A full, in-depth, super realistic four-quarters experience isn’t always what you’re looking for when you boot up a game of Madden 23.
Maybe you’re playing a career mode as an offensive player, and only want to put your focus into that side of the ball. Maybe you’re in a bit of a time crunch and can’t afford to sit down and spend your time playing through an entire game. Maybe you simply don’t enjoy playing defense and would rather focus on making amazing throws to beat cover defenses.
Whatever the reason is, it’s fairly simple for you to play only offense in Madden NFL 23. Just how simple? Find out in today’s guide!
Playing Offense Only in Play Now Mode
To play as only the offense in Exhibition/Play Now matches, you’ll want to start by selecting “play now” from the game’s main menu screen, followed by again selecting “play now” from the list of pop-up options.
From there you can choose what type of game you’d like to play whether it’s a custom game, your favorite team’s real-life upcoming game, or a different real-life matchup from the current week. For this guide, I’ll be selecting a custom game.
The next step is to select your desired game settings. Once you’ve selected from your available options for teams, location, presentation, game settings, etc., you’ll hit “advance to game” to begin your game.
Next is where we deviate from playing a “normal” game in Madden 23. After the pre-game animations of warm-ups and player graphics play, the game will jump to kickoff.
Once your play call options appear on the screen, you’ll be able to pause the game. Once you’re at the pause menu, you’ll want to scroll down to the third option: super sim.
Hitting X (or A) when hovering over the super sim option will present you with the super sim menu. You’ll see the options of “Custom Play Options”, “Jump to Next Play”, “Jump Forward”, and “View All Play History”.
The option of today’s interest will be “Custom Play Options”. After using X (or A) to select Custom Play Options, four new options will appear: “Play Key Moments”, “Play Full Game”, “Play All Offense”, and “Play All Defense”. Scroll down and select “Play All Offense”.
Selecting this will immediately begin the super sim. The game will begin simulating through all moments where your team is not on offense (if the other team is kicking off it will merely skip the kickoff).
Once the game has reached a moment where you’re on offense the simulation will stop and you’ll be presented with a “New Moment Detected”. Simply select “Play Moment” and you’ll now be controlling your offense!
Once your offensive drive comes to an end, whether it’s via a successful score or turnover, the Key Moment Recap screen will appear, giving you the choices of “Continue to Next Moment” or “More Options”.
For today’s purpose of playing only offense, we’ll be selecting Continue to Next Moment (however if you at some point decide you’d like to begin controlling the full team, you can select more options).
After selecting Continue to Next Moment, the super sim will automatically resume until your team is back on offense.
Playing Offense Only in Franchise Mode
When playing Franchise Mode in Madden 23, you have multiple methods available to play as only the offense.
The first is exactly like in Play Now mode. You’ll simply start the game, in this case by selecting “play season game” from Franchise Mode’s main menu, and proceed to navigate to the super sim option from the game’s pause menu.
However, in Franchise Mode you also have the ability to play a game while only controlling the offense without ever having to enter the pause menu.
To do this, you’ll start exactly as you would to play any game in Franchise Mode.
After taking care of all your tasks for the week (scouting duties, choosing your weekly strategy, roster management, etc.), navigate to “Play Season Game” in the home tab of Franchise Mode’s main menu screen.
Following this, a screen will appear presenting you with the options of “Play the Moments”, “Play Full Game”, “Play Offense Only”, “Play Defense Only”. You’ll want to navigate over and choose the middle right option of Play Offense Only.
From there, after selecting the finer details such as the advanced settings and your desired uniform combination, the game will automatically start in the super sim setting of you only playing the offensive snaps while simulating all other plays.
Exiting Offense Only Super Sim/Playing Defense Only
If you’d like to play only as the defense, it’s just as simple as the explained process to only play your team’s offensive snaps. After following the same process for the offense-only selection, you’ll simply choose “Play Defense Only” after choosing the super sim option from the pause menu.
In Franchise Mode you can also select “Play Defense Only” from the home tab of Franchise Mode’s main menu, again allowing you to make your selection before the game even starts and without having to slow your game down to enter the pause menu.
It’s also very simple if you’d like to exit the super sim setting, whether that’s to switch to a different version of super sim or to be able to play all of your team’s snaps on both sides of the ball.
While the super sim is in progress, you can simply press circle (or B) to cancel the super sim. This will return you to the pause menu’s super sim options, and from there, you can back out to the regular game.
Alternatively, if you decide during your playable portion of the super sim (be it offense or defense), you can hit the pause menu to return to normal gameplay.
From there, simply scroll down and select “super sim”, where you’ll once again be presented with the super sim options.
After choosing “Custom Play Options” you just have to choose the second choice of “Play Full Game” to return to normal gameplay!
Final Word
Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a scenario where you’ll only want to play your team’s snaps for one side of the ball. Hopefully, this guide has made the process very simple for you.
If you were also looking for offensive tips that would help you in these situations, I recommend checking out our guide to the best offensive playbooks in the game.
