You know, some of us play video games in order to get away from the exertions that entail with real world sports. Some us are so insecure about our inherent lack of coordination and/or noodle arms that we try to distance our self from our more physically adept brethren as much as possible. "I may lack the upper body strength to pull myself 2 inches up the climbing wall, but when I play as Nathan Drake I can shimmy up that wall like a baboon!" Then the-powers-that-be started releasing sports-themed video games and threw that entire equation into whack. (I may be protecting a bit.)
Sports video games are one the oldest genre of video games dating back as far as as our oldest consoles. I mean if you think about it, even Pong is essentially just simplified table tennis. It's a premise that makes a lot of sense to developers and consumers: Sports are games governed by rules and bestowed certain win conditions, just like a video game. So it makes sense that we have all of these sports-games with super imaginative names like 1983's 'Baseball' for the NES or 1984's 'Tennis' and 'Golf'. These games even resemble the sport they are supposed to be representing, kinda.
Situations and hardware have certainly evolved since the days of the NES and consequently so have these sports games, now they feature a higher degree of fidelity to the game they're attempting to emulate. Gameplay has become tighter and more varied, models have all kinds of polygons now and the sound of boots on grass have never sounded more real. Like any other genre, sports games kept growing and growing with exponential quality until we hit the modern age. (But only if we pretend the modern age is the early 2000's.)
Something strange started to happen in the late 2000's to the quality of sports titles. It seems that the more they became associated with the monopolistic entities that control real sports, the more lifeless they became. I'm not talking about games that have started to lose their creative charm as they slowly tread towards being more 'real', although that is an issue; I mean series that have either halted their progression toward improvement entirely or have even backtracked. Many late 2000's sports games have some of the most rudimentary 'character creation' systems in the gaming market, despite that fact that the rest of the industry mastered that by 2007's Mass Effect.
But the issues don't just end with players being unable to realize themselves in the game. Some football games had progressively gutted down career and management modes; wrestling games experiment with and then subsequently dropped several of their more stylized features (such as story creators) and American football games essentially lost everything unique to them but for absolute core features that make the game run. What could possibly be the purpose for this? Why, to add that content again several iterations down the line and call it a new feature, of course. (Can we call this 'creative laziness' without it sounding like praise?)
Some of the reasoning for these exclusions are genuinely laughable, too. I recently watched a Madden developer affirm, with a straight face, that they couldn't render the 42 different helmets required to create the 'Pro bowl' without hitting the memory limited instituted by current day consoles. It almost isn't worth the breath to explain how much bull is in that statement. Fifa complains how their yearly turnaround makes it difficult to create a substantial amount of new content. Surprising considering the fact they make the same game every year. All that development time must be going into that "The journey." campaign.
You may have picked up on the fact that I am not a huge fan of these sports games, but I'm not the kind of player that these developers are targeting anyway. They don't try to make anything worthwhile with their games because they definitively know that they don't need to. Madden and Fifa are both in that special place in society where their audience consists of casual players who have no idea of what a game should be and so except whatever they're given. Plus, these games companies spend all of their money and influence trying to crush any competition from getting out of the gate, thus ensuring that they never have any pressure to improve.
No where is this more evident then in the Ultimate Team modes. I've already talked about both microtransactions and lootboxes before, but trust me when I say that Ultimate Team represents the worst aspects of both of them. In Ultimate Team, players are tasked with assembling their dream team of players in order to give themselves an advantage in competitive play. How do you get these players? Well, you buy them of course! In randomized lootboxes that have tiered rarities and consumables to muddy the waters even more. This obvious pay-to-win structure would raise hell in any other genre (Like it did when they tried it with Battlefront 2), but in Fifa the audience just lap it up whilst sometimes complaining about it on Reddit. EA's big money maker of the year is always their Ultimate Team program; it makes them disgusting amounts of money and emboldens them to try their hand at implementing the same systems into all their games.
As a non sports game player, you should likely take my general disdain for the genre with a certain grain of salt; but do not fail to recognize that I am foremost a lover of video games. Even genres that I have no interest in, like racing, inspire huge degrees of respect from me; I always keep an eye on those games just to admire the craftsmanship behind them if nothing else. Yet despite that, I have no respect for the sports game industry. Not one leading development team in that industry is actively attempting to forward their craft, they all just lounge about in their blood money squeezed from a customer base who don't know better.
It incenses me so much because it affects my games too. Lootboxes where conceived in the petri-dish that is sports games and now they are everywhere in AAA games. EA sports season tickets popularized the rather niche 'Season pass' gimmick and turned it into a industry standard. Who knows how long it will be before EA's next money-grubbing scheme sets it's claws into the mainstream. All I want is for sports games to be held to a higher standard, and I don't think that will happen with people like Madden and Fifa running the show. They have no competitors, no consumer pressure and no earthly reason to achieve anything higher and as a result they never do. Something has to give eventually, but until then all us pundits can do is sit on the sidelines and shake our heads disapprovingly. Maybe when the camels back breaks and these companies are in the middle of a full consumer revolt we'll have the opportunity to pat them on the back and say; "You earnt it, buddy."
No comments:
Post a Comment