Sport games are not taken seriously by devs

IAmAndre · March 24, 2017

I'd like to share my thoughts with you and see if some of you agree or not. Sport games used to be my favorite type of games, since the console days. I'd play FIFA and NBA Live/2K mostly, or even NFL. Today I'm still playing these games on PC among other games, and I'm really starting to get sick of it. Everything is so random in these games.There is no way you can "practice" your FIFA/NBA 2K skills and be sure to win. Anytime, a noob can defeat you by luck, because of the randomness present in pretty much any aspect of these games. In NBA 2K, it's even worse when you play against the CPU. You may lead by 10+ points, then the CPU decides to score 3-4 three-pointers in a row, their defenders become ball magnets while yours start behaving like autistic kids, and you keep missing your free throws because you release the button "slightly late". Because "slightly late" actually means "we decide if it will fall in or not".

I could go on all night. My point is developers seem to believe that such games are meant to be played on the couch with friends, therefore they don't need that much attention to details, and more attention is put on game aesthetics. Having your favorite players perfectly reproduced is what makes you buy the game. However, FPS/racing/RTS players tend to focus more on the technical aspects, as they usually spend a ton of money on peripherals (mouse, keyboard, steering wheel). Therefore there's no easy way to cheat or be lucky in such games since there is much more accuracy. As a result, when I lose at Age of Empires, I'm almost never mad because I know that the opponent had a better strategy than I did.

So what do you guys think?

PlayStation 2 · March 24, 2017

When it comes to racing games, especially sims and even arcade sims, you have to put that attention to detail for many different reasons. It's why a lot of those games also have a lot of optimization to everything.

Sports games are weird. They mainly don't improve much because they sell well, and I guess they take that as evidence that it doesn't need much in the way of updating in relation to bots/CPUs/etc.