Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

[grunt]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

Yeah, you can't just say "add 50 people to a dev team"...do people realize how expensive that would be at the cost of qualified people these days? That would seriously jack up the cost of a game....

We are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations.

[bkfount]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

We are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations.

and these multi billion dollar corporations see how well the games sell as is. There's not enough reason to put more money into a game just so little things in the grand scheme of things gets addressed. Anytime they spend extra time or money on something that will have little effect in sales, it's money wasted to them.

It sucks that companies take that position, as not all of the game developers do, but it is a business.

[Trevytrev11]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

I think in whole we are too critical, but at an individual level, people only want what is important to them fixed. On a small scale, this is do-able, but when you combine the wants of hundres of thousands of customers, these wants are un-obtainable.

However, people in the business had to know what they were getting into and decided to go that route. I'm sure they make a fair wage and if they don't they should seek employment elsewhere. If you sign up for the job, you sign up for all that comes with it. Everyone faces stress and unobtainable expectations at some point in their career and you either deal with it or you go somewhere else.

The biggest overall problem is that all of these games have a 2 sided fan base that are on complete opposite ends of the spectruns and for the most part, to please one means to piss off the other. It is impossible to be full sim and still appeal to a casual fan. The details that go into being sucesful in realisitic are just too much for most people.

If you take a baseball game and make hitting too hard, you piss off the casual fan and if you make it to easy you piss off the sim fan. Sliders in a perfect world would be the fix, but they never seem to work right or aren't explained to the user of how they work together.

The other problem, and I notice this in the MLB 2K series, is that I don't think the people creating these games have a strong knowledge of the minor details of the game. I think they are mostly casual fans of the game, but their not fannatics. Because of this, a lot of small, but important parts of the game are either missing or flawed. Look at MLB 2K8 and the stolen base issue or the fact that AI pitchers don't throw balls at a realistic pace. To anyone with a decent knowledge of the game, this is an instant pick up.

I think it would be helpful for all of these games to at least have one person on board who is knowledgeable in the sport who could see something and instantly point out that it is not right. Instead, I think you have a bunch of people who see the same thing and don't even realize it's wrong.

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I think in reality, the question is, are our expectations too high? Do we want things that can't be done?

And I think with this, the answer may be yes. However, you look at pieces of games and see how well they do certain things great, but in the form of a total package, they all miss the boat somewhere.

You see the overall game play of the Show, but see the signiture stances and new control scheme of 2K8 and you can't help but wonder how great a game would be if those things were all combined.

[DrJones]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

We are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations.

Right, but when I talk about "dev teams", I mean the people who make the games, not the bloated bureacracy who control the purse strings. The people who actually do the work have no control over budgets. When we started making well-received MVP games, what happened? EA management slashed our budget to cut costs and would steal key people to work on say, FIFA. And then we would go onto a forum like this and be called "lazy". Devs who read those kind of things tend to tune you guys out at that point.

[DrJones]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

However, people in the business had to know what they were getting into and decided to go that route. I'm sure they make a fair wage and if they don't they should seek employment elsewhere. If you sign up for the job, you sign up for all that comes with it. Everyone faces stress and unobtainable expectations at some point in their career and you either deal with it or you go somewhere else.

But that's it, people DO go somewhere else. There's a high turnover rate at a lot of these companies, largely due to stress, and if people are shuffling in and out (particularly if it happens at critical times, or the new people are inexperienced or unfamiliar with making sports titles), then guess what, the game quality suffers.

[umd]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

Huge game-killing flaws are what bother me. I could give two ****s about sock colors or mascots or whatever. What gets me annoyed at any company is when a game is released with a broken feature or a gameplay flaw that should have been caught before release.

Madden is a good example - the broken franchise mode in 08 was inexcusable. Something someone at EA should have caught pre-release. Same with the framerate issues in MLB2k8. These are things that can and should be fixed instead of missed or just shrugged off by the game company.

Gameplay flaws bother me - especially the (acknowledged by EA) TO issues in Madden and NCAA. Those are things you as a consumer should expect a development or testing team to catch. Customers shouldn't have to wait weeks or even months for patches to fix major gameplay/feature issues. Shortened cycle or not.

[countryboy]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

I don't want people to misinterpret what I meant with my original question, so I am going to try and clear it up.

When speaking about criticism, I am not talking about gameplay bugs. Those are inexcusable no matter which game you play. And by gameplay bugs I mean:

*TO issues in Madden
* INT x2 glitch
* The walkoff homerun glitch in the Show
* Broken Franchise

Now please understand that these are just examples and I used these because Madden, NCAA, and The Show are about the only sports games I play. When I speak about too much criticism I am talking about things that are seemingly minute, but get blown out of proportion. Read thru the bugs/glitches thread of sports games. There you'll find legit issues that are accepted/seen by the majority of players and then there are those little things that seem to not really effect anything on a major level, but yet are listed in the bugs/glitches thread and tend to be blown out of proportion, IMO.

[DrJones]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

Now please understand that these are just examples and I used these because Madden, NCAA, and The Show are about the only sports games I play. When I speak about too much criticism I am talking about things that are seemingly minute, but get blown out of proportion. Read thru the bugs/glitches thread of sports games. There you'll find legit issues that are accepted/seen by the majority of players and then there are those little things that seem to not really effect anything on a major level, but yet are listed in the bugs/glitches thread and tend to be blown out of proportion, IMO.

I don't have a problem with people bringing up smaller problems, just (sometimes) how they do it. The best thing to do is to put them in separate threads (ie, uniform issues, franchise issues, gameplay issues, audio issues, etc.) and make them sticky for the first 2 months after the game's been released. Try to include specific examples. Preferably the first post could be continually updated with a running list of issues in that game area. It makes it easier for devs to see and address, rather than wading through a 50-page glitch thread that contains bugs big and small, real and imagined. They still might not be all be fixed, but the odds will improve, that's for sure.

Also, keep it civil (which most of you do). "Hey, here are a list of issues that I think you should look at" works a lot better than "I can't believe you're so lazy/stupid/evil that you let this horrible bug get through." If you want to vent about EA/2K/whoever, that's cool (it's not as if the people working there don't), but it's probably more constructive to do it in a separate thread.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

The only time I have a problem with sports games is when they say they got a feature but then when you buy the game and play it, they don't have it.

Like I remember Madden talking about gang tackles since Madden 97. But they never really had it until last year or the year before last.

Another problem I have is when they do something great one year and then the next year they either change it or take it completely out. Leave you scratching your head saying why the hell they do that for ????

For instance....I liked the sweat in NBA 2K6, I thought it was perfect how it build up over time during the game. But now....it's like they don't sweat at all.

Sports games suffer from a lack of consistency. Some years they do great things. And other years they take 3 steps back.

But over all sports games have came a long way from Tecmo Bowl and Arch Rivals days.

[Village Idiot]

Re: Do Sports Games Receive Too Much Criticism?

I tend to believe that the majority of hardcore gamers (i.e. OSers and the like) have expectations that are pretty well grounded. Sure, I see the occasional guy who complains about things that aren't an issue at all for me, just as I'm sure my own complaints may seem like nit-picking to others, but generally speaking, those things that draw the most criticism are the things that at one time had worked properly and no longer do, or things which the technology clearly allows for but, for whatever reason, we're still not seeing, even when we thought we should have been seeing it years ago. In other words, it's regression and stagnation that cause the real criticism.

An example on the top of my mind is the atmosphere in NCAA. The point isn't that I want mind-blowing atmosphere that exceeds anything I've ever seen (well, I do, but that's besides the point); it's that other games (notably FIFA and NHL 08) have produced some fantastic atmospheres, while my FAVORITE game sits in the gutter with the same stale atmosphere it's had since 2003. The question becomes, is it "unfair" of me to criticize NCAA for this? Is it nit-picking? I mean, lest we forget I'll still be able to play the game and watch all the cool animations, right? Why care about atmosphere? At the end of the day, isn't the crowd fairly similar to shoes or socks, depending on who you ask? (Heck, I bet there's more than a few guys around here who listen to music while they play, so things like the crowd and play-by-play will never be an issue for them.)

And let's not forget that we don't have to agree with negative posts. Personally, I'd rather read through a thread of rabid bitching than I would read through some stroke-fest. The reason being, the nature of the complaints often tells you all you need to know about a game. If a guy bitches about 20 things, but I don't really have a problem with any of them, haven't I learned just as much about a game - if not more - than if I read a post about 20 "cool" things? If a game is a 7/10, I want to know about that missing 3 points, and that's the information I'll base my purchase on. What's right about a game is implicit in the fact I'm interested in it at all. What's wrong with a game, conversely, no matter how small, I want to hear about. If all the complaints are nit-picky nonsense, don't you have a pretty good game on your hands?