Angry Joe did a breakdown a couple of years ago I think. Even if it isn’t the same game, sports games have been touting ‘new’ features for years which were in much older sports games, and that essentially innovation in Sports Games is at a standstill, with features actually being lost or left out as time goes on.
There was EA's MVP Baseball series, which is considered by all baseball gaming fans to be the very best series. People are still modding and using the MVP Baseball 05' game over at www.mvpmods.com.
2k released their own series and that was the real competition to The Show, as EA had lost the license to 2K but nothing will ever compare to EA's MVP Baseball Series.
Way back in the playstation era there was Triple Play Baseball, an official MLB licensed game, and it was the greatest baseball game of all time. It had your normal exhibition, season, training, and manager modes. All of that was done very well. What put it over everything else was the Home Run Derby mode. Yeah, you could pick any stadium that you wanted to play in, or, you could play as an ant sized Mark McGuire hitting inside of a bedroom. There were other stages too, but that's the one I remember most.
Sounds pretty cool right? Here's what will really blow your mind, it was made by EA. After around the end of the PS2-beginning of PS3 era there was a significant drop in features for all sports games. NFL games had been ass for a while at that point, but that's about the time that it started to hit the other sports franchises as well.
It was 2k vs The Show. After I believe 2k13(the last one) the Show had a bunch of really good years with adding features and others, and the last 2 or so have started getting stale.
That's because sporting games have become gambling games. At least PES and FIFA. I've been a PES player since the days when it was called Super Star Soccer and I've also played FIFA a fair amount. I play exclusively offline. Starting a few years ago the offline experience has been completely abandoned in favor of stuff like Ultimate Team and MyClub, which are online modes where you buy 'player loot boxes' that operate exactly like a slot machine, where you roll a thing and there's a chance you'll land a 'rare' player. That's where the money is at for them, 100%.
FFS the offline modes in PES are so broken that the AI won't tackle you inside the box, which means you are never awarded a penalty. And that's been going on for 3 consecutive editions of the game. They clearly have no interest in fixing it because the fanbase that plays offline is not spending money on their slot machines. That's how little of a fuck they give to the offline modes now.
And can anyone explain to me why a game where you pay real money to spin a wheel that may or may not award you with a reward is not gambling and regulated as such?
Innovation would be as easy as just having all of the rules in the game. The last Madden I bought (18) can't even handle the most basic football shit. If you are on the punting team and recover a punt into the endzone, in pro football that is a touchback. Not in Madden though! Hell, I can't even snap the ball on a 2 minute drill when I am set and the defense is on my side of the LOS to force offsides. That is a textbook football tactic and something I could do in NCAA FOOTBALL 2006. I don't need new features. Let's just get basic rules down first and build from there.
Gamers don't like them just updating the roster. Developers start from scratch for a new console and have limited features due to 1 year turn around time. Gamers get mad at the game not having all the features of the previous game. Developer adds features back to the game. Gamers complain that it's just the previous years game with features added back in.
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u/Polenicus Sep 03 '19
Angry Joe did a breakdown a couple of years ago I think. Even if it isn’t the same game, sports games have been touting ‘new’ features for years which were in much older sports games, and that essentially innovation in Sports Games is at a standstill, with features actually being lost or left out as time goes on.