Getty Image / Chris Leduc
At this point, it’s fair to say that EA Sports College Football 25 is the most-anticipated sports video game release in recent memory. As we inch closer to the July 19 release date for the standard edition, more and more details on what gamers can expect from the game are leaking out.
Recently, some of the most well-known journalists in college football got a chance to play the game in an event set up by EA Sports last week. Bud Elliott of 247Sports and CBS Sports wrote about some of the details of the game to much fanfare on Wednesda in a Q+A.
While he couldn’t reveal any gameplay footage, he did go pretty in-depth on what gameplay is like. Here are some excerpts.
Gameplay Will Feel Brand New
As someone who last played the last iteration and kept playing it for a while, the gameplay is just so much smoother. It feels like it was gone for about a decade and is now back. Yet it does feel different than how Madden plays. It’s a little bit faster. In the old game, you could wait until the last possible second to pass and the guy would usually get it off. That is noticeably different. They [also] put a ton of time and energy into really trying to make each playbook distinct.
The No. 1 thing that you get from this is that these guys who make the game, it’s not just another sports game they work on. They’re absolute college football nerds. They geek on every little detail. Like how Tennessee does the checkerboard or how a different team will do the stripes. That level of detail. They have unique sounds for every single team. The mantra they tried to express is that every team is somebody’s favorite team, so we want all the Division I teams that people are playing to be represented and feel special when they’re playing.
That sounds really encouraging! I know a lot of sports gamers have soured on the Madden franchise the over the past decade, claiming that gameplay has gone downhill. Many were concerned that this game would basically be a Madden-type game with college branding. Everything we’ve heard over the past few years tried to dispel that narrative. People were skeptical, but Bud Elliott and others who have played the game are adamant that it feels much different than Madden. College Football 25 is going to be its own product.
Stars Will Stand Out
The other thing they really talked about is that everybody in the NFL is a professional football player. In college, that’s not the case. The gap between the best NFL player and the worst is so much more narrow. The ratings in terms of spread aren’t 99-60. It is probably like 99-30 in some cases.
The age, experience and talent levels mean that certain players will be disproportionately affected more by some of the crazy atmospheres. College [teams] have so much more of a home-field advantage than pros do. Some of the stadiums are louder, but the real thing is some of these kids are 18. [They] are not used to being under real pressure and in a loud environment like that. Let’s say you go into Death Valley at night with some hotshot 18-year-old quarterback, you better preview your routes because some of them may not show up. Some of those lines might be shaky and squiggly. They really did try and simulate giving a real home-field advantage to a team. Experience and maturity matter quite a bit.
Let’s face it. No one wants Caleb Downs to play the same way that a backup safety in the Sun Belt plays. We want to feel like playing with the Alabama transfer and current Ohio State stud is giving us a huge advantage when we’re controlling him.
That’s exactly what it sounds like is happening here. The fact that the range of abilities of FBS football players is being adequately addressed should make for a much more realistic game that is as much about who is on your team as it is the person playing the game.
And, the fact that players will uniquely react to tough road environments is crucial. Let’s face it, some players handle that better than others and the game is going to try to capture that realism.
Those are just a couple of excerpts that show that College Football 25 is shaping up to be an awesome game.