State of Sports Games: All-Pro Football 2k8

State of Sports Games is a multi-part series regarding the games of 2007. Each Wednesday I will take a look at a different genre or an aspect of sports game over the past year. Football Wars is the third in this serial.

Read State of Sports Gaming: The Football Wars, The Bad And continued here.

Read Part 2: The Scores, What They Mean.

Read Part 1: The Scores

Today I will cover All-Pro Football 2k9. Tomorrow we’ll revisit Madden. To close out the week, I’ll cover NCAA and Backbreaker Football.

EA Sports’ exclusive license has killed off football gaming! It sure looked like that last year until 2K Sports announced they would be resurrecting NFL 2k5 will a few legends and labeling it All-Pro Football.

As 2007 winds down, we are in the cusp of seeing four games on the next-gen consoles in 2008. No one could have expected this when the exclusive license was announced.

Strange as this might sound, EA’s exclusive license with the NFL might be the best thing to happen to the football genre. It forces competitors to take considerable risks to compete with Madden. If we had the usual NFL 2k8 versus Madden 08 fight this year, sure they would both be considerably better due to direct competition but they wouldn’t have been forced to think outside the normal process of updating rosters and offering one or two big changes.

I talked about the problems of football games last week so today, I’m going to talk about what APF did right and what 2K Sports could do to improve the game.I think 2k8 did a lot right with the engine but that was due to ESPN NFL 2k5 doing a lot of things right for its day. I can’t emphasize this enough, building a strong game engine will always lead to having a strong game. That’s certainly the case because the on-field engine only needs slight tweaking and the general yearly improvements.

Overall the game was balanced extremely well considering this was the first time players with numberless ratings was seen in a game. Guys like Earl Campbell were beasts that caused slight unbalances in the gameplay but getting the feel for legends like Mr. Cambell is an accomplishment in of itself. For next year, if 2k9 is going to have the same system with generic players and legends, then gold legends could be brought down a bit in their overall ability, while generics and bronze players could be a little better.

The attribute system was a revolutionary idea that should have received more praise than it did. Credit to the game engine where the differences in gold, silver and bronze players, stood out. It was very noticeable how some of the attributes made the same class of player feel. A gold QB with a rocket arm could power his way up and down the field while the precision QB was surgeon-like is his passing game. For next year, they need to expand their attributes model, offering more categories and possibly more levels. They should also add bad attributes to capture the weaknesses of even the greatest NFL legends.

Finally, and this might be a first in football games, 2k8 could improve the responsiveness of the controls. After extended playtime you could get used to the but they were not as fluid as NFL 2k5.Most of 2k8’s problems as mentioned surrounded the lack of features. I think only a radical overhaul of 2k8’s feature set is going to make this game feel next gen.

APF could learn a lot from another poorly licensed game. Winning Eleven or Pro Evolution Soccer, has never offered gamers fully licensed leagues, teams and players. Because its gameplay was sublime, it gained enough of a following to rival FIFA’s sales numbers. If you don’t follow soccer games, FIFA was the Madden of the soccer world. It sold incredibly well but was made to appeal to casual gamers. It created an atmosphere in Europe and the US, that allowed a sim game to be successful.

That is the situation we are in now. There is a market for people wanting more than a casual football game.Without question, APF 2k9 needs to be made without trying to please the NFL so they have a chance of getting the use of NFL license. A game that sells poorly but appeases the NFL does not stand a chance of regaining the use of the professional license. The NFL wants exposure for its own product and to do that it needs Madden’s iconic stature not All-Pro Football’s gameplay.

Fans of APF have been clamoring for a fully customizable game within the same framework of APF 2k8. I believe this is a woeful unimaginative idea to compete with Madden that will only lead to marginal success. 2K Sports has the answer sitting in front of them but will they see it?APF 2k9 needs to take the gloves off and create a game of the unofficial history of the NFL. The idea to play as football legends was brilliant but it was poorly executed. I’m sorry but picking 11 legends with a side of scrubs is lame-ass with a capital “ass”.

2K Sports has already laid the groundwork for this happening. The use of legends, amended with historical downloads through 2K Share could create the most revolutionary game we’ve seen since NFL 2k on the Dreamcast. And the producer’s of APF wouldn’t need to do anything more than create the framework for this happening.

Here’s how to do it. APF would offer users the ability to create unlimited amount of players, teams, leagues and draft classes, with a easy to use and quickly to produce, editor. For the graphical side of the game, the editor would also allow for uniform and logo creation (without the ability to create NFL logos). And it would have a decent stadium creator.

APF would introduce a franchise model with the standard fare of player growth, salary caps, retirements and hall of fame inductions.

Over night this game would have instant appeal. Let’s say you want to replay the career of Troy Aikman and relive the glory days of the 1990’s Cowboys. This would be the only game that would let you do that because you could get on 2K Share, find a career file for the ‘Boys, and play season after season with them. 2K Share would also allow users to create any football universe they wanted by allowing for the ability of single team downloads to create the ultimate football season. Imagine a league with ’85 Bears, the ’72 Dolphins and the ’08 Pats in the same conference.

Within months of the game’s release, the community could churn out hundreds of franchise, team, and draft files. The amazing thing is this would be available to anyone with the game — never needing an Xport or USB flash drive. Access to 2K Share would create a football universe unseen in any sports game before.

So in closing, the future of APF 2k9 lies in 2K Sports ability to break away from the mentality of creating NFL 2k5 with legends. I believe only a game that asks the editing community to be an integral part of the game, will succeed commercially. The gameplay has always been stellar so now it’s time to provide the framework for an game with franchise options, drafts, editable leagues and let them fill in a football universe. For only they would spend hours getting the 4th String RB of the 71 Giants right.