As of right now, there is no official XFL video game, but that didn’t stop a team of people from making it happen.
If video game players want to be able to play as their favorite XFL squad in ‘Madden 20,’ there is now a possible way of doing that.
The people behind the @XFL2KMod Twitter account included all eight teams in the game — St. Louis BattleHawks, D.C. Defenders, New York Guardians, Tampa Bay Vipers, Houston Roughnecks, Dallas Renegades, L.A. Wildcats, and the Seattle Dragons.
“When you are in the editor, jerseys, helmets, pants, referees uniforms, fields, stadium interior walls, etc. look a certain way,” Tyler West, the leader behind the mod, told Sporting News. “We must use Photoshop to edit these things and export them as textures using another software to do so. Everything in the game has a file, so it’s just a find and replace mining-style operation alongside of the creation process.”
The uniforms and stadiums for all eight teams are complete, but the mod team only released the initial beta with four of the teams being completely finished products with full rosters. As of now, seven of the eight teams are done with the entire league expected to be finished by the end of XFL’s Week 5.
As for how West and his team were able to give the game an authentic look, he says it’s not too difficult once you’ve been doing it for a while.
“You’re just playing the copycat game trying to get it exactly how it looks in real life,” he says. “There’s a lot still to be tweaked but at face value it’s been a lot of progress in a short time frame. I have been creating jersey numbers for each team from scratch, which is quite tedious, so that’s why some teams have jerseys but, for instance, the Renegades still had the Browns’ orange numbers on the away jersey.”
Not everything is possible to do, like the St. Louis Battlehawks will only be able to play home games at Ford Field, since it most closely resembles the BattleHawks’ dome stadium.
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“We are only allowed to use what is already in game; we can’t build The Dome in St. Louis for instance,” West says to Sporting News. “So for the BattleHawks, being the only XFL team outside an NFL city, my goal was to pick an NFL stadium that was as close as possible. Dallas, Houston, and D.C. are the other teams in the league who don’t have their real stadiums in game, however we can at least use stadiums in their NFL market.”
The limitations also include trying to add XFL rules that differ greatly from the NFL.
“This is one of those things we wanted so bad, but as of now we haven’t cracked the code on kickoffs,” West says to Sporting News. “We’re working on a solution for PATs. We want to make it so teams go for two every time, but we can’t add a 3-point try or a 1-point try that isn’t an extra point. The time clock inside two minutes isn’t possible either, so we use college clock rules for first downs. We set play clocks to 25 seconds, and catches only require one foot inbounds.”
“Ever since [EA Sports] dropped create a team, I longed for some way to customize a football game again,” West says to Sporting News. “I worked on some NFL redesigns in the fall, and worked on a different college football project, but as XFL season approached I couldn’t help but get excited. So I planned a project which was meant to be private, just for me, that I would share with others every once in awhile. But then I realized the potential and figured this could be something special.”
How to play with the XFL mod in ‘Madden 20’
This mod only works on PC, meaning you can not use it on Xbox or PlayStation. Use the “XFL_README.txt” file to follow instructions on how to download. As the top of that document reads, you will need a few things in order for this to work properly.
- “Madden 20” installed through Origin.
- Latest version of “Madden 20”
- Frosty Mod Manager
H/T – Sporting News
