College Football 25
On Monday, July 8, EA revealed the first extended gameplay of College Football 25, and with this style of reveal, the publisher might be onto something.
We'll get into what we saw in gameplay and the overall presentation style of the reveal later, but the comments section was even more surprising.
Whenever I watch a video, especially one that has had over 1.4 million views in less than 24 hours, I look at the comments section to gauge what people are saying, and it's 2024, so I expect there to be a fair amount of negativity.
We live in a world where it feels like it's fashionable to hate on everything, especially when it comes to gaming. Somehow, College Football 25 and this very well-received preview have escaped the usual tide of negativity.
In fact, the comments on this video were some of the most positive I've seen recently. Let's take a look at the top five that stood out to me. There was no need to leave out the negative comments. This sample is a perfect microcosm of the sentiment expressed in the video.
“These 9 days feel longer than 11 years,” one viewer wrote. At the time, College Football 25 was scheduled to be released in nine days. This user will be happy. As of this writing, the countdown is eight days away. CFB25 will officially be released on July 19, but fans who pre-ordered will have early access starting July 16.
A second viewer wrote: “My grandfather was 83 when he passed away last year and was excited about this. He was a huge college football fan. Even though he was a die-hard Ohio State fan he loved the whole game of football.”
It's amazing, this game bridges the age gap like no other sports video game I know of.
“You can see the crowd has no reaction until Donavan stands up,” a third viewer commented at the 5:40 mark in the video. [Edwards] Now they're free and they're really committed to this game.” Fans seem to appreciate the presentational detail the EA team has put into the game.
As I wrote in a previous post, after playing four full games in our CFB25 preview back in May, anyone playing most of this presentation verbatim will be left feeling embarrassed.
“Just gotta survive 8 more days,” wrote a fourth viewer — a statement that anyone eagerly awaiting the release of a video game can relate to.
A fifth viewer wrote: “This actually looks like the first big next-gen sports game. All the others were playable on last gen but this one is only playable on next-gen and looks completely different” Weird, but I said the same thing to another person during the game's preview.
The video above may have been impressive, but watching it on a monitor is even more spectacular: Although we are still concerned about some issues, there is no doubt that CFB 25 will play out the beautiful game of American football.
The visuals, gameplay and presentation deliver countless wow-inducing moments.
Overall, this gameplay reveal was well done. Cover athlete and University of Michigan star Donovan Edwards played two games against content creator Bordeaux. Edwards was skilled with the stick and proved to be a joy to watch play.
Bordeaux, who I met, is a great guy and has some great content on his YouTube channel. His ability to build a huge channel with an 11-year-old game as his primary content driver is a testament to his hunger for college football and his smart, consistent approach to content creation.
The in-studio experts who are part of EA's development team (Scott O'Gallagher and Will Sykes) were on-site while we watched the gameplay to add important insight and useful information about gameplay mechanics, and while some of it was obviously edited, it never felt like a video made to hide flaws in the game.
Here's hoping EA and other companies offer this style of reveal with gameplay in the future.
