On Thursday night, NFL fans around the world were glued to the TV, hoping that their team would find the right combination of new talent to lead their franchise to success. However, one team of Madden developers were hard at work during this time, trying to implement the new draftees into Madden Ultimate Team (MUT) as quickly as possible. Jeffry Younger, Associate Producer at Electronic Arts, provided SportTechie with some behind-the-scenes insight into how newly drafted players “walk across the stage and into Madden Ultimate Team.”
In order to allow the draftees to enter the game only minutes after they are selected, most of the work and player design is completed beforehand. Younger explains, “We go into the 2015 draft with a list of roughly 65 players that we think have the best shot at going in the first round.” For most of the draftees, the process of adding them to MUT goes smoothly—all the EA team has to do is to add the team info and take a picture for the player card. For instance, the Madden Team was able to generate this in-game image of Jameis Winston only minutes after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers selected him.
However, if a team reaches for a player in the first round, it can cause difficulties for the Madden team. In this case, Younger admits that the unexpected selection “does create some chaos due to the fact that we need to create new players from scratch in a very short amount of time.” Because of the effort and resources it takes to create each individual virtual player, this could delay the process of adding some of these unexpected draftees into the game. However, the skill and expertise of the team combined with recent advances in technology allows the Madden team to quickly assemble the player’s in-game avatar.
Many Madden players are surely excited to play with the new draftees in Madden Ultimate Team. Younger says that the new players are “dropped into MUT packs at different intervals during the draft,” ideally as close to their selection as possible. Then, MUT players must open packs in the game to collect team Draft Collectibles, which will then allow them to unlock the new players.
In Madden Ultimate Team, the players have ratings—most importantly the Overall rating—which range from one to a hundred. While rating future rookies who have never played a snap in the NFL presents a challenge, Younger explains that his team is “basing the overall ratings for the MUT Draft on a combination of research into each of the guys, combine results, and where the player is drafted.” This allows for a fair system of player quality in Madden that closely mirrors the projected performance of each future player.
New technology has allowed sports video games to improve at a remarkable rate. Not only can EA Sports create realistic avatars of newly drafted players, but they also can implement them into the game in real time. To see an example of one of these players in game footage, check out the video below: