Madden 21: Franchise Mode’s first major update coming November 12

The first update for Madden 21’s Franchise Mode is slated to arrive on November 12 and will introduce playoff brackets, player card career stats and more.

As previously promised, EA will be delivering a title update for Madden 21 this month that will feature the first of three planned Franchise updates. Arriving on November 12, the first round of updates to Franchise mode are based on community feedback — specifically, ” improving usability for core users of the mode as well as a number of tuning upgrades.” This update does not require a restart/new Franchise save to get access to these features.

Dev Trait Regression Tuning

The first major improvement you’ll notice is dev trait regression. A new League Setting has been added for each DEV Trait to allow Commissioners to decide the right amount for your league experience. These desired counts are the “correct” amount for Dev Traits like Star, Superstar, and Superstar X-Factors. New offseason logic will determine which players are eligible to regress.

"If there are more players at a specific Dev Trait than the setting says is desired, eligible players will be regressed in priority order until the target is met (in some cases, there may be slightly more than target after regression if no players were found eligible)."

Commissioners are also able to turn off Dev Trait Regression in League Settings.

Playoff Bracket

The playoff bracket has been updated to visually reflect the new Wild Card format that was formalized this offseason. NFL owners voted to expand the playoff field to 14 teams this offseason, giving each conference seven playoff teams. There are now three Wild Card teams and only the No. 1 seed gets a first-round bye with the other six teams playing during wild card weekend.

You can view the new playoff bracket starting in Week 13 of the regular season. A Things To Do item will take you to the current playoff picture as if the season were to end that week. Once Wild Card week begins, you can track the scores of all the games that have been played and go further into the box score.

Player Card Career Stats

The Player Card Career Stats User Interface has gotten a dramatic upgrade. A top-requested community request for years, you’ll now see the week matchup and result of the game for each player’s season stats via their player card. You can also now see what team a player finished a season with on each year of their career stats.

Pretty cool stuff!

X-Factor Customization

This one was talked about in greater length already, especially since its another highly requested community feature. It allows Commissioners to able to edit the X-Factor abilities of players that are on player-controlled as well as CPU teams. Abilities will still have slot and overall rating requirements per specified archetype. Commissioners can edit abilities directly from the player card.

Retirement Improvements

This one wasn’t previously mentioned, but it’s also more of a quality of life change that allows you to see who is retiring in an offseason much more quickly. Now in the Re-Sign Players week, you can find a Things To Do item that will take you directly to the Transactions screen sorted by Retired players.

Again, this is just the first of three planned Franchise mode updates for Madden 21 and beyond. It’s a good first start but there are still plenty of other features still in the works. In fact, the next update for Franchise mode is planned for mid-January and will feature new CPU draft logic as well as additional Commissioner controls.