The best thing I can say about Dynasty Mode in EA Sports College Football 25 doubles as the best thing that I can say about the game itself. Yes, it feels familiar. Yes, there are tons of ways that it feels like an extension of the EA Sports NCAA Football series that went away more than a decade ago. And yes, there are little things about this game mode that make it feel like you’re playing something new and fresh.
You ever go a long time without going to a restaurant, and in that time, they hire a new chef who prepares everything mostly the same? But you notice that things are just a little bit different, and for that reason, you feel like you’re getting a different (and better) experience from the one that you remember? That, essentially, is what Dynasty Mode in the newest college football release from EA Sports is like, and while it’s not perfect, you can’t help but love it if you are someone who has spent the last 11 years wondering when the heck you’re getting a new college football release.
Right after the game dropped, we published a few initial thoughts on Dynasty Mode, which is the backbone of the entire game. Today, we’re going to go in depth with the various elements that make up the mode, and identify what we like, dislike, and what we’d like changed and tweaked going forward.
1. The Archetypes
How do you want your coach to run his program? My favorite element of Dynasty Mode is how you can shape your coach by picking one of three archetypes. They are:
1. Tactician: “Puts players in position to succeed on gameday”
2. Recruiter: “Good at talent acquisition”
3. Motivator: “Culture setter who is strong in player development”
It’s like any other skill-based video game, where you get XP that leads to digital currency that lets you build out your coach’s abilities. Within each of those, you have the initial level and a secondary level that you unlock by building out your skill tree (spend 50 coins within each archetype) and by doing an archetype-specific challenge, whether that’s have a number of players drafted, win a number of top 25 games, or sigh top 5 recruiting classes. Those, respectively, are Scheme Guru, Elite Recruiter, and Master Motivator.
There are, additionally, three other archetypes you can make available for purchase:
1. Talent Developer, by having two players taken in the first round of the NFL Draft
2. Architect, by winning four rivalry games
3. Strategist, by winning four bowl games
If you do really well, you can get the opportunity to unlock the ability to get the Program Builder archetype by winning five Playoff games. And if you do so well that you win a pair of national titles, you can get the CEO archetype.
All of these are designed to give you a small but notable leg up. A Tactician, for example, can boost the skills for his players at each individual position, while a Recruiter can make it easier to scout and recruit each individual position, or a Motivator can do things like help players continue to stay hot through timeouts or get a boost in offseason training. It’s all up to you how you want to approach your coach’s archetype — do you want to kill it on the recruiting trail but not be as good in-game? Or do you want to have less influence over what happens on the recruiting trail because you want your current players to perform at the highest possible level?
I will say, I decided to go down the Tactician path, and recruiting can be brutal if you don’t have that extra support — your hours during the week are so limited, and being able to cut down on something like how long it takes to recruit a position is a big help. Having said that, once the games started, my players were basically performing at as high of a level as they could because I maxed out what I could. My approach was not the end all, be all approach, and as I run through Dynasty Mode again, I’ll 100 percent go down different avenues. And the fact that you can experience the mode in so many different ways is legitimately one of the coolest things about Dynasty this time around.
2. The Games
They’re pretty good! I won’t dive into gameplay, as you’ve probably already read gameplay reviews of CFB 25, but there are two things I’ll mention. Both came up in my early Dynasty Mode takeaways, and the first is a small critique: Even if you are a coordinator, you can control both sides of the ball. It’s up to you if you think that’s a good thing, but I think if you take an OC job, you should not be calling defensive plays, and if you take a DC job, you should not be calling offensive plays. Now, you can toggle this yourself before each game and play just offense or defense, but I don’t think it should even be an option — if for no other reason than to provide real differentiation between the jobs. This also applies to recruiting, which we’ll get to in a second.
The other is that EA Sports wanted to make your life hell if you start at a small school. This isn’t a bad thing in the slightest, I quite like that I had to get better at the game — at understanding how to throw and kick the ball, at seeing defenses, and knowing when to take risks and when to let loose — because I was using a smaller school going up against the big boys. If you take over a MAC school, you should go get your ass kicked if you play Ohio State in the Horseshoe, for example. Your audibles are wrong, your hot routes aren’t correct, you have coverage busts left and right. It’s reminiscent of, well, what happens when these teams play in real life, and I think it’s a nice touch. I hated every second of it, but I appreciated it.
3. Recruiting
I am a big fan of just how intense recruiting is in the game. It does feel just enough like recruiting in the NCAA series, where you have to scout the kid as part of your process of recruiting them. The general way it works: You have a certain number of hours in a week to divvy up among all of your recruiting responsibilities. After you extend a scholarship offer to a kid — which you can do before or after you scout them and determine just how good they are (recruits either get a green gem to indicate they’re better than their ranking, a red gem to indicate they are not, or nothing) — you are in control of how you want to approach their recruitment.
You can learn about them with one of four scouting methods: Search Social Media (5 hours a week), DM the Player (10 hours), Contact Friends and Family (25 hours), or Send the House (50 hours). This lets you know about their interest in 14 categories:
Academic Prestige
Athletic Facilities
Brand Exposure
Campus Lifestyle
Championship Contender
Coach Stability
Coach Prestige
Conference Prestige
Playing Time
Pro Potential
Playing Style
Proximity To Home
Program Tradition
Stadium Atmosphere
Recruits go from an open recruitment, to a Top 8, to a Top 5, to a Top 3. Once you get in the Top 5, you can bring them on a visit, where you choose which category you want to emphasize. And of course, you can try to Soft Sell (20 hours) or Hard Sell (40 hours) on pitches (which are set combinations of three categories), with the understanding that this could backfire. You can also try to Sway (30 hours) them on a category actually being more important than they previously thought to better align with your school’s strengths.
There have been people who mentioned that you can swoop in and get a 4 or 5-star kid at a lesser school if you wait long enough and give them a scholarship offer. In my experience, I did not get to do that — EA mentioned that might be fixed in its first patch after the game is released, so perhaps I just got unlucky. The much bigger problem, in my experience, was one of bugs in the game where I could not use recruiting hours on, say, trying to Soft Sell a recruit for no reason. Right before I typed this out, I tried to use 20 of my 95 hours this week to Soft Sell one kid on my board, but got told I don’t have enough hours for that. This was a major reason why I only had four kids signed at Early National Signing Day. More than anything, that was my big frustration with recruiting, and hopefully it gets patched soon, because it straight up keeps you from being able to sell recruits on your program.
Getting locked out on some recruits is also something you’ll have to get used to, and is something that might need some tweaking from EA. Basically, this manifests in two ways: The easy one is recruits make their Top Whatever and you’re not in it. The other: Some recruits decide what singular category is most important to them, and if you do not meet the bar, you’re locked out. That’s fine, but I would continue to be locked out on kids where I was their No. 1 school, and would remain so throughout the process, which feels strange — why are recruits even putting you that high on your list? Anyway, be warned of that.
My final recruiting critique: You are tasked with putting together an entire recruiting class. It’s a bit strange to be a coordinator and have to recruit on both sides of the ball, but there isn’t an alternative as opposed to the game control selection options.
4. Coach Carousel
It’s fun, and essentially what it sounds like. At the end of the season, jobs open up, and you have to go through whichever ones end up getting offered to you. For me, after one year as an alright offensive coordinator at Akron, I got an offer for a head coach job, turned it down, simulated a week, and got a head coach offer at Southern Mississippi, which I took.
From there, you build out a staff. If you’re a Tactician, do you want to lean even farther into that bit and have blind spots on your staff as Motivators and Recruiters? Or you want to try and compensate for the stuff you don’t do especially well? I went down the route of a Tactician head coach with a Master Motivator offensive coordinator (with less prestige, but some good recruiting chops) and a Motivator defensive coordinator (with more prestige and similar recruiting ability). You also adopt the team’s entire recruiting class and recruiting board, which you get the chance to tinker with a bit once it’s transfer portal time.
5. Transfer Portal and Encourage Transfers
As the season goes on, you get a sense for which kids will and will not enter the transfer portal at the end of the year. And once you get through the coaching carousel, you see which kids hop into the portal and why, citing things like Playing Time and Playing Style. As an added bonus, you are told how likely it is that you can persuade them to change their mind.
And then, it comes time to play the portal game. It’s the same thing that you do with recruiting, although in a fun twist, you get to go after both uncommitted kids and transfers as you try to build out your roster. It’s up to you to determine what you’re going to prioritize — do you want the immediate boost of more ready-made transfers, or do you want to continue to try and build up your program with high schoolers? There’s no right or wrong answer here, and it’s probably pretty closely tied to how badly you want to stay at your current job.
While it’s not a portal thing, you can, uh, let some kids know that their services are not needed before the season begins. I did not have to do that because my roster was not too big for the roster limit of 85 players, but if you decide you want to trim some fat — say, a junior fullback who is a 61 overall — you can nudge them in that direction.
6. Custom Conferences and Schedules
At the end of every year, you can tweak which team goes into which conference. This wasn’t a big priority of mine, so I didn’t fiddle around with it too much, but I was able to put Vanderbilt in the AAC, because why not? You can also trade schools between conferences, which is what happened when I then took Vanderbilt and put them back in the SEC, in exchange for Alabama going to the American. (I put Bama back, don’t worry.) Again, this wasn’t a huge priority of mine as I went through Dynasty Mode, but I’m sure if you wanna see what, say, Florida State and Clemson would look like in the SEC, you could do that very easily. You can also fiddle with the conference rules: Whether or not there are divisions (and, if you so choose, their names, so I immediately made the Big Ten the Leaders and Legends again), how many conference games there are, if there is a conference championship game, where it’s located, and what criteria is used to pick the CCG participants.
And of course, before the year ends, you get to build out your schedule — well, your non-conference schedule. It’s about as straightforward as anything, as you can pick between every FBS team (so long as they have an opening) or a collection of generic FCS teams.
7. Overall?
I love Dynasty Mode. In the previous version of this series, I probably sunk more time into that than I did anything else. That was not just the case for NCAA Football, as I spent more time with Dynasty Mode than I did any other game mode in any other video game.
I say all that to say: This is exactly what I wanted Dynasty Mode to be in the new college football video game. Like, to a tee. It scratches the itch that I haven’t been able to scratch in 11 years, all while feeling like a new and unique video game. It’s to the point that I haven’t even taken any other game mode for a spin, because I have been sinking all of my time into Dynasty Mode. If you’re on the fence about getting this game, Dynasty alone is going to make it worth the investment. Why are you still reading this? Go buy the game now and get started.