Sports video game customization has been a staple of the genre since its early days, and as technology has advanced, so too have the tools players use to mod and personalize their experiences. To get the most out of that ecosystem, communities often form around these games, giving creators a space to share their work, exchange advice, and help others push customization even further.
By forming communities, the modders for a game find peers who can make their own time with the game more fun, and even extend to making friendships that grow and expand beyond just the world of video game customization. If you’re considering giving custom creation a try, it’s a great time to do so, and you can not only make your game better, but the gaming experience of others around the world better, too.
How Creator Communities Improve The Experience For All Gamers Who Take Advantage Of Them
Members of creation communities can get a lot out of it for themselves, not just from the creations themselves, but also from the friendships and enjoyment that being a part of the community can bring. That doesn’t mean you have to be making your own creations to see the gains they offer, however, as there are plenty of ways creation communities benefit the entire sports gaming community:
Providing Slider Guides To Live By
A lot of the things creation communities do are about aesthetic changes, helping your game to feel more realistic by looking more realistic, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways the community makes gamers experience actually playing the games better, too. Modern sports games come with a vast array of sliders that allow you to tweak and refine how your game behaves to dial it in to be just right.
This is great for gamers, but it can also be overwhelming. Sometimes it isn’t always clear what the right slider is to fix an issue you have, and sometimes the complex way systems in games interact can result in unintended side effects when making slider changes. With slider guides and setting downloads, you can find settings that have been tested by the community to get the gameplay experience you desire.
Filling In The Gaps In Licenses
If you’ve ever taken advantage of community downloads before, there is a good chance it was to download custom designs that take teams or players in the game as generic stand-ins and convert them into true-to-life representations. Licensing is a hotly contested field in game development, and sometimes that means games that release without the license to include official versions of big teams, leagues, and competitions.
While a game that plays well will be fun even with Manchester Red taking on North London, it’s just more fun when it’s United against Arsenal. With community-driven creation projects, it rarely takes long before you can jump on and update your game to look just like the real thing.
Rounding Out The Outside Elements
Carrying on the theme of things that may not be essential to having a good time with a sports game, but which certainly help, creation communities will often work to make mods that fill out the decoration that makes a game feel real. While it’s unreasonable for a soccer game to be released with realistic stadium builds for every arena in the world, with modding communities, it becomes more manageable. Sometimes, this can be fully detailed models for games which support it, in other instances it’s building as accurate a possible representation within the game’s modding support, but in both cases it makes the game more immersive.
Adding In Deeper Leagues
For another area where modding communities can expand upon what developers can include, you can often find options to download creations that expand on the leagues in a game, such as bringing in lower divisions and minor league clubs. In some cases, this is done on a surface level with just the leagues and teams covered. In other cases, however, the modding community really outdoes itself and even includes accurate rosters for new creations, allowing you to fully play your chosen league in your chosen sports game.
Recreating Classic Teams
Sports fans are nothing if not fond of looking back on the past, especially since for most teams in a season, that is where you will find the point where your team had the most to be happy about. With historic mods, the gaming community builds out elements of a team or league’s history. This may mean adding in custom uniforms to match some of the most popular looks in a team’s history or making builds of historic teams, allowing gamers to play as historic great players either against other historic teams or even modern ones.
Making Fictional Sides Real
There is a proud tradition of sports movies through the years, like Any Given Sunday, and it’s only natural that fans of a film that also plays a video game of the same sport might want to see their favorite fictional teams brought into the game.
While in the past this may have required digging into the creation tools yourself with modding communities and in-game creation hub support, it’s often now as simple as doing a search for the fictional team you want to add and choosing to download it. Now you can be the one telling the fictional Miami Sharks about the importance of dying for every fractional gain there is to be had.
Inventing Entire Leagues
Not everyone who wants to dig into creation wants to do so to make real teams or fictional teams that, in their own way, actually exist. Sometimes the community can come together to build fully functioning leagues consisting entirely of user-created sides. This allows for communities to form where everyone brings in their own custom team to compete in a league or tournament with the goal of seeing their personal side rise to the top and be crowned champion.
Extending The Playability Of Older Games
The top complaint you are sure to hear anytime you look into an annual sports franchise is that each new edition ultimately amounts to developers asking you to pay full price for a game that feels like a roster update with just some minor tweaks. The best way to fight back against this is to sit out a cycle or two, and creation communities are an excellent tool for making this easier to do.
If a new game is little more than a roster update, then all gamers need to do to get it without dropping a hefty sum is to update the roster in an old one. When the community builds a downloadable roster for a game that brings the roster into alignment with the current state of the league, it lets gamers around the world experience the correct lineups for this season in a game from the last one.
