I played EA Sports College Football 25. Here are my immediate thoughts:

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

My apologizes to my industry readers…you’re going to get a bunch of newsletters about college football video games over the next few days. To my video game-centric readers…welcome! I hope you stick around and enjoy the rest of what Extra Points has to offer.

Last week, I visited the EA Sports studios in Orlando for a two-day media event. Over those two days, I, as well as several other reporters and content creators, listened to several presentations on the development and feature sets of Madden and EA Sports College Football 25. I interviewed developers and other personnel directly involved with the creation of the project.

And then I got a chance to play both games.

Before I dig into the details, let me be very clear up front about what I played and saw, as well as offer up some Serious Professional Journalist Disclosures.

While I was invited to the media event, EA Sports did not pay for my travel, on-site transportation or accommodations.

I did agree to honor a media embargo on what I saw and heard at the event until today, and also agreed to not record any video or take any photography of gameplay. Part of that, I imagine, is because the builds of both games that I played were not completely finished, which is typical and not something any fan should read into or freak out about.

While I was briefed about different gameplay modes and features, and interviewed staffers about different gameplay modes and features, the only mode that I actually played myself was Play Now, rather than Dynasty, Road to Glory, any assorted minigames, or online play.

This is not meant to be a formal review of that mode or of anything that I played, not is this particular newsletter meant to be an exhaustive breakdown of everything I saw and learned. I can’t squeeze all of that information into 2,000 words.

This particular newsletter is for me sharing my first impressions, as well as provide more information about what features should be expected in the game’s formal release, and why. I will provide additional information about gameplay features, behind-the-scenes content, and reader questions over the course of this week. I am currently planning on making the Friday newsletter, which will be completely free, a video game-specific mailbag.

I’m going to get substantially more granular here after the jump, but let me put this above the paywall, so everybody can read it. I had two major takeaways about the game from this event.

This game is an absolute love letter to college football fans, by college football fans. And from presentation to feature set to gameplay…it is not a reskinned version of Madden. The two games look and feel and play like different entities.

So what was the gameplay like?

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