[ThreeKing]

Quote: Originally Posted by DrJones

#1. Online leagues ARE a pain in the butt. #2. Regarding EA's NHL series and fighting/blood inconsistency, I was told a lot of that was due to the NHL and the PA flip-flopping on how they wanted their league to be perceived (remember this was about the time that Bettman became commissioner). As far as dropping features when going from current-gen to next-gen, most of those features need complete rebuilding and can't get ported. Dev teams runs out of time. #3. Real money is a league/PA issue. For years on EA's baseball series, for example, we couldn't use real dollars because the MLBPA didn't let us, so we had to use "points". #4. As I've said before, most of the real decision-makers (execs, marketing) don't really care about realism. They want gimmicks to market, and those tend to chew up a lot of dev time. #5. Devs are juggling many more balls than they used to. Quite often, I'm afraid, making a sports title is a mad scramble to make a ship date so you don't get canned/demoted. I'm generalizing, of course. Some dev teams really go above and beyond. If your gameplay engine is really solid, it gives you more time to work on the little things. Sometimes stuff happens behind the scenes that screws everything up. The real problem is that games are much more complicated than they used to be and require a longer (2-year) dev cycle to do everything properly. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Great post.

Unfortunately, #4 will never sit well with the OS community. Which I completely understand.