EA College Football 25 will be revealed in May.
That reveal will likely include gameplay footage of licensed athletes, the cover, a few features, and the release date. Anything beyond that is tricky to guarantee.
If you’re a fan of the old NCAA Football series, you may remember the export/import draft class feature that connected the series to its big brother, the Madden franchise.
It was one of the most incredible companion sports video game features ever, and it has been a major point of conversation in the powerful and influential Operation Sports forums.
For those who don’t remember the feature, users could customize the names, attributes, heights, and weights of every player on every school’s roster in NCAA Football. Through Dynasty play, you could export the graduating class and players leaving early for the pros into a draft class that could be uploaded into Madden.
Here’s a look at a video that shows how it worked.
During your Madden franchise, you could use the draft class you exported from your NCAA Football Dynasty. Every year from July through February, I lived in my virtual football universe, which was powered largely by this functionality.
If you’re a real franchise-mode head, you know or can imagine how much fun this was to use.
OS’ Chase Becotte recently wrote about the feature’s potential return in the rebooted college football series. Still, he doesn’t sound overly optimistic that we’ll see the draft-class option in year one of the restart.
“Nostalgia is powerful, and it’s working overtime on the forums right now because this import draft class feature continues to come up,” Becotte wrote. “Its inclusion in EA’s next set of games is a total mystery, and I’m personally dubious about its chances of making it into this year’s game. I don’t say that to be negative, just logical. I’m not sure if the licensing agreements EA has with college athletes will allow them to appear in anything beyond the college game.”
Becotte’s hesitancy is logical. We don’t know the parameters of the licensing agreements that have allowed EA to bring college football back to gaming and even more than that; we don’t know how well this feature will work on the current generation of consoles.
Potential cross-platform technical issues and scope limitations exist for the development team, which is undoubtedly working hard to make this relaunch special.
EA College Football is likely to be an annual release moving forward; some features are always pushed to the next cycle for capacity reasons and to prevent front-loading one title with all the goodies, leaving little room for improvement in future versions.
While the feature’s absence makes sense, EA should also make every effort to include the draft-class option to prove to its hungry franchise-mode fanbase that it is serious about improving its experience.
Madden has slightly improved its franchise mode experience over the past few years, but it still needs to catch up in customization and sandbox-like options.
Re-linking the NFL product to the returning college vehicle would improve both games and rekindle the complete gridiron experience EA once offered its fans.