Madden NFL 22’s latest patch is a big one. In fact, it’s hard to remember the last time a post-release title update added an all-new gameplay loop, to the staple Franchise mode, that is this detailed.

But will the Scouting update, available now on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of Mut 22 coins, at last satisfy the series’ restive base, one year after the #FixFranchise social media revolt snapped EA Tiburon to attention?

“We don’t expect — your words, not mine — that they would ever be ‘off our back,’” senior producer Mike Mahar told Polygon last week. “We think it’s absolutely fair that that community, who is absolutely core to the success and the popularity of the game, we expect them to be equally demanding.”

Perhaps, but Mahar and Franchise producer Tom Lischke still hope players will find plenty in Scouting to tide them over, and deepen the emergent narrative they build up over the multi-season mode. Scouting should, basically, make the NFL Draft a gameplay cycle throughout the whole season, similar to how Draft news is a yearlong story IRL.

The Scouting update starts by extending the staff management tasks that Franchise introduced this year, with the hiring and firing of assistant coaches. In this case, players will be building up a staff of scouts — with national or regional expertise, and expertise at evaluating specific positions.

The better the scout, the more they’ll uncover about a player’s background and potential. Users assign scouts to their tasks in the first half of the season; at its midpoint, they can pick three prospects for focused workouts where they unlock a large portion of the player’s profile, to determine where (or whether) they should be picked. Obviously, a good scouting job is going to separate the chaff (or ignore players who will be taken before your pick) and build up to three prospects who are worth the attention.

Lischke said that Madden NFL 22’s draft class generators have undergone thousands of year-to-year simulations to assess their balance, their feel for realism, whether they generate players who are even interesting to scout. I asked, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but somewhat seriously, whether the fictitious name generator is the same as in previous Maddens, where world-class GOAT names like “Wolverine Justice” and “Hadrian Bellweather” became fan-favorite characters in their own right. It sounds like the game is still drawing from that library of possibilities. (“I know there are some surprises that Andre [Weingarten, Franchise designer] hides in there,” Lischke said.)