Why We Need Stronger Franchise Modes
 

As a lifelong Houston sports fan, franchise modes have been my bread and butter. Conjectures and what-could-have-beens can finally be realized in a digital testing environment. My beloved Texans can play the 2017 season again as if we had never signed Brock Osweiler. My beloved Astros can play the next 15 seasons with Kris Bryant drafted instead of Mark Appel. What if I was to separate players based on their home state, city, or country, and battled it out that way? Franchise modes are a uniquely bizarre sandbox where teams can correct mistakes, rewrite history and even time travel.

The thrills of taking a bottom-dwelling franchise and slowly but surely rebuilding it your way is an experience that only video games can provide. Elevating your favorite team to a perennial powerhouse through shrewd trades, signings and immersive clutch performance is unlike any other experience in gaming. Sports games yield the only universes wherein you, the fan, can implement your ideas and explore for seasons on end. It is one of the reasons that, year in and year out, MLB The Show takes up far more of my time than it should.

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I don't play as a Single Team/Franchise. I like to play out a season more in an administrative role. Picking games to play at random whilst controlling the roster management of teams in regards to Injuries/Signings etc. I'm probably in the minority in this respect but if the logic of the game is fundamentally sound then it should be playable in any given way.

Agreed! CH2K8 Legacy mode still one of the best "franchise" modes I've ever played and I believe one of the best ever created in a sports game.

good writeup

Excellent write up and read, thanks!

I think that franchise mode will always be an after thought now that the pay-to-win, ultimate team type game modes are huge money makers for sports titles. As someone that played franchise mode the majority of the time growing up, lately I just haven't been able to get in to them. It is extremely disheartening to see title after title, year after year, the franchise mode aspect of sports games ignored in favor of UT (Fifa, Madden, 2K, etc).

Take Madden for instance, you feel so disconnected (pun intended) from what's actually going on within the team, other than the games you play and if you sim games, the stats are usually so unrealistic that it's almost unplayable. Or how about Fifa, about 80-90% of players have generic faces that look nothing like the players themselves. So if you do play a Career mode, you don't feel like it's realistic at all and lets not even get started on how the mode hasn't really changed in the last two gens. In Fifa you still can't even build your own stadium, create a team, properly edit players (w/o glitches happening), player progression is still random other than a few mini games for 5 players a week, the list goes on and on.

I say if these games are so hard up for cash then make a DLC that allows people like myself and other that love these modes. If you've ever played any of the PC manager games, basically something like that but with the ability to actually play the games, practice, etc. Obviously they wouldn't be as deep as those games are, but if they could find a happy medium I think we would be more than happy to pay this point. Will this ever happen? No, not a chance. Even if they charged an extra $60 for DLC, it still wouldn't compare to how much people spend on packs for their UT modes or in 2K's case VC, but I don't even want to get into the whole VC scam.

MVP 2005 had the best franchise mode imo. It was so immersive. Had me coming back for more. My favorite sports game of all time. I still have a copy of the game and play it occasionally. CH2K8 Legacy mode was amazing too. Sadly we haven't seen anything that has come close to this.