Thankfully, the Madden team must've agreed change was needed because this year's new take on narrative-driven Madden is the best it's ever been. Over the past two years, Madden story modes went from bad to painfully worse. Sometimes you see a new Madden feature and you know it isn't long for this world (see: QB Vision), but X-Factors feel like something that will stick, even as that's partly because it's an easy headline to market each summer.
It's a system that carries across all game modes: franchise, online, and even in Madden Ultimate Team (MUT), where you can assign X-Factor roles to your players. This focus on the league's best players is done in an arcadey way, but it's meant to represent the real-life explosiveness of players, letting them take over a game. Twenty skills are assigned across 50 players for skill positions and defenders. For others, like Aaron Rodgers, it means disabling the ability for defenders to get an interception for a while. They're given special skills that can be activated during a game after certain parameters are met.įor Mahomes, it means earning an additional 15 yards of throwing distance after he throws multiple passes that travel 30+ yards in the air. Superstars and their returning, lesser abilities are spread out to the point where you'll find several on every team, but only 50 players in the league have been designated as X-Factors.
Why? Because Madden NFL 20 is largely focused on the league's most explosive playmakers, and no one was more fun to watch last season than the Chiefs' instant superstar.įor Madden, his and others' game-changing abilities manifest as new X-Factor abilities.
Though the game's cover star doesn't always denote its direction, Patrick Mahomes seems like a good fit for this year's iteration. Madden NFL 20 Review: Rebuilding for Prime Time This year, Madden NFL 20brings quantitatively fewer big changes, but qualitatively, the changes it does bring feel like the building blocks of a future champion. The problem is that not all of those changes have worked, and some have even disappeared from games within a few years.