As sports games grow and grow in size, tough decisions need to be made each year about where developers should put their time and money. Since these games are so large (for better and worse), it’s nearly impossible to give time to every mode and feature each cycle. While my first suggestion has always been to shrink games back down, I think there are two areas where I would put most of my development time these days. Those two areas would be franchise mode and gameplay.
Now, that might seem obvious and playing to the crowd, but I have rational reasons for these two areas beyond my own biases. Yes, I’m sure many of you also prefer franchise mode over all other modes (it’s part of what OS was built on, after all), but I also think franchise mode serves as a basis for all other modes in the game. As for gameplay, that goes without saying for why it’s important.
Call it recency bias, but I’ve also been watching a lot of Out of the Park Baseball on Twitch in recent weeks, and then I’ve still had Rematch on the brain since that beta a couple weeks back. I don’t talk about OOTP much on OS, but I have talked about Rematch plenty the last couple weeks. With those two games in mind, I want to jump into why these two areas should be priority 1A and 1B moving forward.
Franchise Modes Have Had A Rough Decade, But They’re Here To Stay
I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of “everything new is old again” like what happens with fashion and various other things in society, but franchise modes do feel like they’re starting to slowly come back into focus. I think the reason for that is a general fatigue with card collecting modes (even if they’re still making lots of money), and a realization that goodwill needs to be found somewhere in these games. College Football 25 largely succeeded on the back of being the new kid in town and having a dynasty mode that was enjoyable to a wide range of people. Its Ultimate Team mode was crappy and bottom of the barrel in comparison to its competition, and it didn’t really matter. It was one of those games where I actually heard more about its standard online ranked mode (where it did a couple interesting things to make it feel fresh) than the Ultimate Team mode, which is extremely rare in this day and age. It sold well, I have no doubt it will sell well again this year, and popular games ultimately make others pay attention.
I post that Scott The Woz video above since he’s a goof who ultimately does a good job covering various game topics, and “live service games” are the Ultimate Team modes of sports games. He doesn’t talk about sports games much in that video because sports games don’t fit as cleanly into the “live service” bucket. What he talks the most about instead is Fortnite. Everyone wants to be Fortnite since it makes billions of dollars. The catch is that it only makes billions of dollars because everyone plays it. Fortnite, and all those other competing games, have to do the hard part first and get millions of people to play their game for an extended period. If a game pulls that off, making money becomes the easy part.
However, you can’t chase Fortnite and fail without losing hundreds of millions (as we’ve seen with many games and studios), but sports games aren’t technically chasing Fortnite with the same sort of inherent risk built into them. They’re chasing that “live service” money spigot, but not many of the biggest sports games are just live service games. Ultimate Team might keep these games super profitable, but they’re not sold as just Ultimate Team games, it’s a part of the whole package.
What this tells me is that even greedy studios realize they won’t succeed if there is only an Ultimate Team mode in it. The better thing to do is make sure people are playing your game throughout the year by any means necessary. The longer they play the game, the better chance there is they’ll spend more money on the game. Franchise mode is a rather obvious way to keep people playing your game because, well, we already know it was the pillar many sports games were built around years ago.
In addition, you can make a better franchise mode without risking it all. Live service games come with inherent and endless development costs. Online franchise mode might need constant server upkeep, but you’re not constantly feeding franchise mode new content and artwork like you do with Ultimate Team modes. The costs are more fixed year to year.
This brings me to OOTP and my general viewpoint that the real holy grail for sports game franchise modes continues to be how to fuse the OOTP management aspects with the presentation and graphics of an MLB The Show. This is not a unique viewpoint to put forth, but it is something that has stood the test of time for various reasons. “Text sims” generally run laps around their console counterparts when it comes to the GM and management side of things. It’s sort of just been accepted that if you give more detail to the off-the-field elements then the on-the-field elements will suffer. The same is true in reverse, and we mostly never close that gap between the two sides of the same genre.
To some extent, I am talking out of both sides of my mouth here because at the top I said I have been “watching” OOTP not playing it. This is how I generally consume OOTP, and it’s part of why I don’t write about it very much. I love OOTP, but ultimately I still want to play the games more than I am allowed to in it. So how it fits into my life is I usually have it on my monitor while I’m playing The Show, or I just have it on in the background while I’m hanging out. It’s my comfort food game even if I prefer watching it rather than playing it.
It’s really no shot at OOTP either. It’s not that I never play it because I absolutely love me some spreadsheets and do play it sometimes, but I don’t always feel the same connection to my team even if I love the management tools themselves. So I end up watching OOTP for hundreds of hours but probably only playing it for closer to 60-100 hours in any given year. I think if I had ever found a group of people to play with (more my fault than anything since I know even on OS groups do exist), then I would be more invested in the grind of building a squad. Instead, I usually get more enjoyment out of watching people crunching the numbers, scouting prospects, and getting invested in their teams rather than mine
Either way, my dream game is still one that combines OOTP and MLB The Show. There are issues with controls and layouts since OOTP is obviously mostly played with a keyboard and mouse (I’ve never messed with the mobile version much), but there are absolutely ways to bridge that gap. I think the bigger issue is selling companies on this style overall. Some might have a hard time believing enough people will get invested in something as “dry” as OOTP without more presentational pizazz. But I honestly think the presentation fear itself might be overrated because for as much as I don’t feel connected to my team at times in OOTP, I feel so much more connected to the league and the AI teams I’m competing against than when I play franchise mode in The Show.
The lack of connection with my team comes from not being able to use them in high fidelity on the field, but it’s not because I’m not getting to do some stupid press conferences or whatever off of it. There is a level of “compete” and time investment that I’m making off the field that builds in that level of connection with the overall league itself, which leads to situations like me being being pissed if the Cardinals take the guy I was about to draft. I never feel that kind of rage in The Show if someone swoops in and takes my guy, and I think that’s because most console franchise modes struggle with making you feel like you’re really competing with other GMs in the NFL, MLB, NHL, etc.
So if we could just fuse how I feel about my individual team in The Show with how I feel about the whole league in OOTP, then we’d have something special. Returning back to Ultimate Team, there’s no reason parts of franchise mode couldn’t translate to Ultimate Team. After all, OOTP even has its own form of Ultimate Team at this point. But the larger point there is the resources should funnel to franchise mode first and then you translate them to Ultimate Team in the best ways you can. It’s harder to do it in reverse because Ultimate Team is whatever you want it to be anyway since it’s not based in reality.
Gameplay Is King Because It’s Everywhere
When was the last time you felt like you had a truly revolutionary or unique game mechanic in a sports game? I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last couple weeks because Rematch is the last time I felt that deep in my gaming soul in many years, and now I’ve been trying to think about what made me feel that way before it. I have yet to really come up with a good answer because I keep thinking of games from 10+ years ago rather than anything in the recent past. Has it really been 10 or more years? It can’t be, right? And if it really has been that long, that’s not good at all.
I think big sports games hit a point where someone “won” and then we just sort of decided that was the way to go. In some respects, I think this is a good thing. I don’t have a problem with every soccer game taking FIFA’s controls as the base in that we just assume pass will be on X and shoot will be on circle/B. PES lost that war at some point, and I would contend it was always annoying having to remember the difference if you played both anyway.
But what I’m talking about goes a layer beyond the buttons themselves. It seems most developers don’t even think there’s a better way to control the game anymore or create new ways to approach sports games on a larger scale. Why Rematch is so awesome to me is that it’s putting it out there that there is another way to play soccer that can be fun. It makes the ball its own physics object in most every way, and it challenges you to control the ball in a way FIFA/EA FC simply doesn’t even attempt.
Making Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed was a risk that developers took when they didn’t know better yet. Things like the one-timer were born out of wanting to mimic something from real hockey and bring it to the video game. Perhaps the issue is that developers ran out of low-hanging fruit at some point as now all the “basics” of the sport are in the games. Still, I don’t think that’s the whole story.
There is a risk aversion when it comes to gameplay in modern sports games, and I do see why that might be the case. If we think back on some of the biggest sports game flops of all-time, most of them tie back into controls. NBA Live had other terrible games in its past, but NBA Elite 11 was the beginning of the end due to the “Bynum glitch” and terrible controls. That game is a great example of seeing controls work in one game and trying to bring them to another. At the time, that game was made at EA Canada, and EA’s NHL game had put itself back on the map with the analog controls.
The NHL 07 demo is burned into my memory banks, and I will always remember the hours I spent doing the penalty shootout in that demo with my buddy Scott. It was amazing, and it’s one of the games I thought back to as a “revolutionary” moment that I was alluding to earlier.
But, again, those things are a risk. The hit stick remains with us to this day, but the vision cone didn’t make it. Now, the vision cone wasn’t some monumental misstep, but even if it has its fans (I’m among them), it didn’t catch on with enough of the base. Regardless, whether it’s the hit stick, the skill stick, a vision cone, or something else, at least we can point to those things and vividly remember them. It’s nearly impossible to recall gameplay features like that in today’s games.
Sports game developers have to get back to taking some risks. As much as I want to see The Show incorporate far more pitches and get more accurate with how it showcases pitcher repertoires, that’s not really a risk — that’s just an “easy” win. When was the last time there was a monumental shift with how we do any mechanic in a baseball game? It’s probably something to do with the pitching interface, but it’s been a long time. The same goes for most of the other sports. To give some credit, I think we got a taste of some innovation in last year’s football games as they started to tweak the passing controls a bit, but they still seemed almost afraid to lean too far into it. For a long time, I think NBA 2K was the closest thing to a risk taker among the group of big boys, but even they have backed off a bit in recent years with the year-to-year tinkering of core mechanics.
Investing in gameplay and being willing to take risks with it is still important today because it again goes back to Rematch for me. You’re only ever controlling one player in that game, and it’s already likely the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had in that environment. I do not like “Be A Pro” modes in pretty much any game because I think the gameplay is largely boring when you’re only controlling one player. From a gameplay standpoint, the closest I’ve ever been to being fully invested in that style of game was playing goalie in the EA NHL games, but Rematch blows past that for me. It blows past it because it’s a unique experience rather than just a bite-sized version of one.
To put it another way, while some games have gotten better about trying to give you unique controls, camera views, and whatever else to make it feel a little unique, a lot of the time those modes boiled down to having “player lock” turned on. Beyond that, the experience was the same. If developers instead tried to think about unique gameplay hooks, Be A Pro modes could perhaps be revolutionized by default because you’re getting a new experience moment to moment. Until they do that, it’s not going to matter how many penthouses you can buy in the mode or how you level-up your player because it’s still mostly an inferior gameplay experience when compared against the “standard” version of the game.
The bottom line is between gameplay and franchise mode, you’d not only service two core components of a sports game, you’d probably also unlock more fresh experiences in the rest of the game by default.
