Franchise Mode Bugs
There are so many bugs in Franchise mode, where do I even begin?
1. Dev Traits - Every season you play, the rookies always have bugged dev traits. In Weekly Strategy, Adjust Lineup, and Player Cards, it always says certain prospects have 1 trait, like Superstar or X-factor, but in game have a trait 1 or sometimes 2 traits lower then what they actually have. This happens for already existing rookies like Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels, last seasons rookies like CJ Stroud, imported draft classes, and auto-generated draft classes.
2. AI Difficulty - Why is it that the opposing AI has the same difficulty as mine, but ALWAYS does worse? I've even adjusted sliders, tweaked overalls, changed league difficulty, but I've had AI defenders at 85-90 OVR get torched by 70 OVR receivers that just run right past them. I have higher speed, higher awareness, and good pass defense schemes. In our first season, my same fantasy draft team had the second best pass defense, but through 4 weeks in season 2, I'm sitting ugly at 30th. No changes were made.
3. Stats - The stats NEVER match up. Stat pop-ups, graphics, pre-game stats, team comparison in the main screen, and many other times stats can be found never match up to the actual stats menu where you can view team and player stats. The franchise menu will tell me that I'm 18th in the league with 170 pass yards per game, but the actual stats menu shows my QB at 210 yards per game??? This is the same for running yards, pass defense, run defense. There are always false numbers while in -game, a popup will tell me that my receiver has 1 TD and 96 yards on 5 catches, but then in the stats menu, it says 87??? There is on pop-up stat graphic I get frequently and it happens in almost every franchise game I play and in every league. It'll say my receiver got 615 436 yard TDs. This is obviously a glitch and impossible.
4. Story Lines and Press Conferences - Oh man, I fricking hate this stuff. Why give me a press conference to talk about how well my player has been doing recently and if he does well again, he'll get a dev up grade, just for him to meet the stat requirements and NOT GET THE DEV TRAIT UPGRADE???? I even get the successful dialogue in the post game cutscene, but even weeks later, my star dev MLB remains star dev. These interactions are cool and provide realistic moments in-game, but they almost never work as intended.
5. Rookie Models - This one is infuriating. Rookie player models are usually inaccurate. You can draft a hidden dev trait LT in the first round, they have 79 overall, 310 lbs, 6'6", but when you load their player model, they are built like Kyler Murray. They always seem skinny and short. It happens for ANY lineman on both sides of the ball, and usually TE's and LB's as well. The only position I've never seen this happen to is secondary and wide receivers. I love when my 90+ STR lineman get bodied by blitzes in .3 seconds because of this.
I swear, franchise mode, fantasy drafts, and online leagues are the forgotten child of Madden Game Modes. They get zero love, zero updates, and zero bug fixes. I can only imagine a team of like 5 people manage this whole game mode, and I feel really bad for those people that put time and energy into this, only for it to not work because EA doesn't give them additional resources to get the job done well. I've been playing franchise modes since Madden 12 on the Nintendo Wii, and I've never seen a Franchise game mode with this much content, but also this much bugs and glitches. Please take some time to address some bug issues and game test some things.
