There was lots of information distributed released yesterday about College Football EA Sports 25 and it seems like there are even more things coming today, so I think it’s best to do a few small stories on some of the big topics that people are still interested in. A major topic revolves around player editing and its limitations in College Football EA Sports 25.
From the start, EA made it clear that there would be restrictions on the extent to which you can modify players in its college game, and now we have more clarity on this topic in a few different areas.
Real players generally cannot be modified
If we return to NCAA Football 14, you can obviously change most things on most drives. Now everything from attributes to their gear will likely be locked to real players. It appears that the restrictions are even tighter on certain players highlighted via NIL agreements, but I haven’t seen what that means.
While it’s disappointing, all of this, as Players’ Publishing in general, was a huge part of the lawsuits that sunk EA last time around. Not much has been said about the coaches (other than there aren’t any real ones this year), but I’m guessing there will be limited changes as well.
As for trying to create players like Arch Manning, EA maintains that safeguards are in place to prevent that from happening. Again, it’s not clear what this means.
On the bright side, EA will change and update rosters during the college season, so it’s not like day one rosters will never change.
Can you edit generic players and prospects?
It’s still unclear exactly how many changes we can make for wildcard players and incoming fake prospects at this time. The people at the event probably didn’t have much access to this area, and EA isn’t being very specific about any of this yet (at least not publicly). Still, it will be more relaxed overall, that’s for sure.
I guess editing fake players in dynasty mode is a bit more relaxed than the editing you do on wildcard/fake players outside of dynasty mode. I say this because the “sharing” of rosters/players is still a bit unclear, but we know we can’t share a full dynasty mode, so EA probably doesn’t have to worry about as many legal issues.
In terms of users creating players and the depth of that, EA threw out some numbers like 16,000 custom heads (made up of a combination of multiple facial features), 70 hairstyles, and 14 skin tones. So users should have some flexibility to get creative, especially compared to EA’s previous soccer games.
Can we share the lists?
As far as I know, this hasn’t been brought up yet, but I’m not sure of the real value of “share” lists at the moment, anyway. Given the limitations of editing wildcard players and appointing them real players to bypass the system, the real “potential” here would come from Team Builder, and it looks like we’ll be able to share Team Builder teams. Hopefully this means the full edited rosters for these teams will also be included in what people share.
No export draft class feature (this year)
This one we’ve talked about in a few articles in the past, and I always thought it wouldn’t make it because of the licensing mess. It appears that is exactly the case since the agreement in place with college players is for college play only. Importing them into Madden would mean requiring a new deal, and I don’t think EA has a good way to resolve that part of the problem at the moment.
I guess because we can’t use the export feature until all the real players no longer exist, EA made the choice not to devote too many resources to making the feature available in dynasty mode.
That said…
You can export your Road To Glory player to Madden
Because your Road to Glory player isn’t real, you’ll at least have the option to import that player into Madden if you want. This is also probably a good way for EA to test the functionality in general before providing us with the full export functionality in the future if the license is resolved.
(I will continue to update this article as we get more information on this topic, or as some people bring to my attention information that I may have missed while analyzing the tons of articles and videos people present at the event.)
