For a sport that’s entire season unfolds in less than six months, the NFL has done well to maintain relevance year-round. In striving for authenticity, Madden NFL 23 needs to reflect that. With NFL training camps re-opening soon, football fans may be looking back on what has been, without a doubt, the most eventful off-season in recent memory–arguably in all of NFL history. Big-name wide receivers like Tyreek Hill and Devante Adams pushed themselves out of cemented roles onto new teams for massive paydays. Star QBs were traded, like Russell Wilson, retired (and then un-retired) like Tom Brady, while other vets like Bobby Wagner and Von Miller joined teams already knocking on the door to the Super Bowl.

For this year’s Madden, the team at Tiburon has sought to give Franchise players more of that control fans have watched the likes of Adams and Brady claim for themselves. New contract tools and a deeper free agency experience are some of the marquee changes to the game mode, and if they’re done right, should give players a similarly frenzied feeling when it comes time to build a championship-caliber team.

Every NFL team knows that you don’t just win games on the field. A season can sometimes be decided in the draft room and front office. Madden 23’s new contract tools finally replace the series’ outdated model of guessing the sweet spot for getting a player to sign with you based on a vague starting position. Tiburon calls these new tools “simplified,” and they are, but they’re also objectively more nuanced and detailed than ever before, which is great news for capologists in both solo and online leagues.

Starting with Madden 23, you’ll be able to offer one of four basic contracts to free agents: team-friendly, player-friendly, neutral, and max offer. Fine-tuning it beyond those templates is still available, but at the very least being able to compare what a good deal for the player versus the team looks like should go a long way to making sense of one of Madden’s most opaque components.

Those free agents will weigh your deal from a financial standpoint, but they’ll also consider a much longer, sometimes even humorously lifelike list of factors. This includes things like whether they look poised to be in the starting lineup, what the team’s overall prospects for winning games looks like, and even whether the team exists in a state with an income tax. Yes, teams like the Dolphins, Bucs, and Jags may sometimes get a leg up in free agency, but this is just one of many factors.

This system isn’t brand-new to Madden. Longtime players may remember something like it has been in the game in years past, but not for a few seasons now. The presumption is it’ll be done better and more authentically, which may still mean the money tends to win out in the end, but not always.

Winning ends on the field, but it starts in the front office.

Players will have new roles added to their attributes, too, making some players a better fit for your team for more reasons than just their on-field skills. Someone like Bobby Wagner, for example, will wear the figurative “Mentor” badge, which gives XP boosts to players younger than him at his same position. These roles play into free agency directly, as knowing who is in the locker room will help players decide where to sign, such as wideouts looking to team up with an elite QB.

Another new wrinkle is how the free agency period plays out. Unfolding in stages has long been the case, but Madden 23 will now limit your available contract offers within each stage. An example GameSpot was given suggested the initial free agency period will allow each team to make up to five offers, but no more than that. In subsequent stages during the free agency period, more offers will be available. This is meant to ensure players don’t thoughtlessly throw money around (even though the Jaguars do in real life).

For online franchises, the effect of these changes seems destined to be amplified. In my Madden league, we already place certain out-of-game restrictions on the free agency period to seek something closer to parity, or at least something that accounts for our variable time zones. Madden 23 will bring systems like that directly into the game, ensuring one deep-pocketed team doesn’t go out and nab every viable player on day one right at the deadline.

For players who want to pinch pennies more often than throw them into the wind, Madden 23 will also feature rollover cap for the first time. Though the specifics are still a bit fuzzy until I see it in action, it was explained to me that unused cap space can be applied toward the following league year, giving Madden players more flexibility in how they build their team. I’m curious to learn precisely when this rollover occurs and what happens in years further down the line, but with what I know so far, it’s a welcome addition.

Last year’s scouting update greatly enhanced the talent pool and the process of uncovering future stars in each year’s draft, and Madden 23 will build on that with a smarter team of AI scouts. As the process has been streamlined to essentially play out in the background of a week-to-week franchise, scouting reports will now reveal more relevant information. In Madden 22, scouting a pocket-passing QB may needlessly reveal attributes like Break Tackle and Spin Move, but in this year’s game, you’ll unlock relevant info first and foremost–things like Throw Power and Short Accuracy, for example.

In a Connected Franchise, each team owner can toggle Skill-Based Passing on or off.

While Madden 23 will be marketed chiefly on its new “Fieldsense” overhaul, which encompasses new mechanics for basically every spot on the field, one of the biggest changes, Skill-Based Passing, will be optional on a player level even in a Connected Franchise. This means a league won’t need to decide collectively whether to implement the new passing controls. Each team owner can decide for themselves. That’s welcome news, as major new systems in Madden can go either way–maybe the community will love it and it’ll be around forever after, like the Hit Stick, or maybe it’ll be a mess that Tiburon scraps in a hurry, like QB Vision.

I’ll be diving into the Madden 23 beta this week and offering more thoughts from the virtual gridiron soon. In the meantime, it seems like Franchise mode’s biggest changes in Madden 23 aren’t back-of-the-box material, but what they may be are much-requested tools to allow all team-builders to compete not just in jerseys on the field, but in suits in the front office, too. Madden NFL 23 launches on Xbox Series X, PS5, Xbox One, and PS4 on August 19.

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Microsoft has said it will not stand in the way of attempts from its workers to unionize, though the company says workers don’t need to form a union to be heard by upper management. Microsoft is making this statement amid a growing tide of unionization efforts in the US, including some in the video game space that could affect Microsoft going forward.

In a blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith said the American economy “continues to evolve” and that the “free market is being reshaped in part by changing public expectations about the nature of work and the responsibilities of corporations.”

Responding to recent efforts among US workers to unionize [workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and others have recently formed unions in the US], Smith said it’s an “inevitability” that even more unions are coming, and they could happen at Microsoft. This might become a reality soon for Microsoft, as some workers at Call of Duty studio Raven recently voted to form a union. Microsoft is in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard, the Call of Duty franchise, and all of its studios. Xbox boss Phil Spencer previously said Microsoft would recognize Raven’s workers’ union.

Microsoft will not seek to stop workers from unionizing, Smith said, but the company also is not promoting unions. “Our employees will never need to organize to have a dialogue with Microsoft’s leaders,” Smith said. “But we also recognize the workplace is changing.”

Smith said Microsoft has “talked with and worked hard to learn from” leaders in the labor, business, and academic spaces as it relates to unions. But it’s still early days, and Smith acknowledged that “We recognize that we have far more learning ahead of us than behind us.”

Smith went on to say that Microsoft recognizes the legal right of its workers to form or join a union. “We respect this right and do not believe that our employees or the company’s other stakeholders benefit by resisting lawful employee efforts to participate in protected activities, including forming or joining a union,” Smith said.

The executive also mentioned that Microsoft higher-ups have an “open door policy” and other “listening systems and employee resource groups” to help workers feel heard.

In the event that Microsoft workers want to unionize, Smith said Microsoft “will make it simpler, rather than more difficult, for our employees to make informed decisions and to exercise their legal right to choose whether to form or join a union.”

“We acknowledge that this is a journey, and we will need to continue to learn and change as employee expectations and views change with the world around us. And we recognize that employers and employees will not always agree on all topics–and that is okay,” Smith said. “Perhaps as much as anything, we bring a sense of optimism grounded in an appreciation that success in a competitive global economy requires that businesses and labor strive to work together well.”

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Destiny 2’s favorite arms dealer Xur is on his way to offer a selection of Exotic weapons and armor from his inventory. With Season of the Haunted having some new activities that require heavy firepower, now’s a good time to see what Xur has for sale so that you can triumph in Nightmare Containment on the Derelict Leviathan or in the new Duality dungeon.

We don’t know where Xur will appear just yet, but we’ll update this post as soon as we have his location. He usually pops up in one of three locations–Nessus, the EDZ, and the Tower hangar–so he’s not too difficult to track down. Xur is present every weekend in Destiny 2, starting with the daily reset at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET each Friday.

His exact location is always a mystery when he first arrives, as he is not listed on the map, and for novice players, he can be easy to miss.

In addition to a rotating pool of Exotic weapons, Xur has also been offering weapons that were previously locked to seasonal quests–Hawkmoon and Dead Man’s Tale–with each gun having a fresh roll of perks every week.

For those of you looking to grab an Exotic Cipher that can be used to purchase an Exotic weapon from the monument in the Tower, there’s also a lengthy quest that you can acquire from Xur that’ll reward you with one of these rare items.

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Season, the biking adventure game first revealed by Scavengers Studio at the 2020 Game Awards, has re-emerged as Season: A letter to the future in a brand-new gameplay trailer shown during the latest PlayStation State of Play. The trailer further showcases the game’s standout art style and its quaint gameplay that includes snapping photos, biking through fields and down hills, and meeting strangers on your travels.

See it for yourself in this new trailer that combines lots of gameplay with some hints of story.

Scavengers Studio’s previous game, Darwin Project, offered a very different experience as a frantic survival-craft battle royale where a “Show Director” and spectators can influence the match, such as deciding where to drop bombs and close off the arena. Season’s vibe is almost a polar opposite, and seems intent to slow pacing to a crawl.

Though the game itself comes off as tranquil and pleasant, the studio was previously mired in controversy stemming from allegations of inappropriate behavior by the studio’s CEO at a party. The subsequently discreet reaction by the studio’s other leaders, which included a demotion of the accused person, created a rift where some employees felt no action was taken at all, which the team later called “regrettable.” When the story was spread more widely, it led to CEO Amélie Lamarche stepping down indefinitely while the accused employee, former CEO and then-creative director Simon Darveau, was permanently let go after having been found to be at fault.

An independent audit of the team’s workplace environment concluded “[w]hile there are workplace behaviors that still require improvement, the presence of systemic sexual or psychological harassment at the Studio [was not found],” according to an official statement released on the company’s website in June 2021.

The team said it has identified key areas that need improvement and seems ready to put the issue behind it. Season: A letter to the future is scheduled to release this fall on PC via Steam, as well as PS5 and PS4.

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Stray, the highly-anticipated cyberpunk adventure game in which players take on the role of backpack-wearing cat working its way through a robot-infested city, now has a release date. Originally slated for release in “early 2022,” the game officially hits PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC on July 19. Stray will also be the first day one release for the new and improved PlayStation Plus subscription service, meaning those subscribed to PS+ at its highest tiers will have access to the game without needing to purchase it.

Set in a dystopian city, Stray follows a cat who gains the ability to communicate with humans after encountering a drone named B12. Alongside the small robot, the furry lil’ friend must navigate the city using its cat-like reflexes and propensity for pushing objects off ledges to avoid enemies, solve puzzles, and survive.

Stray is available to wishlist on the PlayStation store, and up for preorder over on Steam.

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