EA Sports College Football 25’s unique features make it look like way more than a Madden reskin

Summer is only just starting, but college football fans are already itching to head back to campus in EA Sports College Football 25. The upcoming game marks the franchise’s return after over 10 years of absence, and will be the first game in the series to feature officially licensed player likenesses, thanks to NIL money and a large-scale campaign to pay players to appear in the game. On Friday, EA released a massive deep-dive into the game’s ridiculous number of new features, and the ways it aims to create the most realistic college football experience ever, both on and off the field.

With real players in the game for the first time, many of College Football 25’s new features put an emphasis on making it clear what separates the best players in the sport from everyone else. The game includes a variety of players traits that will augment gameplay, like responding better to high pressure situations and being able to identify on-coming blitzers. There will be more than 80 of these traits in the game at launch, as well as different tiers for each one.

The game will also feature an extensive new injury system called Wear and Tear, which shows the specific injury effects of each play, and how much it increases a player’s risk of injury. While this is important during games, it’s even more important in modes like Dynasty, where you run an entire college football program and have to look after your players from game to game.

One of the ways the game appears to be a major departure from the Madden franchise is also true of college football versus the NFL: There’s way more variety in playbooks. College Football 25 already seems pretty dedicated to preserving the individuality and quirks of the 134 schools in the game. There’s a detailed option system in the game, including a Flexbone formation with Air Force’s signature triple option. There’s a new feature which lets players pull the ball back and run with it in the middle of a called reverse, and EA even highlights a wide formation, a staple for Oklahoma.

EA also takes time to note how important real-life tradition is to the presentation of games in College Football 25. Every stadium and fan base in college football has their own unique rituals, and EA has tried to capture as many of those as they can for the game, licensing certain songs for team walkout music (though not every song could be secured), and including fan traditions like Tennessee’s checkered stadium and Penn State’s “White Out”. All of this is in service of not just recreating the authentic highs of a college home game, but also to enhance the game’s new emphasis on home field advantage, with the ridiculously loud stadiums making it harder for the away team to concentrate on things like calling hot routes.

These are just a few of the new features EA Sports announced for the game on Friday. To get a look at more of the features, EA has put together a short gameplay video narrated by sportscaster Kirk Herbstreit, as well as a very in-depth blog post that outlines each of the game’s new systems in great detail.

EA Sports College Football 25 is set for release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on July 19.