The latest Gridiron Notes goes over some of the new equipment that has been added to Madden NFL 22. Primary and secondary team colors for mouthpieces, sock height customization, new color variations of arm tape and new smoked/dark Oakley visor variations have been added this year.
New Facemasks
New Cleats and Gloves
Updated Coach Gear
Updated Head-Scans (More coming in title updates)
The team has also added over 100 new generic heads which will be available in create-a-player.
Rosters
For rosters, some adjustments were made to make Franchise mode more dynamic and to better reflect aging superstars and promising young players. We started with removing the ‘Star+’ dev-trait on many older veterans who have met or surpassed their full potential through their careers.
You can expect some tweaks to the OVR formula as well. We’ve modified the outside linebacker group to get them more closely aligned to middle linebackers, which will improve ratings crossovers when changing a player’s position from one to the other to support specific defensive schemes and playbooks. This change will prevent significant OVR shifts when changing positions and keeps players within the same range across the LB positions. Along with this, Ball Carrier Vision has been added to the Scrambling QB archetype to better characterize a very important skill for this type of player.
Ratings
During the Madden NFL 21 season, we started using the average of the top five speeds recorded by each player, via Next Gen Stats, to get a better evaluation for our Speed rating. Using real-life data from the NFL, and accounting for player performance on a weekly and yearly basis, we will deliver a more accurate representation of player speed on the Madden gridiron.
In addition to the speed data, we find it really important to take into account recorded 40-yard-dash times and watch game film to see how it translates to game-speed. To summarize, we’re matching up the Next Gen Stats data and combining numbers with actual game footage to improve our creation process of Speed and Acceleration ratings for Madden NFL 22.
Steve is the Editor in Chief at Operation Sports. He's been here since the year 2000 posting news, features and interviews, along with keeping the hardcore sports gaming community alive and well for over two decades. He covers almost every game related to sports but enjoys basketball, football and baseball games the most.