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Making Virtual Sports More Like the Real Thing
The New York Times has an article today with an unexpected source of game criticism: Seattle Seahawks football player Sean Alexander. The athlete made the EA execs nervous at a press conference this week, where he offered up some insightful comments about the Madden series of games. From the article: "Madden has always been great, but it's always been one-on-one, just you and another person, and real football is a team game. You should be able to make a team and play together with your friends. Like if you have 10 friends, you could all play different positions and be in 10 different houses and play together over the Internet. Or maybe you just have like five people, and you control the skill positions and the program controls the other guys."
In case you are like me and hate the reg only articles at sites like the NYT, here's the same topic from Ars Technica,
It's interesting that the concept of having more than two people in a game has not penetrated into sports games yet. Many other genres have long since adopted this kind of play, even on consoles, which were long constrained by lack of networking ability. First-person shooters? Yup. Role-playing games? Yup, to a dazzling extent. Real-time strategy? Not really, but the nature of the game inherently limits the number of players.
The one genre where teamwork should seem obvious lacks any sort of teamwork gameplay for more than two players. I wonder why it took an NFL player to bring it to the EA execs' minds.
Then again, when you have what amounts to a monopoly in sports games, there's little motivation to innovate. We certainly haven't seen EA do much in that area...
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If he's strictly talking about getting 10 of your personal friends together, why not just go to Target, pick up a cheap football, go to a park, and...play football? Compared to the price of getting 10 gaming systems, 10 copies of the game, 10 online subscriptions, and coordinating the same time to get all 10 of your friends together it's far too much effort.
Now, for online play in general (playing with people you don't know from the entire world), it seems like it may be feasable. The only problem I forsee is the same types of complaints with most other online games: more than half of one team disconnecting before they lose, n00bs bringing a team down, and 1337 players pwning everyone.
Prove it.
Ship steroids with the game discs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did Alexander just make a dig at his offensive line by implying they aren't "skilled" positions? Let's see how many touchdowns he gets this season... :)
Who's "Sean" Alexander?
The all-pro Seahawks RB is named "Shaun" Alexander.
If you're going to post a front-page story on sports, at least get the first name of one of the top players currently in the game right. This is the equivalent of writing a story on MS and referencing "Steve Bullmer". It's kinda' sad...
Executing a football play is a complex thing. The play has to be decided upon, the players have to huddle up, each player needs to know their role. The offensive line needs to know who to block, each receiver needs to know their route exactly, tight ends and running backs need to know if they're blocking or receiving. Running plays might be a bit more controlled, but think about possible reverses, options, trick plays, etc. Now, you're actually going to the line of scrimmage, and the defense shows you an alignment you don't like. Now you've got to audible. It's really quite a miracle that with all of this chaos, football players can still go out and execute.
The reason why football plays succeed in real life is because those 11 men on the field practice together like crazy before football comes up every Sunday. Who out there is going to want to try to get 11 buddies out there to practice there this much? Never mind conflicting schedules from real life that could make this impossible, or trying to audible using only your gamepad... it just doesn't make it as much fun. If you're the quarterback, you're involved in every passing play. If you're the running back, you're involved in every running play. If you only get to be a receiver, though, the ball might get passed to you a half-dozen to a dozen times per game. If you're a fullback, you're basically limited to running into people and trying to knock them down. Who's going to want that skill position? And it is a skill position, because of the possibility of getting to do a short-yardage running play or catching the odd pass out of the pocket, etc.
The only way to make sure that everybody holding a gamepad gets to be involved in every play is to make sure that the guy with the gamepad is the one with the ball. That's 1 guy out of 11.
I'm not passionate about this or anything, just not sure how this could work and be both practical and fun. Even in baseball, for instance, where coordinated execution isn't as important as football, it still means a whole bunch of bored guys sitting around waiting for something to happen.