Madden 09 Patch #2 Now Out

After having to wait a few days from the initial time the second patch for Madden 09 was thought to go live it is now out for the 360 and PS3. As long as your console is connected online you will be automatically prompted to download the patch when next starting up the game. You will not have to restart franchise mode for the effects of the patch to come through.

Continue on to view all of the changes and feel free to leave your impressions of the game after the patch in the comments. Initial response seems to be that the gameplay related improvements have proven to be valuable, the CPU now takes too long to snap the ball even on extra points, and it may not have fixed freezes that some people have experienced in franchise mode.

Update: If you experienced freezing in franchise prior to the patch you will have to start over. Any that hadn’t previously had issues with freezing should be fine to continue.

1. Kicking play disconnect: If two opponents play a game with two different camera angles, in any situation where a game winning or tying kick was to be made, a disconnect could occur. “ActionCam” forces the game to go into slow-motion to add drama to these late kicks, but unfortunately the Classic camera does not, thus forcing the “disconnect”. This has been fixed…all cameras can still be used as well.

2. Stability issues in the play call / halftime highlights / postgame highlights screens (especially in Franchise mode after training games): This was a hard one to track down as not everyone was seeing it , we did find the issue however with some Instant Replay / cache corruption, and have a fix ready for patch 2.

3. Stability issues with Madden IQ end of game popup: This has been fixed.

4. “WR direct snap” exploit: Cheesers found an exploit to direct snap to a WR for easy short yardage gain. Not only are we fixing this play (i.e. we aren’t removing it), we are also going to be re-setting records for anyone with a winning record that has been found to be using this play.

5. Franchise Progression / Regression (or lack thereof): The lack of higher numbers was a tuning value that I think everyone agreed was just too low. This has been juiced up so you should see more realistic progression now.

Additional info I obtained on what the progression fix entails:

1) The Edit Player Progression Bug. So now edited players and created players will progress like normal. Before, anytime you edited a player’s ratings, he would then never progress in your franchise.

2) Fixed a major bug that stopped awarding progression points after the top 2-3 players at a position. So before, only 2-3 players per position were getting awarded the proper progression points. That has been fixed now, all players are now being assigned the proper progression points.

6. Edited players don’t progress: Players were not progressing after their jersey number (or pretty much any other attribute). This has been fixed.

7. Stability issue when exiting Madden ‘93 in CE version: This has been fixed.

8. Deep ball glitch: Some enterprising gamers found a way to throw a deep ball while crossing the LOS and hit a receiver wide open at a decent rate. We addressed this by making sure the DB will no longer break on the ball when the QB crosses the line while throwing.

9. CPU running out of bounds: This bug appears when the CPU tries to switch hands while running to the sidelines. This is fixed for patch 2.

10. Penalty sliders ineffective: A common complaint from the hardcore community was the lack of effect from the penalty sliders. We increased these substantially for patch 2.

11. Field degradation: Another common complaint was the lack of field degradation. Our effect was very subtle, which was also getting overshadowed by our lighting and post effects, so we increased this effect for the patch.

12. Stability issue with the Eagles and a full ring meter: We found and fixed a rare issue where the gamer could run into stability issues while using the Eagles in mini-game with a ring meter that was completely full.

13. Play call screen hitch: We found and fixed a bug that was causing a noticeable hitch when exiting the play call screen

14. Prevent Defense issue: We found and fixed an issue where defenders sharing a deep zone/prevent assignment would loosen their coverage (because they thought the other guy was covering for them), which allowed the receiver to get behind them even though they were in Prevent.

15. Brett Favre stats: With the late addition of Brett Favre, we were not able to get his Career and Season statistics into the game for the roster update. This has now been added for patch 2.

16. Defensive Preplay Mis-cue: We found and fixed an issue where defenders would leave their man wide open in a Cover 3.

17. CPU quick-snap: A very common complaint on the forums was the speed at which the CPU snapped the ball. We added a random length of time (no less than 5 seconds) for the CPU to wait and even make pre-play adjustments.

18. Online playbook switch: We found and fixed an issue where playbooks were re-setting to the defaults after the playbook select popup was closed.

19. Additional fixes to situations where the game would freeze.