With the EA Sports College Football 25 trailer now at over two million views — plus some initial press releases and notes from EA — OS members have been cooking up thoughts, reactions, and insights on the forums, so I wanted to gather up some of the general sentiments so far.
The overwhelming response has obviously been positive, and the top thing to come up so far has been the clear passion for the “pageantry” of the sport showcased in the trailer. This makes sense because well over half the trailer was pregame rituals or general celebrations. The depth here even in the trailer was impressive, and it was hard for some not to make a comparison to Madden.
OS user CM Hooe was maybe the most blunt with the comparison, but I don’t think it’s really wrong to say:
That trailer had more life, vibrancy, and pageantry viewable in its runtime than every single Madden NFL release from the past ten years combined. Preordering today lol.
Madden has tried to focus on a TV-style broadcast (at least in theory), and obviously college football and the NFL are very different in terms of the amount of traditions and pageantry on display on any given weekend, but it’s hard not to view that trailer and think about how much more life comes through in it than your typical Madden game. Atmosphere does a ton to keep things fresh in a sports game, especially if you get tired of the commentary and all that after a certain point, so focusing a lot on those presentation elements does a lot for your game in the short and long term.
The graphics themselves also got a lot of thumbs up, and I think the shot of the 12th Man was maybe the most noted thing beyond some of the equipment comments (OS loves to point out new equipment). The still screens of the Texas A&M crowd look very close to real, and it’s only in motion you can start to nitpick a bit more. Still, some of the crowd shots were great looking.
On the negative side, we did have some people mentioning the helmets look a little small and the jersey numbers don’t seem to look quite right. There is a little bit of confusion with some of the jerseys though because we’re not sure if EA is basing it off 2024 jerseys we maybe just have not seen yet. There was also a little talk about some of the colors looking washed out, but I think that’s more chalked up to a general style choice than an “error” of some sort.
It was also fun to see people calling out small things they noticed in the trailer. Beyond the equipment stuff, we had things like OS user LeBlonde James pointing out the playcall signs on the sideline during the Syracuse snapshot.
Beyond the aesthetics, most of the modes news ended up being received as good news on the forums. There is obviously some disappointment about online dynasty not being cross-play enabled, but 32 users is the “standard” now based on Madden, and we’ll more than be able to fill out a whole Power Five conference (or I guess Power Four now) and all that.
Some of the buzzwords used by EA caused a little more “nervousness” if you will, and I think it’s fair to be a little wary of certain things. OS user kennylc321 puts it succinctly:
Ok…two things that scare me: “Wide open gameplay” and homefield advantage. In the history of EA football games, “wide open gameplay” has always meant that QBs will complete 75% of the passes and there ain’t a single thing you can do about it. Homefield advantage scares me because I think of how poorly momentum was implemented with Madden 24.
These are perfectly valid concerns. The gameplay in NCAA games is generally always more “wide open” due to the college sport itself, but if we go back to NCAA Football 14, the passing game was very powerful there. With homefield advantage, yeah, EA has literally messed this up in the last 12 months — and while it wasn’t specifically homefield advantage being the sole issue, there was some bugs around momentum (including being unable to turn it off at one point) in Madden 24. I don’t think anyone is pre-judging or saying it’s going to be bad, but the buzzwords did make some waves.
Overall, with a lot of the early news now out of the way, people are ready for the main course. They want to know how different the gameplay is going to look compared to Madden (albeit they know they’ll be in the same ballpark due to being in the same engine). They want to know more about recruiting and dynasty mode. They want to know what Kevin Connors and Desmond Howard are doing since we know now about the multiple commentary teams but don’t yet know what every voice in the game is doing. In other words, are we getting game breaks, a halftime show, a pregame show, something else entirely? There are plenty of good questions that remain — in fact there’s even a thread for questions, which I’ll be making into a news story all its own soon enough. But above all else, EA mostly nailed this initial reveal and has kept the excitement levels near max.
