MAITLAND, Fla. — Fans are gearing up to boycott upcoming football video game Madden NFL 21 after EA revealed that the game will not feature every single football player since the NFL began in 1920.
“Everyone has a favorite football player, so you know someone’s going to be upset when they realize they can’t run around the field with Chuck Bednarik or Bronko Nagurski,” said u/blitzxet83 in a Reddit thread that was upvoted 150,000 times. “And to be clear, I’m not talking about myself, a 36-year-old man. I’m talking about the kids. I know for sure there’s going to be scores of 8-year-olds who pick this game up and wonder why they can’t see Tom Brady going head to head with Roger Staubach.”
According to EA, the newest game would have to add 23,204 players to the newest game in order to include every retired football player since the formation of the NFL. According to various redditors, however, this would not be a major issue.
“I’ve crunched the numbers and you could finish that up in a few days, tops,” commented u/galaringerror420. “There’s already a create-a-player mode in the new game. So let’s say it takes you three minutes to make each historical NFL player using that. Now, let’s also say EA has a small team of 100 developers dedicated to adding in all of the old players. That means every three minutes, we get 300 new characters. So if they work four hours a day, that’s 7,200 characters each day. Boom: you finish up the whole thing in just over three days.”
“Frankly, it’s clear the developers are incredibly lazy,” added several identical replies.
Despite complaints, there are some fans who don’t care about the missing characters.
“Every single year, EA puts out another Madden game that updates the roster and that’s it,” explained Twitter user @jeremiahsmiling. “The game is almost exactly as the one before it, it’s not particularly exciting or compelling, and it costs way too much money at $60 a pop. And every year, I buy it up like a sucker. I don’t deserve new features or gameplay. Just give daddy his sport game.”
As of press time, fans were riled up even further after a dataminer discovered that all of the football fields in the game were reused assets from Madden NFL 20.
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