Why Are There No Sports MMO Games?

Brian P. writes "With the online gaming market growing at a remarkable rate and new games being announced frequently, why have developers and publishers shied away from creating an MMO sports game? Online fantasy leagues are bigger than ever and online sports games such as Madden '05 are huge franchises. It seems to me that a logical evolution of this trend would be a gaming experience that lets a player start out as a street-baller and work their way up to virtual super-athlete status. The possibilities are endless...but obviously there's something seriously wrong with the concept because all we keep getting are tiresome sword and sorcery games and online adaptations of megafranchises such as Star Wars."

Comments

Also...

[hollismb]

Why are there no team sports games where more than one or two people can play against eachother at a time? Why not large amounts of human controlled players on each side? I call first baseman!

Re:Also...

[Ayaress]

This is also one of the big problems with MMORTS games like Shattered Galaxy.

Quick refernce: Each player in SG can have 48 units, which they can take into battle in gruops of 6 (up to 12, depending on their stats). The most common thing for players to do is to take six units of the same type into battle and use them as a single squad.

The thing is, in any given map, there are usually three to five control points that must be held, and a number of strategically useful postions to occupy (cliffs, choke points, cover, etc). Its great when you get mostly experienced players together who will coordinate to win the battle.

However, 99% of the time what happens is everybody mass swarms one point of the map while ten people try to play commander and give bad, conflicting orders. Ideally, somebody finds Arbalests (artillery units) in grid A1, they say, "Arbs a1" and a couple people with fast air-to-ground units will rush in to kill them quickly.

Ideally, its an easy situation and any enemy arbalasts are doomed the minute they open fire. But what happens usually is somebody finds arbs in A1, says, "Arbs A1" and every last player on the map abandons the strategic points and mobs A2 where they discover that the arbs are on top of a cliff and you can't reach them by ground, thus falling directly into the arbs' line of fire and get wasted, leaving all the strategic points wide open for the enemy to take.

I don't know how many times playing that game, I've had my tanks set up in a nice spot, but getting annoyed by really weak air-to-ground units. Meanwhile, some strong air-to-air units are sitting by. I say,"Hey, little help here?" and if I'm lucky, they just say, "hey, sup dude?" and ignore what is basically a free kill for them.

Why?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Because sports games tend to require a level of strategy above and beyond that of current MMORPGs. Sure, guilds and clans with voice chat might be able to have fun, but it wouldn't be suitable for the mass market of individual gamers who just want to pick up the game and play.

Plus, sports games tend to be more based on the skill of the actual player than the character, and someone who was good at basketball games would be mighty pissed if they got schooled by some noob who had just played a long time.

Re:Why?

[numbski]

There are technical limitations as well.

There are huge amounts of problems with real-time sports games that require quick, split-second judgements. Most online games now rely on a peer-to-peer game-state. Two consoles, running the same game and occassionaly checking to make sure they're reading the same 'story'. If a divergence in the gameplay is detected, the game drops.

It would require a huge rewrite, running the game server side, and the console only running clients.

I don't see that happening soon. :\

Individualism

[matlokheed]

In MMOs, the game is based around you being a character in this alternate world. It's something you probably aren't in reality for lack of monsters or foes you can legally slay.

Sports games revolve around one person controlling an entire team. In an MMO, assuming your character finds a team, they have to:

1) be online at the same time as the team
2) the designers need to come up with an entirely new way of playing sports games online from a 1 player=1 player perspective
3) the new way of playing has to be fun

This is not remotely easy and might not be possible at all. Otherwise, if you're just looking for seasons, doesn't X-Box Live have support for that?

It can't be done

[SirBruce]

First of all, many people have already pointed out, you have to get people to play all the positions. Not just that; you need people to play BENCH players, too. Who's going to do that? Second, they all have to be at the games at the same time. You're talking co-ordinating anywhere from 25 to 50 to 100+ people to all show up at the right time, every day or every week, to play a game. That's going to be a nightmare. What do you do when a team doesn't show up, or doesn't show up with all its players? Modifying the schedule will be a nightmare. Thirdly, what happens when a guy gets disconnected during the middle of a game? Does he disappear? Is the game suspended until he returns? Do you replace it with some lame AI player? Great, now you have to go code AI players somehow. What if the guy comes back? Finally, what do you do about seasonal rosters, trades, and so on? If you require the guy to be on the same team all season, he may just not want to play anymore when his team is 0-12. What do you do when all of your QBs quit the game? Can you get a new QB? They're not retired; what if they suddenly come back? On the other hand, if you let players just move around all the want and play on whatever team all season, the league will be a joke, not to mention very confusing to follow. You could do this at the managerial level, but then it's not really a MMOG. But having everyone control their own player? No way. (It should be noted, however, that there are some MMOGs in development that are trying to solve these issues.) Bruce