Travis Kelce – Madden 25
I’ve been enjoying playing EA College Football 25 a lot, and the most recent patch has served the game well. That said, one issue with the game has become even more glaring than I initially thought.
And now I’m starting to worry about Madden 25’s seemingly improved customization options.
UPDATE – 12/08/2024 – 10:00 AM ET
Great news! EA contacted me and clarified that the TeamBuilder version of Madden 25 will not have the same restrictions as College Football 25.
According to a statement provided by an EA representative: “Madden NFL 25′The customization features are really robust. Users can change the name, physical attributes, and rating attributes on the web, and can change the likeness and other characteristics imported into Franchise mode.
This is remarkable and it’s great that EA has recognized the importance of clarifying things.
END OF UPDATE
I learned in May that College Football 25 would have significant limitations on customizations, but I thought I might eventually look past that, especially for the first year.
Unfortunately, while the game is still fun to play, I feel more limited by the restrictions, and it negatively impacts my experience. For those unaware, College Football 25 does not allow users to change the attributes or physical appearance of NIL players, who make up about 90% of the game’s roster. There are limitations to the options for the few players you can change.
When you find a player on a modifiable roster, you can change their name, height, weight, and attributes, but you can’t change their face or uniform number. I’ve known this for months, so while it wasn’t ideal, I was thinking of workarounds to bring back customization and salvage some aspects of the sandbox experience that made NCAA football thousands of hours of fun.
College Football 25 features TeamBuilder, which is a great concept on the surface. The return of the website-based tool has some amazing benefits. The image uploader and uniform customization are in line with the ad. Both allow you to create your school with the identity of your choice.
Likewise, the stadium customization is solid. The inability to edit players on the TeamBuilder site could be strengthened, but I understand that due to EA’s “better safe than sorry” approach to in-game customization.
I’m having a hard time finding a reasonable excuse for the developer regarding the inability to fully edit your TeamBuilder school roster in-game. Once you’ve uploaded your TeamBuilder team to the game, you have to add it to Dynasty Mode to edit the roster, which seems unnecessary.
Once logged in, you can only edit their name, height, weight, and accessories. The user is locked into the list that is automatically generated when the school is created on the TeamBuilder website. This limitation removes a ton of control from the user, making the school I created feel less like my team.
With TeamBuilder coming to Madden 25, the feature would be a huge failure if it had the same limitations. EA has stated that users can create 32 teams from TeamBuilder for a Madden franchise mode experience.
However, if you’re not allowed to edit or create players from the website or once they’re in-game, many users will feel like they’ve been duped into getting excited about a feature that only advertises massive customization improvements but ultimately fails to deliver on its promises.
With both games having made notable strides in terms of gameplay and visual appeal, it would be a shame if the potentially series-breaking customization options were to be cut short.
Hopefully the NFL product won’t follow the colleges’ lead on this one. Madden 25 will be released on all platforms on August 16.
