With fresh foundation set, EA Sports strives for new heights in ‘Madden NFL 25’

A core experience in any sports simulation is the ability to take over a club and guide it to glory.

The goal is to have fun, but also to be fully immersed in such a mode that is driven by narrative and on-field experience. Madden, admittedly, has fallen short of that goal in recent years.

But the much-maligned franchise mode is finally receiving the tender love and care it has long deserved. The development team has acknowledged and addressed this fact, overhauling the mode’s user interface while delivering new depth, storytelling possibilities and a customization suite not seen in a decade.

This is the result of a yearslong effort on the part of the franchise team, which began to give fans a taste of what was coming when it added contract restructuring and doubled the total amount of trade slots in Madden 24. Madden 25, by comparison, should blow those improvements out of the water.

With these goals in mind, EA Sports was fortunate to welcome back Josh Looman, the former lead designer of the company’s deepest NFL game, NFL Head Coach 09, and a driver of the game’s first foray into Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) over a decade ago.

“There’s nobody that loves franchise more than I do,” Looman, the Madden NFL 25 principal game designer, said during the preview event in Orlando. “I’m basically a giant franchise nerd that they pay to work on this stuff.

“When I came back and interviewed with these guys, the first thing we talked about constantly, in every phone call, was bringing life back to franchise mode. That’s the thing that was missing. There was a lot of great stuff in Madden 24, a lot of customization, there’s new relocation teams, but the one thing that was missing the entire time was life and immersion. That element of surprise. That feeling that every single time you played the mode, things are different. It’s the stuff we did in Head Coach. It’s the stuff we did in CFM in its first season.

“I really want to bring that kind of stuff back and have that feeling of excitement every time you play franchise mode.”

Looman has overseen an effort to bring that life back to franchise, where players have lacked the ability to truly immerse themselves in the narrative of their careers without using their own imaginations. In Madden 25, he believes they’ll never run out of game-produced inspiration.

Players will demand trades. Coaches can direct a player to focus on a specific area of offseason training to best suit his fit within the team. Coaches can choose to rest their starters after locking up a playoff spot. They can dive deep into the Xs and Os to game plan against a specific opponent. They can make promises to players, but those players will remember their guarantees and, judging by their personality type, will react accordingly.

Want to follow in Lions coach Dan Campbell’s footsteps? You can with a “change the culture” storyline. Draft night received a makeover, too, including the addition of Commissioner Roger Goodell into the game. A virtual commish will hug fully suited draft picks at the end of their walks across the stage and hold up their jerseys after they’ve been selected. And last (but certainly not least), a once-sleepy offseason will now include intense contract negotiations with top players.

“Now, things take place over the course of seasons,” Looman explained, “and you’ll actually, finally feel like you’re managing a team for the first time, instead of clicking on rows in a spreadsheet.”