I haven't played much yet, only two ranked games like previously mentioned. Are all of the playbooks pretty much the same from madden 11? I'm sure there are some tweaks here and there, but for the most part... the same?
In terms of offensive playbooks, I've only used a few. I used NO playbook in the last Madden, and based on the one game I tried it out with in this game it looked basically the same. Didn't see any plays missing from what I could notice.
As for the defensive playbooks, they appear to have some big differences. The Jets playbook is pretty different from last year's Jets playbook (the normal 46 is substituted out for the 46 Bear - which is useless in Madden in my opinion). Haven't really experimented with enough defensive playbooks to make a definitive conclusion outside the Jets one though.
THe custom playbooks are only for offline, which is lame cause the Microsoft football game that came out for what 3 years had custom playbooks online way back in 2001
Hopefully they make a patch soon and change that because I know a lot of people are unhappy about that. No point in having custom playbooks if I can only use them to abuse the CPU.