Conversation with EA designer anthony white from ea sports:
Hello Madden NFL 09 fans and thanks for taking the time to check out my blog post, my name is Anthony White and I'm a game designer here at EA Tiburon. I've been a passionate Madden gamer since 1991 back when the game was on the Sega Genesis console and in my opinion I have one of the best and coolest jobs here at EA. My primary responsibility is researching, designing, implementing, and testing the offensive, defensive, and special teams plays which are used in each of our football titles at EA. For those who don't know I recently wrote a blog post on the changes we made for the playbooks in NCAA Football 09. That blog can be found here. This time around I'm going to discuss the changes, updates, and additions to the team playbooks in Madden NFL 09.
The team playbooks in Madden NFL 09 have undergone a major overhaul. As many of you are aware, each week during the NFL season we receive the actual coach's film of every game that was played in the NFL the previous week. I personally watched and broke down game film on every team in the NFL and we'll show you a few video clips of plays that were created as a direct result of film study. With the large number of hours devoted to studying film the end result was the addition of 31 new formations and over 1,200 new plays to this year's Madden NFL game.
In this year's edition of Madden NFL you'll notice new schemes, new terminology, and a more streamlined organization of the plays within each playbook. All 32 team playbooks are now much more unique and authentic to their real life counterpart's style of play. Whether it's the Patriots heavy use of the shotgun spread offense, the Seahawks west coast system, or the Bears power run game, you'll see that reflected in that team's playbook. It also comes to light when playing against any of the CPU controlled teams in a Franchise or Play Now game. We made a concerted effort to tune each team's playcall logic so that it closely mimics its real life counterpart's style of play. That means when you play a team like the Patriots they'll use lots of shotgun, the Steelers and their use of bunch/condensed formations or Packers with their Full House backfield package will be evident.
Offseason coaching changes were also taken into consideration when building our team playbooks. New coaching staffs in place for teams such as the Falcons, Ravens, Dolphins, and Redskins were all taken into account. Offensive coordinator changes such as the ones that took place in San Francisco, St. Louis, and Detroit were also factored in.
Although we did a similar overhaul to the team playbooks in NCAA Football 09, we didn't just take what was done for NCAA implement it into Madden and call it day. There are some very noticeable differences between the two titles, with each game having some of its own unique plays that can't be found in the other title. In Madden NFL 09 the first difference you'll notice while scrolling through the playbooks is the new naming convention for the formation and sets on offense. For example in Madden NFL 08 the formation/set name Shotgun Normal HB Wk is now called "Gun Doubles Wk" in most playbooks. In the playbooks of the Lions and 49ers the shotgun is now referred to as "Rifle". The primary reason for the change is we wanted to differentiate Madden from NCAA along with the fact that we want to introduce more authentic /real world football terminology into the Madden series.
As is the case in NCAA Football 09 there's much more variety in the passing game with the introduction of new concepts such as mesh, shallow cross, spacing, X and Z spot, as well as new smash concepts from formations with reduced receiver splits. We've also added more variety to the play action passing game with new bootleg and waggle plays. Attention was even given to the running game with the addition of the inside zone, Power O, along with adjustments to the blocking schemes on many other run plays. Speaking of the run game each team's run game is patterned after what they actually do in real life. Teams that are primarily zone run teams such as the Broncos, Colts, Titans, and Packers will feature more of those types of schemes in their playbook, whereas teams that focus more on a power run game such as the Chargers, Buccaneers, and Bears will have more of those types of run blocking schemes in their playbook.
The plays within the playbooks have been rearranged to make better use of our four play playcall interface. The plays are logically grouped so that runs are aligned next to complementary playaction passes, while all automotion plays are now aligned with other plays that use similar motions. This is very useful when using our new bluff mode system while playing head to head offline matches. The playbooks themselves are larger than what they were in Madden NFL 08. On average each team's playbook consists of about 24 formations and 369 plays. We obviously can't put everything a particular team does on offense into its playbooks due to our playbook size limitations, but for the most part everything that's in each team's playbook is based on what we saw on film.
Subject: Authentic Offensive Team Playbooks 
