Another posting on the Inside EA Blog details improvements that are being made for Madden 2010 to the QB position. Of note are five new ratings categories, layered blending, and changes to how accuracy is determined. This is a significant update and you can read it in full here. 1. Deep Ball Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on deep passes (streaks, deep posts, etc) 2. Medium Passing Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on medium passes (outs, corners, etc) 3. Short Passing Accuracy: Determi...

Traditionally the cover athlete for Madden has been revealed the same weekend as the NFL Draft. The general idea was to kick-off the promotion of Madden alongside the NFL Draft with the cover announcement being a major part of that. Even if not the same weekend it has usually been in the same general time frame as fans of the sport being concentrating on the upcoming season. However according to Sports Business Journal (via First Cuts) that may not be the case this year. EA Sports is appa...

Over the past couple years there has been some disappointment over how certain stats weren't being tracked in Madden. The two main ones have been half sacks and assisted tackles. This obviously isn't being made out to be any sort of big announcement, but Madden 2010 will have these stats included. So while this week's info doesn't have the same punch as the one about the shift in ratings philosophy it does go to show another community request that has made it into the game. After talking ab...

The new EA Sports community blog has provided another interesting entry this time from Madden 10 Designer Donny Moore. In it he goes over some significant changes to how player ratings are going to be structured next year. You can read the entire blog posting here. Every position and every rating has been re-scaled to expand the range of numbers we are dealing with. The Overall Rating for your average NFL player has dropped. Your Joe Average linebacker who was 80 OVR is now dropped down ...

Coming out of the class action lawsuit that the retired NFL players won against the Player's Association was an interesting sequence of questioning around Brett Favre being the Madden 09 cover athlete. You can check out the full story at Gamepolitics. Apparently EA had made the decision to put him on the cover before he retired, then when he did they considered switching to someone else. Instead they stuck with him and sculpted the marketing angle of him representing the 20 years of the fran...

The first news relating to Madden 2010 was to be announced at halftime of the Super Bowl on the brand new EA Sports Community Blog. That announcement has come and centers around discussion of new technology in the game and specifically "Procedural Awareness". It is my pleasure to introduce Madden’s newest piece of technology, one that is also shared within many of the EA SPORTS games, called Procedural Awareness. What is it? We’ll you’ve likely heard of “head trac...