NCAA 25: Troubleshooting the Gridiron Glitches
After an 11-year hiatus, the return of a college football video game was met with immense anticipation. For many, including myself, the absence of a new title since NCAA Football 14 created a void in the way we connected with the sport. Sports video games offer an easy route to stay invested, especially in a sport as expansive as college football, with its hundreds of schools and thousands of players. The release of College Football 25 (CFB 25) was supposed to fill that void. However, the game's launch has been a mixed bag, with stunning graphics offset by frustrating bugs and underwhelming features.
A Rude Awakening: The Difficulty Curve
CFB 25 is hard. The game's difficulty is one of the first things players notice. It's a significant step up from previous entries in the series. The computer opponent is ruthless, and the "Adaptive AI" learns your tendencies and punishes you for sticking to them. Quarterbacks have precious little time in the pocket before it collapses, and defense requires playbook knowledge and real in-the-moment skill. Tackling and pass defense are both fraught endeavors. No longer is it good enough to just play man-to-man defense and blitz every now and then. Now, a player needs to mask coverage shells, time zone blitzes perfectly, cover the middle of the field with a linebacker who might not have enough speed for the job, and generally do all of the extremely difficult things that have made football such an offense-dominated sport at every level.
While the difficulty can be frustrating, it also adds a layer of challenge that can be rewarding. Beating Wisconsin on the road as UTEP in a Dynasty mode, thanks to a fumble recovery touchdown and a blocked extra point, was a rush I had forgotten. The challenge was great, and has kept the game fun for me even when I was getting my ass handed to me.
Fortunately, the difficulty is fixable with slider settings that allow adjustments for basically every facet of the field, and the CFB 25 community is working hard and fast on creating the perfect set to balance challenge with realism.
Buggy and Underwhelming: Where CFB 25 Falls Short
Despite the initial excitement, CFB 25 feels rushed. The game, in its current state, was released as a buggy, underwhelming, and ultimately empty mess. While development began in 2021, the three-year window wasn't enough to deliver a polished product.
Read also: Deep Dive: NCAA Football 25 Dynasty
Here are some of the issues:
- Broken Dynasty Mode Simulation Engine: Top teams are losing to FCS schools left and right, 7-5 teams are ranked in the top 10, Charlotte wins the national title way more often than it should in year one, and somehow only about two or three running backs nationwide run for 1,000 yards or more.
- Buggy Recruiting: Players are locked out of scheduling campus visits with recruits for no reason, names simply disappear at times from the recruiting pool, one-star schools could get five-star players with relative ease (this has mostly been patched since release, but remains worth noting), and the interface is both un-intuitive and slow.
- Unreliable Online Servers: Online servers have been touch-and-go since release, as is true for any big game these days, and many features are locked up for no apparent reason. As an example, the game allows you to create a school from the ground up, but you can only use it online.
- Gameplay Glitches: Players sometimes just do not follow the playcall, even at home, when there's no home field advantage working against the player. Defenders also simply do not move at times; my defensive end frequently just stood there after the snap.
The two marquee modes, Dynasty and Road to Glory, feel shallow. CFB 25 has stripped so many features from NCAA Football 14 that it feels empty as a result. Dynasty mode survives a bit better, although some customization options for your school that simply needed to be in the game are not; why can't I make formation subs before games, a feature that is doubly important with the new Wear And Tear mode that slowly but surely saps players of their abilities as they take hits? Elsewhere, the record-keeping is a mess. Why, for instance, is it so difficult to see who's leading the nation in passing yards? Why does editing a player's number sometimes brick the player entirely, ruining their overall rating?
Road To Glory is even worse, and bereft of the charm from previous iterations; in earlier games of the series, a RTG player had a dorm room they could decorate, a silly but immersive bit of roleplay. The mode is also broken in its own ways, such as a Heisman-winning player coming back the next season to find themselves third on the depth chart simply due to a lower overall rating than a new transfer.
Patches and Potential: A Glimmer of Hope
EA Sports released its first update notes on Monday, addressing a variety of these problems. That's to its credit, but it shouldn't require many, many patches to get a game that cost upwards of $70 into a workable state. That's the reality not just with CFB 25 but with all games.
The knowledge that "they can always patch it!" has made that less of a priority, at the expense of the most visible period of a game's life. CFB 25 was the most anticipated sports video game of all time; absence makes the sicko heart grow fonder. But the state of the game upon its release has dulled that excitement so heavily that even die-hard content creators have to send out posts detailing myriad issues that should never have made it past internal testing. These are people who want to love the game, finding that they can't. At least not yet.
Read also: Revolutionizing NCAA Football 25
Read also: Anthony Robles: Overcoming Obstacles
tags: #NCAA #25 #troubleshooting
