Training and Drills mode bugs
There are a number of bugs and issues in the training and drills section of the game. It’s been a long time since I played a madden game so when I finally got this one on PS5, I thought let’s learn how to play with the tutorials and drills since I know a lot must have changed. Some of these were great like the inside and outside zone run drills! Others were absolutely terrible and were buggy and/or broken. Play art won’t show up when you hit L2 or R2 in some drills, defensive C and F gap assignments won’t show up, players catching the ball in the white rectangles and not getting credit for the catch, perfect passing accuracy not enabled even though it is in the settings so you never get the red yellow green blue meters, the pass fail counter would sometimes not track the number of pass or fail attempts correctly. I was honestly shocked at how many bugs and issues there are in the tutorials. There was one running tutorial that asks you to choose which side to run to by selecting the side of the field with fewer defenders, to which I counted the number of hats on defense and pushed the RS in the direction of fewer guys, I failed the attempt! I was so confused by this that I laughed out loud at how bad that was!
There also seems to be a crazy difficulty difference between the training drills and the actual drills. I am not sure if this is intentional but there were a number of times that i would get 6 out of 6 in the tutorial and then be unable to get half of them passed in the drill. It was like let me show you how to do this but then in the actual game it doesn’t work because the AI is overwhelming broken. This is further made difficult by the play suggestions not matching what the tutorial was showing. A good example of this is in the cover 1 pass concepts the tutorial used the crossing routes to beat cover 1 when the CBs align off the line of scrimmage and double moves to beat the press cover 1, well when it gets into the drill the plays being asked to run don’t match the concepts that where just being taught. You need to force the double move into cover 1 with the CBs back. In the tutorial the CB would be completely out of position but in the drill you would barely stand a chance to catch the ball. What did I learn? Don’t throw the double move cause you can’t…
Another problem is that after you complete the training drills there is no option to move onto the actual drills, just repeat or go to main menu. You have to go back to the main drills menu and then find the training mode you were in and select the "only drills" option to access the skills challenge.
I realize that a game of this complexity takes a ton of work to complete but I am baffled by how there are basic UI/UX bugs that are fundamental to user experience. This all should have been caught in basic QA. I am very disappointed at the quality of this release and frankly surprised considering EA's standards. I feel like I am playing a Beta version of the game...