I’ve loved what I’ve seen from EA College Football 25, but I’m beginning to worry that the game will be negatively impacted by the tightrope the developers will be forced to walk to comply with all the rules that come along with including NIL athletes.
The Wear-and-Tear system is conceptually brilliant, but is it another area destined to be nerfed by the game’s necessary commercial advancement?
Many know and have voiced their displeasure about the limitations of player editing. Users who are hoping to enjoy the same level of player-editing freedom they had with the old NCAA Football titles will be disappointed.
While we haven’t been told what we can edit with players in the game, we know that users won’t be able to edit NIL athletes completely.
The WAT system sounds so good, but in reading through the Dynasty Mode blog and watching the deep dive video, you never hear the word “injury” from Kirk Herbstreit. The word “injury” is only written one time in the 85-page blog, and it’s in this sentence from the Skill Groups section: “As opposed to progressing each attribute individually, for example Trucking, players will instead progress an entire Skill Group. A Skill Group is a collection of related attributes, for example the running back Power skill group includes Trucking, Strength, Stiff Arm, Toughness, Jumping, and Injury.”
It begs the question, can players actually get injured in Dynasty Mode? We know that players’ attributes will take a hit if specific areas of their bodies begin to take damage, but can a player be forced to miss a game(s) because of an injury?
I’m beginning to believe that has been removed. The verbiage in the Wear and Team section is a little more problematic. It reads:
“As described in the Gameplay Deep Dive, players can incur damage to body parts during gameplay. The more damaged a body part is, the more it will impact their on-field performance. In addition to on-field gameplay, players will also incur Wear and Tear damage during SuperSim. Each week, players will recover some of their wear and tear damage. The amount of recovery is dependent on how damaged the body part is. For example, let’s say in the previous game your running back severely damaged his right ankle and his left shoulder was only slightly damaged. The next week you can expect his shoulder to be fully recovered and his ankle to be only slightly recovered. His ankle would then be something you want to monitor in the next game.”
There’s never any mention of the player missing an entire game. A little further down in the blog, there is more ambiguous verbiage. It says:
“In an effort to ensure that players are not disappearing in big time games late in the season, we have set minimums that players will always recover to when advancing the week.”
I went back to the gameplay deep dive, and there is more there that suggests players may not be allowed to miss a game with an injury.
“If a player gets really banged up on a given play, expect him to sit a play or two, or maybe more,” the blog says. “Later in the game the expectation is that the player will have to tough it out.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking for players to spontaneously combust on the field or for players to tear ACLs every play, but injuries and the potential of missing games are a part of all sports.
Having Wear and Tear in the game but omitting the potential for any injury to last longer than the current contest is more annoying than it is immersive.
I hope I’m reading too much into this concept and that injuries will function as they do in every other franchise mode. If that’s not the case and the presence of real college athletes has necessitated nerfing the injury concept, I hope there are sliders that can be set for every Dynasty mode to deliver a more traditional experience.
Fans should still be excited about the return of college football to video games, but the overall product may have a few cracks.
College Football 25 releases on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on July 19.
