Madden 07 Current Gen Interview with Phil Frazier

Here's bit of the EA Sports Interview with Phil Frazier

Phil Frazier Current Gen Interview
Phil Frazier, Lead Producer for Madden NFL 07 Current Genenration
Q: Talk to us about the all-new defensive playbooks. How did you come up with those?

Frazier:We watched a lot of game-tape. We've got two guys that are dedicated year-in and year-out to making Madden playbooks great. They're the most hardcore football guys that we have in this building. One of the guys actually played college ball at Florida, and the other one aspires to be a head coach somewhere. The two of them combined watch hours and hours of game tape that we get directly from the NFL. Using that footage, we're able to create plays in Madden that look exactly like plays that NFL teams run, and we also get a lot of different systems and formations in there as well.

This year, we have team-specific defensive playbooks in the game. Instead of having just the schemes, like 3-4 and 4-3, we actually went in and looked at team-specific things. Teams will run things based on specific personnel, and we wanted to capture that in Madden.

Q: You've expanded last year's Superstar Mode? What's new in that?

Frazier: Superstar Mode was something that a lot of people were excited about in concept last year, but at the end of the day, when the game shipped, there was no real difference in playing a Superstar game than there was in playing a Play Now game or a Franchise game. The in-game experience was exactly the same. This year, we wanted to change that, so we went in there and now we lock you to your position. If you create a quarterback, you play quarterback and only quarterback. If you're a wide receiver, you play only wide receiver, and so on. It's called Superstar: Hall of Fame mode and it's a big improvement over last year.

We really wanted to kind of focus on you being the guy you create, and that's more than just the off-the-field stuff -- that's with in-game stuff as well. As you're playing with these guys, we've also added position-specific cameras so you actually get to experience what it's like to play at that position. When you're on defense, you're not looking at the standard camera where you're looking down the field -- you're actually looking from behind the defensive player's shoulder. You get to watch the quarterback as he's looking at you or into your zone, you get to cover wide receivers as they're running all over the field, and you have to react to plays like a normal defender would.

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