State of Sports Games: The Football Wars, The Bad cont’d.

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 Part 2: The Scores, What They Mean.
Read Part 1: The Scores

Football Wars is broken into readable parts. Today’s feature is continued from yesterday and is covering the worst about the 07 football releases. Later this week, Football Wars will continue with the good of the 07 releases and improvements I would like to see.

Read yesterday’s article

Football the same way since 1994
Believe it or not you have played videogame football the same way since the old PS1 days. Pick a team, pick a play, run the play do that for 17 weeks and playoffs.

The new catch-word for sports games these days is organic. Users are demanding more dynamic interaction with games and football games are not delivering.

The problem lies in two areas, ratings and playbooks. Let’s start with the positive. APF did something unique to football games this year — it had no ratings. It wasn’t perfect but you could see the differences between Elway’s arm and Montana’s precision. The position specific attributes helped to differentiate between key positional attributes and player styles. Football games need to move beyond the 100 point system and towards point systems with positional abilities. No one knows the difference between an 89 rated player and a 92 rated player. Madden’s weapons feature was little more than an icon showing Champ Bailey as a shutdown corner.

The playbooks designed for these games rely on you to beat a system instead of beating a team or a player. You beat the game by knowing that a certain route or play is more likely to succeed because of a game’s flaw not by exploiting your opponents weakness. An organic football game forces you to use Randy Moss, Adrian Petederson, Brian Urlacher to exploit mismatches, bowl over defense lines, or get in on every play. Madden and NCAA have not reached that level of football. In those games you win by knowing a sweep to a cleared out side results in 20 automatic yards. Beating a system is how we’ve played football since the PS1 days.

17 Weeks of Pre-Season
I can turn on ESPN or read Peter King’s column on monday to see the game between sundays. Much like the lack of organic football, the franchise modes in football games have been nothing more of 17 games with playoffs, some free agent period, lottery AI happy time…err a draft and pre-season before 17 weeks of exhibition games start anew. There is no world of football that surrounds your virtual NFL team. No mind games between coaches and players. Very little game-planning due to every team playing the same way. Injuries are all straightforward and teams never worry if their star player could hobble enough to make an impact. And the media is just a magazine of headlines, as in NCAA 08, with no interaction.

75,000 Seats, One Foam Finger
One of the biggest complaints of Madden was the lack of atmosphere. There was none aside from the 1970’s sitcom applause track that comes standard. I think NCAA is only saved because of the college band music and if you took that out of the game you would have Madden’s bleakness. Even John Madden isn’t in his own game.

APF also took a step back in this department. In NFL 2k5, the football game was sandwiched between a pre-game and post-game show with a slice of half-time highlights. The whole thing felt like an ESPN broadcast. APF had some of this but again it was limited to only a few highlights.

The Vision Cone In Your Head Is Off
Madden, NCAA and even APF show a lack of vision in the 07 releases. And I think that’s the state of football gaming. Madden is stuck between trying to please Madden-nation, football purists and casual gamers. NCAA is the schizophrenic little sibling that doesn’t know if it’s wants to have a good year or a bad year. And APF was a $60 demo of a really great game called APF 2k9.

Madden first. If there’s one thing you can take to the bank next year, it will be that the EA marketing department will take two features, one exciting and the other pure fluff, and make you think these two things are worth a $200 value for $59.99. Madden will promise you improved AI, fixes to last year’s problems, a franchise mode better than sex and 100,000 new animations. You know that the improved AI means they only fixed the problems from last year. Fixing last year’s problems mean they broke the responsiveness and AI that wasn’t broken before. The franchise mode will be better than sex because it include features from 3 Maddens ago. And 100,000 new animations mean 100,000 new animations but you only see 10.

I don’t know what Madden wants to be and I don’t think EA Sports knows aside they want everyone to buy it.

NCAA in recent years has always been better received than Madden. Strip away the turnover issues and I think you have the best all-around game. EA Sports has not had the drastic up and down years with NCAA next-gen as it did with the old-gen versions. The ride from 04 to 07 damn near killed college football fans. What saves NCAA isn’t the gameplay but the things the game cannot leave out; the polls and rankings, 100+ division one schools, the bowls and player recruitment.

All-Pro Football had the best on-field action of the big three but let’s face it its wasn’t really a football game. Including legends was one of only a handful of ideas that would tempt people to buy APF. Yet, the implementation was such that everyone questioned their purchase. The problem with APF wasn’t the lack of features its was the lack of a feature. The whole premise was to get a bunch of legends, design your own uniform and playbook and play against other legends on the same teams forever. Online you could play against any number of variations of legends but came with a side of cheese. Season mode was excruciating painful because legends were never utilized for that mode. Who wants to play against the same legend set-up when the whole game was about thousands of legends options?

What do games need to do to improve? Check back over the next few days to see.