Equipment
Let’s start with one of our most fan-requested additions: mouthpieces. While we added an initial offering of mouthpieces via Title Update in Madden NFL 21, in Madden NFL 22 all the primary and secondary team colors will be supported across all modes, for both NFL players and created characters. This will be across current gen and last gen consoles.
Another fan-favorite feature coming to Madden NFL 22 is fully functional sock height customization, including all striped socks. This means no matter how an NFL player likes to wear his socks, or how you, the gamer, wants to customize socks, all sock types in the game will respect the proper sock height across default, low and high.
We have also added new color variations of arm tape, and are offering both short and long variations for different styles in the tape length. New smoked and dark Oakley visor variations have also been added as options to customize your helmet look.
Speaking of helmets, a variety of new facemasks we saw being used by NFL players have been added into our facemask library. Here’s a full list of all the new facemasks you’ll see in the customization menus:
- Speedflex 2 Bar WR
- Speedflex Jewel
- Speedflex Robot 808
- Speedflex Robot Z
- Speedflex Halfcage 2
- Revospeed Robot Cage
- Xenith Prowl
- Vicis Kicker
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To finish off player gear, here are the new cleats and gloves being added for Madden NFL 22:
- Nike Vapor Jet 6 gloves
- Adidas Updated Adizero Gloves
- Adidas Freak Gloves
- Adidas Updated Adizero Cleats
- Adidas Updated Freak Cleats
- Adidas Nasty Cleats
We will continue adding more cleats and gloves via Title Updates later in the year from Nike and Jordan, so stay tuned for more information on those during the season.
Our NFL authentic equipment doesn’t stop with just players. We are also adding a few new pieces of coach gear from the official providers of NFL on-field gear — Nike and New Era — to ensure we are reflecting the latest styles to be used this upcoming season:
- Updated Nike Coach Polo
- Updated Nike Coach Sweatshirt
- Updated Nike Coach Hoodie
- Updated Nike Coach Hot Jacket
- Updated Home/Away New Era Hat for all 32 teams
- Updated Coach Visors for all 32 teams
Stay tuned for more equipment updates coming over the course of the Madden NFL 22 season!
Player Likeness
We know that player and coach likeness is extremely important to our players, and it is equally important to us. The process of head-scanning takes time and relies on our team getting face-to-face with athletes. Limitations around in-person opportunities impacted our ability to get our traditional number of head scans this year. We intend to add more head-scans via some Title Updates during the season and we hope to hit the road to start scanning even more NFL players soon. Here’s a list of some of the head-scans we added for launch of Madden NFL 22:
- Trevor Lawrence
- Kyle Pitts
- Justin Fields
- Zach Wilson
- Jonathan Taylor
- Rodrigo Blankenship
- Deebo Samuel
- Terry McLaurin
- Darnell Savage
- Byron Murphy
- Juan Thornhill
- Matt Milano
- James Robinson
- Diontae Johnson
- Cam Akers
- Mark Andrews
- Clyde Edwards-Helaire
- Mecole Hardman
- Maxx Crosby
- Antonio Gibson
- Darius Slayton
- Penei Sewell
- Micah Parsons
With those limitations in-mind, we made a significant effort to upgrade our generic head library. We’ve added over 100 new generic heads that will be available options for create-a-player. We have also spent time making visual improvements to existing scans and carrying them forward to the latest console generation.
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
We are excited to share some news about our usage of NFL Next Gen Stats in our ratings process.
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.
As you have seen throughout the game over the last two years, NFL Next Gen Stats is a big part of where we’re taking our game in terms of player performance and we’re continuing to find more ways to integrate this data into ratings processes in the future.