My Case for EA to Bring Back Create-A-Play
Posting this here because I
A) Would like to hear thoughts about this feature, and
B) Want to get people talking early on if this is a thing that a lot of people want
Anyways, I've been saying for years now that EA needs to add create-a-play back to the game and let us just run wild with it. I will add as many reasons as I can think of here and am happy to discuss with anyone who has thoughts on it.
Reason 1 - Variety In Online Play Styles
Every year since the new games have been coming out a complaint I've seen from the online community is that everybody's ripping the same 1-3 schemes from the pro scene and it gets monotonous to play against the same exact offense and defense every single game. I believe create-a-play would put a huge dent in fixing that issue because it would allow people to be a lot more creative than just running the same formations with a couple of generic hot routes. Even if it just encouraged the higher-level players to experiment around it would leak down to the mid to lower tier players and there'd be more variety just from people still stealing from pros who are doing different stuff. Some detractors would hear about being used for online and say something along the lines of "people would use the CAP to abuse the AI as much as possible" and to that I say that that's what everyone's already doing so how would this be any different?
Reason 2 - Because they could never have the time to add everything
There are so many teams trying so many new formations and ways to get into certain patterns and so many different types of runs that it'd be impossible for them to fully represent every team's way of doing things. Let us put our own real life plays into the game and recreate real life schemes to our hearts content. If they really wanted to simplify it, they could even make another computer interface similar to teambuilder instead of making a new game mode and let us get real into the weeds with blocking patterns vs certain fronts, choice routes with our own parameters for when they run each route (maybe somebody could make the veer and shoot viable to run by giving the deep choice runner some IQ points), and other things of that nature. They keep claiming this game is supposed to be our sandbox, why not let us create our own schemes if we feel like it?
Reason 3 - Because wouldn't it just be plain fun?
They were able to have this in the game for NFL Head Coach 09, and it was an absolute blast to go in there and cook up the most diabolical nonsense ever seen between the sidelines (see the amazing video that Secret Base made on HC09 for reference). I refuse to believe it can't be added to the games being released almost 2 decades later with significantly higher budgets (the Head Coach series wasn't even really part of Madden's yearly installments and was more of an experiment by EA than anything else) in some capacity.
I'll leave it at those reasons to keep it slightly brief even though I could write a few more niche ones. Curious if anyone has thoughts on this