EA Sports College Football Attempting to Make ‘Video Game History’
EA Sports is set to release its first college football video game in over a decade this summer, with July 12, 2024 being the latest rumored release date for the much-anticipated game.
That date has since been disputed by EA, leaving the confirmed information on the upcoming AAA title are at a minimum with six months or less to go.
The most reliable source on any information surrounding details on the game has been Matt Brown, the publisher at Extra Points. Brown has gathered a vast majority of the information out there right now via open records requests.
In a recently obtained document, Brown one heck of a quote from EA that claims an impressive feat that the video game company is trying to tackle.
How player likeness is going to work in the game is a major talking point in the community, as that is ultimately what shut the game down after NCAA Football 2014. Instead of using “randomized” likenesses to combine with numbers and jerseys, EA Sports has partnered with One Team Partners to allow players to sign an agreement that gives them permission to use real player name, image, and likeness assets.
In short, Shedeur Sanders will look and sound like Shedeur Sanders in the video game (granted that he signs on with EA Sports/One Team Partners).
The challenges that come along with attempting that level of definition in a game are astounding though, as Brown discovered in an EA document.
“As one EA communication I’ve inspected says, “…our team expects to create more human likenesses at one time than has ever been attempted in video game history.”“
In the Madden franchise, EA Sports’ NFL money grabber, there are 32 teams made up of 53-man rosters, plus a list of free agents whose likeness is all used in the game.
But for the new college football game, we’re talking about an entirely different kind of challenge. There are 130 FBS football programs, with each roster having 85 scholarship players. After some quick math, that’s north of 11,000 players who could be in the game.
No wonder EA is talking about making history.
Despite many folks being worried that the game isn’t coming out after there wasn’t any sort of teaser trailer during the national championship game, it is still on track to be released this summer, meaning we’ve got just a few more months until the decade-long drought is finally over.
