Madden NFL 25 gameplay will give players “more control than ever before”

“Authenticity” was repeated a number of times during the Madden NFL 25 team’s presentation

Madden NFL 25 / EA Sports

For decades, Madden has been a tool for football fans to immerse themselves in the game they love.

“The first time I played [Madden] was on the Megadrive around 1992,” Ross Masters, a Baltimore Ravens fan from the United Kingdom, says. “It taught me how the scoring works and all the team names, as there wasn’t any easy way to find this out.”

Two years after discovering Madden, Masters began watching the game in 1994, starting with “A Beginner’s Guide to American Football on Channel Four”. From there, “I was hooked”, he says.

While he doesn’t credit Madden entirely for his route into the NFL, Masters acknowledges its impact, “It must have done something right because I love the game and have played it every year since then.”

Since that 1992 edition, much has changed, both in the NFL and in Madden. 

Each year, the sport is expanding globally, and more fans are finding their way into it, whether through seeing a game on television or gathering around a console to play Madden. 

Madden NFL 25 will bring some exciting changes, including introducing female coaches, a change users have been requesting for years. Another thrilling addition this year is BOOM Tech, which utilizes real-world physics to simulate how tackles would happen based on the skill set of the player conducting them. 

With record daily users in Madden NFL 24, the team behind Madden NFL 25 are looking to expand on that success through the product pillars for this year’s game: physics-based tackling, NFL immersion and more live content and modes.

Clint Oldenburg, who spoke about gameplay, says players will have “more control than ever before” in this version while expanding that signature authenticity and foundational football the game is known for.

“Authenticity” is repeated numerous times throughout the team’s presentation, and it’s clear it has been the driving factor behind each decision made. 

Not only is it important from a narrative standpoint but also in the tech, where the laser-scanning team meticulously ensures that everything we see in the game is as authentic as possible. What began with shoes has now become the standard for delivering the most true-to-life version of Madden possible. 

“We’re the first game company to ever do this,” EA reveals, demonstrating the tech they use to scan real-world items into Madden. They’ve got their hands on everything they possibly can, “Not only uniforms but Lombardi trophy, sideline props, the gloves we get from Adidas/Nike/etc.

“There are so many things that we couldn’t do in the past just because the tech wasn’t there. Now we can do full wrinkle socks — you can do every single load out.” 

“The greatest thing about all this? There’s no arguing,” EA jokes before adding, “They’re still arguing. I don’t think that will ever stop. We feel confident that what we’re delivering is as accurate as it possibly can be.”

The attention to detail doesn’t end there. EA shows us its state-of-the-art Motion Capture studio, where they demonstrate the two different technical routes they take to get the player action into the game. 

“We are surrounded by 16 cameras that are actually emitting light, and that light is reflecting off of each of these little dots. That information is fed to these cameras, into the software,” EA tells us as we witness the magic happen in real-time. “From here, it can then reproduce the placement of those markers from the real world to the 3D space. We can then build a virtual skeleton that can also be attached to our football player”. 

In addition to motion capture, the studio also uses XSens suit technology, which has sensors inside that replicate the movements of the person wearing it. 

Seeing the attention to detail put into the game by each department makes it difficult to ignore the craftsmanship required to bring a game like Madden to life. 

Thinking back to Masters’ experience of the game in 1992, where every player looked alike, and the ball moved in a way that felt like it could result in an interception at any given moment, it’s remarkable to see how far things have come for Madden NFL 25. 

Madden NFL 25 is set to launch on Friday, August 16 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC via EA app for Windows, Steam and Epic Games Store.