How Have We Still Not Figured Out Camera Angles in Our Football Games? - Operation Sports Newsletter

Florida Man (me) is on vacation this week in San Diego so I wrote this newsletter days ago. For that reason, this will be shorter than usual, but just know I appreciate y’all as always for reading.

I think Madden, and to a lesser extent College Football 25, get shortchanged a little in the “beauty” category. I think both football games can look ultra-realistic and could claim to be the most “current-gen” of the current-gen sports titles out there from a graphics standpoint. However, both games do themselves no favors when it comes to camera angles. Both in terms of realism and functionality, both games fall short of most other sports games out there when it comes to gameplay cameras.

If you’ve played both football games this year, you probably noticed each game has a different default camera angle at the line of scrimmage. I think the Madden camera is slightly worse, but neither is perfect for a variety of reasons. Whether you feel uncomfortable running from the default cameras or passing from them, the point is that they’re not ideal. On top of that, we still do not have custom cameras in either game.

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The lack of a custom camera is probably the most confusing part to the EA formula. It’s not just their football games where this is an issue, it’s basically all their sports games. When compared to 2K or SDS, EA is just behind here. They either don’t trust us or don’t trust their games to be able to handle custom cameras. Otherwise, I can’t think of another reason why it would not be in at least one other EA sports game by now.

Now, the football games do have a bit of a “specific” issue in that the camera probably changes just slightly depending on where you are on the field (and EA has to do those changes behind the scenes so it’s a dynamic rather than static camera), but cycling through the same couple cameras in all situations is still not ideal. And, again, this is both from a functionality and “beauty” standpoint.

These Games Can Be Very Pretty

The broadcast camera that is in these games is decent. It’s not quite a true broadcast camera, and it’s not really a playable broadcast camera in many respects. To me, it would need to be more zoomed out to be a “playable” camera.

That said, you can actually get the broadcast camera to zoom out further “than designed” by doing a specific trick. We’ll get to that below, but first let’s go through how the broadcast camera looks.

First, here is a real game’s broadcast camera:

In college football, you get more diverse “broadcast” cameras on TV than in the NFL, presumably due to the wildly varying natures of college football stadiums. Again, I don’t think it would be easy to play from this either on offense or defense, but here is how it compares to the default broadcast camera in CFB 25.

It’s slightly more angled than most TV-style broadcast cameras, but it’s pretty close to the real thing. It has the same issues where even if you want to play from it, it’s probably not perfect.

And then here is the “modified” camera you can get to show up if you do specific things before the snap of the ball on offense:

This camera I can play from on both offense and defense. I would prefer it be a little more zoomed in than this and from a slightly different angle, but the point is I can see everything, and it makes the game look really nice. EA spent all this time on stadiums and exteriors, why not give us more chances to see them?

Now, if you want to play from this view, it used to work like this as the fastest way in Madden games:

When on offense:

-Click L3 twice to activate the rotational zoom
-Then call up an audible, but then just cancel out of the audible
-Hit L3 twice again, and the slow zoom will begin

This was the fastest way, but it doesn’t work like that anymore in CFB (or at least I can’t get it to work that way). Instead, I have to do it the old-school way:

-From broadcast cam, at the line switch to a WR (the same way you would to send them in motion) and click L3 twice to player lock
-Let the camera finish its zoom to that player
-Click L3 twice again and you'll start the slow zoom from the very distant angle you see in the shot above

You’re on the clock at this point because the slow zoom happens until you press hike because the camera is trying to get back to the “normal” broadcast camera the entire time. So you’ll want to have all your pre-play stuff done before you begin the camera tweaking as well.

If you want a deeper explanation about how to get to this camera (plus a closer peak at how it looks), we’ve done plenty of work on this camera angle in the past, and the go-to article is still the one we did with Madden 21 as it even has a video.

The folks on PC are still in the early-ish stages of Madden 25 modding, so it’s best to just use Madden 24 PC camera mods to prove the point about how much is left on the table with cameras. I won’t go into all the details about the mods because you can read my past article about them if you want to get all the in-depth info (plus how to get them yourself), but the point is these modded cameras are amazing.

Here is my preferred angle on PC:

It’s flattened out a bit. It’s zoomed out a bit. It’s more side-on rather than at an angle. It’s playable. You have to get used to it, but it’s playable. And the reason you play from this angle is because it looks amazing, and it’s how we generally watch the game.

It’s not that there shouldn’t be a perfect All-22 camera angle to play from as well and all that, but against the CPU I’m a “beauty” guy. If the game looks the most rad from this angle, why not play from it?

Modders have also gone even deeper here so there are “static” and “dynamic” cameras. And really all that means is if you’ve played any version of The Show in the last 15 years, it’s that the camera will change depending on what you’re doing. So in The Show there are different camera angles for hitting/pitching/fielding. I actually don’t know off-hand how “dynamic” the cameras get with the Madden mods, but they do change at the very least based on where you are on the field.

Modders shouldn’t be miles and miles ahead of the real developers with camera angles, especially when it’s not a matter of “legal” issues for why the modders are ahead of the curve.

Functionality Matters Too!

I’m watching more college football than usual this year (I’m more of an NFL guy) probably because I’m playing a college football game again. I have some of the same qualms about the real college game as always in that I like to be able to evaluate how talent will translate to the NFL and some aspects of the college game are just not going to translate. A simplified route tree and the decisions a Tennessee Vols QB are tasked with making at the college level means you don’t get to see oodles of “NFL throws” from that offensive system. It’s fun to watch, and I like watching the Vols, but that’s where my “beefs” sometimes pop up.

Regardless, uh, how the hell am I supposed to run these Wide playbooks or run RPOs from them when I can’t see my players in College Football 25? A reminder, here is what the default camera looks like in CFB when running some of these Wide formations:

There are currently four receivers I can’t see in this Wide Stack. Four! And if I zoom out, I still can’t see them until we get to the game’s version of the All-22 cam:

And even with this camera, I still can’t see the entire field. Look, I can do a number count and see if I have numbers or not to decide pre-snap if I’m going to throw an RPO or not, but if you’ve played CFB you know a number count isn’t really all that matters. Is it man or zone? Are the defenders crashing in from the sideline or not? I can’t make those sorts of split decisions from the normal camera angles.

And here’s the other thing, we can make this even sillier. Now let’s move the ball to the hashes:

Now, even with the All-22 cam, I have zero idea what’s going on with that far left sideline. I have to throw it blind. How are we supposed to properly use all these new formations if we can’t even see what we’re doing?

To me, that’s the most shocking aspect of all this. You created formations that are in some respects functionally useless because you don’t give us any tools to see the entire field. I don’t use a lot of Wide formations in this game for this very reason. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem that shouldn’t exist in any sports game at this point.

We should have full control over some sort of custom camera, and short of that, you need to actually give us a camera that contains the entire field of play. We can’t be waiting for a player to pop on the screen 1-2 seconds after it’s started as we need time to process things as a QB.

It’s Time For A Change

Across all EA sports games, it’s time for a dramatic shift in terms of how they prioritize gameplay cameras. It’s important for all their sports games, but it’s especially important for their football games because at least in College Football 25 we have zero cameras that are actually able to handle all the various playbooks in the game.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase