Shortly before the Super Bowl, Electronic Arts had good news for all American football fans today: The well-known college series next to Madden NFL should finally celebrate a comeback.
In previous years, EA Sports not only relied on the Madden NFL series for football, but also had a college spin-off ready with NCAA Football. However, due to licensing and legal disputes, this franch ise was crushed years ago, but now EA Sports is returning to the college football fields.
As the company confirmed today, it will partner with publisher Electronic Arts to bring back college football in a next-gen game for PS5 and Xbox Series X / S. The project is currently not running under the name NCAA Football as it used to be, but is officially called EA College Football.
Apart from the announcement of the return of college football to a video game, details are still rather few and far between, also because the journey up to the release has just begun. Accordingly, there are no more detailed statements about the specific scope of the game or the release period. The waiting time could be even longer, because a statement speaks of “the next few years”.
After all: Thanks to the cooperation with the CLC, more than 100 institutions including logos, stadiums, jerseys, game day traditions and more are to be licensed. So the bottom line is that EA wants to deliver a truly authentic college football experience. Original player names and pictures are probably not planned due to the license hurdles that seem to exist in this respect, although EA wants to closely follow further developments in this regard. So maybe something could happen before the release.
The NCAA series was developed between 2005 and 2014; the last offshoot was NCAA Football 14. Since the series was crushed, a comeback has been one of the “most popular games of EA Sports”. The pleading of numerous football fans around the world has now been heard.
Thanks to the integration of Next Gen Stats, Madden NFL 21 on PS5 and Xbox Series X should be much closer to reality and imitate players and their movements even better.
