The gameplay has really grown on me in the last couple days. In simulation I'm seeing a great variety of play, even from the CPU, and when it's a balanced game ratings wise, the games are pretty good. Had an exciting 36-30 overtime win over Kansas City as Oakland last night, and it was a great game with pretty realistic stat lines in the end.
Some nice observations from my last game:
Forward momentum sack - Really nice to see the defender reach around the offensive lineman to sack Carr, especially without taking him to the ground. Was just a nice new animation.
CPU Baits an old money route from M'17 - This route was a money route against the CPU last year... Man defense, you'd get that corner route by the tight end and basically any talentless tight end would get separation from the safety and take it to the house or get a long easy gain. I thought I had that right here, and Eric Berry jumped the route and took it to the the house. Nice to see it.
Alex Smith makes me pay for the blitz - The early videos it looked like CPU QBs would just sit in the pocket and not do anything... Here, Smith rolls away from the blitz (a little forced/fast, but w/e), and then throws a dart to a wide open receiver who was open because of the blitz pickup. THey burned me on a similar play earlier in the game.
ALso, I'm echoing what others have said... I was wrong about Longshot. I thought itd be really have assed and shitty, just a promotion tool for MUT... But you can tell they genuinely put a lot of time and effort into it, with good production value. It's cheesy and it's like cheesy sports movie stuff, but for a videogame sports movie it's surprisingly good... ABout as cheesy as any sports greatness movie. As a videogame it's a mix of Telltale story-type stuff but with smart football decisions, and then you have gameplay sequences which are mostly like a scripted game of Madden. You don't really feel (At least I didn't) like I was dramatically affecting the results of a game, but you felt like you had control of a sports movie in the victory sequences, and that's pretty cool.
Man the amount of loading in MUT is already getting to me. Too many of the challenges are simple and require going back to the menu when done, loading up another challenge, and then waiting again for loading. Ugh.
Yep always what detracts from this mode for me... I'd love to try some of the single player challenges, but the loading sucks. I don't think they have any incentive to improve it either because it makes it more of a grind, encouraging people to buy coins or packs or gel or whatever they sell.