Combining Pro/College Football or Basketball In One Game
 

I know we've had a thread on this before, but I forget exactly -why- it isn't feasible to have a pro/college football or basketball combination computer game. Arguing with a buddy of mine who says OOTP and FM prove that it could be done and I've tried telling him that such a project would take too long to program, be too expensive and wouldn't run on most systems.

He disagrees.

What do you guys think?

Well, it seems to me that while it could be done, it would by necessity not model one or the other well. It would either have to focus on the pro model and do it well, and have the college part of it be unrealistic, or vice versa. It could also end up having both parts of the sim unrealistic.

The trickiest part about this would simply be the modelling - baseball and soccer work because the minors in baseball and the lower tier leagues in soccer still work basically the same way, the rules are the same and basically the style of play is the same. This is not true for the different levels of basketball or football, which have very different styles of play, and very different rulesets in many cases.

Well, we have sims by the same developers that run both college and pro versions of the sports. Lumping them all in to one wouldn't be too difficult I'd think (well, for a decent coder, at least). You'd have two different engines.

I think think the main issue would be how do you price it? Essentially you've got two games in one, and people aren't going to want to pay twice what they usually do for a new text sim, especially folks only interested in the pro or college engine.

To make a great college game, then the pro game has to be a part of it and vice versa. Players would move between them and coaches also. Systems would flourish in the college game and move to the pro side slowly.

I think that some developers consider it bad business, and therefore they decide to no do it. For Basketball and Football, having two games work decently, though not perfect. But for a sport like hockey, for example, where draftees don't join the pro-team right away after being drafted, it would suck to have a separate CHL/NCAA game and one for the NHL.

The main thing I would like in a football sim (sorry for going away from the basketball) is coaches moving back and forth, but a "Living" college world going on at the same time as a pro-world would make the entire gaming experience feel more alive (keeping track of prospects as they're competing to become top pick etc).

The only thing that would get me to buy a FOF game again. Sorry Jim.