No, I get that football doesn't change all that much, and therefore the games don't need to change all that much (so why it's become an annual new release sort of situation is beyond me) so I could understand not redoing all of the game logic, but... eight-bit score storage?
Assuming a 15 minute quarter(though most Madden games have shorter quarters, especially if they're multiplayer), to get 255 points in a quarter, a team would need to score a touchdown + 2 point conversion every 30 seconds. For a full game, that's every 2 minutes.
Any given play generally takes 10-20 seconds, and you're going to be running, bare minimum, 2 plays per 8 points(1 for touchdown, 1 for 2 point conversion). So that's about 25 seconds per score.
If the teams are remotely well matched(i.e. aren't a Breaking Madden team), they'll take at least 2-3 minutes per possession, since you're most likely going to have 4 downs, which have a play clock of 40 seconds(most teams use around 30/play), so the "average" shortest possession is something like 2 minutes.
The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that you'd have to specifically code for.
Who wouldn't just use "int" for all of this logic? It's so simple that you could do it on autopilot. You'd have to specifically try to limit to 8-bits.
If 'char' in-place of 'int' is a legacy quirk, then I get it. I just find it odd that over the course of twenty-five years the required expense couldn't be made to update the data type. It just makes more sense.
If you find it odd you haven't worked on any large projects that have enormous backlogs of bugs and features to build which need to be prioritized. Bugs that will never actually manifest in normal usage should be far down the list of things to fix, particularly if they are in 25 year old code that is battle hardened and in the critical path.
You have to remember that consoles are very limited devices, especially if core code was developed 25 years ago. Even in the late 90s, developing for the original Sony PSX, we were carrying flags in high bits, removing file names from our file systems for prod builds (relying on known sectors and offsets instead), making sure that no unnecessary strings were in the final build, etc.
While it was annoying at times to be so worried about bits and cycles, it was also a very rewarding type of puzzle, figuring out how to squeeze just a little more performance out of the limited system we had to work with.
> so why it's become an annual new release sort of situation is beyond me
The answer from EA's point of view is that people buy it every year, so of course they'll make a new one.
The explanation from the user's point of view is that much of the magic of the game comes from it reflecting the teams, players, and plays of the actual NFL. When some quarterback gets traded to another team, you want to get next year's Madden so he's on the right team in the game too.
This is one of the really cool things about the game. There are millions of people who have detailed knowledge of different teams and players and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Madden lets you take that otherwise pointless barroom trivia and use it to actually be better at the game.
I understand that, which is why it seems like the more appropriate vector for that sort of change would be via a patch, not an entirely new release of a game.
