Innovation is an admirable goal in game design, and big swings have brought us many of the things we love about games today. Sadly, not every time game developers shot for the moon did they even come close to the stars. Here are five times developers shot their shot, but it was a complete brick.
Full Motion Video Was Not The Future Of Sports Gaming
Being the first to identify the next big thing in gaming is always a top goal at development studios, and that means that anytime a new technology arrives in the gaming industry, there will be attempts across all genres to see how it can be implemented. One of the defining innovations of mid-90s gaming was Full Motion Video (FMV), in which games used actual footage, albeit displayed in resolutions that worked on the limited consoles and PCs of the time, for characters and game action.
While a popular option for adventure games at the time, it was only Slam City With Scottie Pippen that thought to bring it over to the sports world. Unfortunately, the limitations that dogged FMVs of all types, namely the limits on how many possibilities you can shoot for and the sometimes awkward transition between videos, were particularly detrimental to a sports game, and Slam City ended up high on visuals and low on enjoyable gameplay.
Tony Hawk’s Ride Offered A Peripheral In Search Of An Audience
For a brief period in the aughts, motion-based controls were the future of video gaming. The Wii had arrived to critical and consumer praise, and both PlayStation with the Move, and Xbox with the Kinect, saw motion-capturing control systems dropped. At the same time, game-specific peripherals had gone beyond the OG light guns to include things like Wii Fit or Guitar Hero.
Tony Hawk’s Ride was an attempt to cash in on this concept in the form of a bespoke controller that worked like a real skateboard. While not an idea that couldn’t have possibly been done right, the difficulty curve present would have provided some challenges even with the best execution. Ride did not have the best execution, and the skateboard-based controller was not the next innovation in the skate game genre; instead, along with the sequel Shred served to put a half-decade pause on new console releases for the series.
Fans Fail To See The Vision With Madden’s Passing Cone
A lack of meaningful changes from year to year remains one of the most common complaints about annual sports franchises, so it’s always refreshing to see a series taking a big swing at a new mechanic. Unfortunately, adding something new to your sports game is no guarantee that fans are going to take to the change and that it won’t ultimately go down as a short-term accident on the timeline of a franchise’s development. One such innovation, which arrived to fanfare but exited soon after as a flop, was the QB Awareness passing cone.
Mobile quarterbacks have become a bit of an issue for developers around the turn of the millennium, with the game engine not quite managing to accurately represent the performance of QBs who could scramble or run. Fast, scrambly passers were considered overpowered, and the cone, which forced you to use your second analog stick to turn your QB’s vision or risk significant accuracy penalties, was the attempted fix. While not universally reviled, with many gamers liking the change, it lasted just three editions and did not have enough time to find a balance that worked for the majority of the player base.
Football Manager’s New Engine Was A Year Late And Still Undercooked
It would be an understatement to say that Football Manager has been having a bit of a rough go as a series in recent years. Generally held up as one of the best annual sports games released each year, Sports Interactive made the announcement that the series would be switching off a proprietary engine to move to Unity with the goal of creating a platform to make the series look and play better in the years ahead. Things have not gone to plan.
The first problems arose with Football Manager 25, which was delayed, delayed, and delayed again until finally it was cancelled entirely. The difficulty of the switch proved too much to fit into the planned window, and all expectations shifted to Football Manager 26, and the game has decidedly failed to live up to the new level promised. While more optimistic fans can see the bones of a better FM experience in the game, two years and one release into the new normal, fans have been frustrated with a buggy, unintuitive game that has many fans sticking to Football Manager 24.
NBA Elite 11 Failed Its Way Out Of A Console Release
It’s fair to say the switch to Unity for Football Manager is one that could have gone much better, but at least it did finally see the light of day with the potential for future improvement. The same can not be said for NBA Elite 11 and its twin-stick approach to shooting on the court. Basketball has always been harsher on EA than some of its other series, with stiff competition from the likes of 2K Games ultimately winning the franchise war. Nowhere was that more stark than with NBA Elite 11.
Developers were looking to take advantage of the prevalence of twin-stick controllers, and for the team at EA Canada, this meant a new approach where one stick controlled your lower body and the other your upper body in shooting. Whether this innovation would have gone down as a never-gonna-work mistake or simply a first pass in need of polishing will always remain a mystery, as it also came with so many bugs that the game’s console releases were cancelled last minute, and the series reverted to the new Elite naming style for good measure.
