Nothing gets my creativity going than some game talk and I am happy to see that there's a community contest going on right when I return to Hive blogging.
To begin, I believe perfection isn't a single entity. There can be multiple kinds of perfection existing at the same time. I also believe that there's no such thing as a "perfect game" because there are way too many genres out there to be put into one. There will be a perfect shooter, a perfect RPG, and so on. I think we have to start by defining a genre, and my genre for the day is ** Sports Simulation**.
Why sports simulation specifically?? And what do I like about the simulation kind of sports game? For starters, I have always been a fan of life simulation games of all kinds. I don't know how to explain it but I had always wanted to live a different life that is not my own. I know some people are going to say "goddamn, think about your own life and not waste time on bullshit like that, you only live once" but I have always been a dreamer. It's not that I care about my own life, or that it's not exciting (even though it is, I am a pretty ordinary dude) but I really want to be in others' shoes. I always imagined what would life be if I were...a lot of people. It could be the President of the USA one day, and then a medieval villager another day. I am very interested in acting, and roleplay of any kind, because they all allow me to experience things that are outside of my life, even if it's just like 1% of the whole experience.
At the same time, I am a big fan of sports as I see it as a form of "realistic drama". It's part of real life, yet it tells a story as good as any fiction. You have the evil empires, you have the underdogs, you have all kinds of struggles people go through to chase their dream, and so on. And more importantly, I simply find sports games entertaining to play. Some sports I might not watch or even enjoy watching it, but I will certainly try out any kind of sport games.
But personal viewpoint aside, I just think there is more to do with a simulation-based sport game than an arcade one. Of course, there's nothing wrong with an arcade sports game that's built for simplicity and sheer entertainment, but I am just too much of a simulation buff to ignore all the depth and possibilities that one can do in this genre.
(There ain't even being subtle about the fact that they want your money and give zero damn about gameplay)
Let's cut all the bullshit right away: I am disappointed at the development of current sports games and I really hate what the developers are doing with these games nowadays. The majority of the mainstream sports games nowadays are nothing but glorified gacha boxes created to cash in the mass with minimal effort on gameplay development. Why waste time on gameplay when we can just print more cards for massive income? And you know what's the worst? People are encouraging that line of thought by spending so goddarn much on these cards.
And don't get me wrong, I got nothing about the sports games here in the crpytospace. Sorare and Zed Run are both awesome. Sure, Sorare runs on a card system and a lot of crypto games are pack-based (which sounds like what I hate), but the biggest difference is longevity. Crypto games are built to run for years on the same title and they are also decentralized. Meanwhile, these FIFA, NBA 2K, and the likes will release a title every single year to "refresh" everyone's accounts so people will need to fork out for all these cards again and again every year. It's absolutely disgusting how well this works for the companies and how that is going to dictate the sports game genre in years to come.
Gone are the times where we play with standard teams. In FIFA 2004, you play the game with teams like Brazil, Argentina, and so on. Now? You are going up against "whale team with OVR 99 #1" to "whale team with OVR 99 #5".
(Everyone's team be looking like this)
So the first thing to do to make a perfect sports simulation game, and why that is impossible to execute in real life is to say no to these easy sums of money and develop with gameplay in mind.
Speaking of gameplay, I have played all sorts of obscure games out there and I have seen great ideas being executed not so greatly due to budget constraint and etc. There are a lot of ideas in the world that are not well-executed. Another thing to do for my perfect game is to put all the ideas into one filthy yet brilliant box and make them work.
But before we go into the idea, let's talk gameplay. As a Malaysian Chinese, I am blessed with the language understanding to get the best of both sides of the world. Some obscure Japanese or Korean games might not make it to the west or be translated into English (not even fansubbed) but they are available in Chinese. I also have a solid understanding of English (trained by my interest in roleplaying in writing form) to be able to get to enjoy all kinds of games from the west, barring the Russian games and European games available only in their native languages.
When it comes to sports games (or in any genre really, a western RPG and JRPG is easily recognizable due to their difference in design), I find that the west and the east tend to have their preferred style of doing things and they are far from perfect. "Perfect" is a very high bar but that's also the spirit of this article.
Sports games or sport simulation games from the West tend to be too crunchy at times. Some of them really make you feel like you are playing a spreadsheet more than anything. There are a lot of numbers, a lot of data, but it's just so...lifeless. You need to be very imaginative yourself or be the kind that likes numbers to enjoy these games.
(Extracted from http://www.fbbgames.com/fbpb3/;Very spreadsheet-like presentation style)
However, this kind of hard design does mean these games are very realistic and accurate in simulation. The west puts their effort into the number part of the game as to provide the most realistically accurate experience and sometimes at the sacrifice of presentation and accessibility.
The Japanese sport simulation games(which represents the East, as you rarely see sports games from other Asian countries) tend to have a stronger graphical presentation and they let their imagination runs wild. I am not saying they have photorealistic graphics like the mainstream sports games of the West like FIFA, MLB The Show 21, and so on, but they will never make you feel like you are playing a spreadsheet. Some of them can be cartoony, but they always tell you "hey, you are playing a game here".
They don't always have the excellent accurate-to-the-bone gameplay and deep mechanics, but you don't feel so intimidated by them as compared to the number-crunchy Western products. Also, they are usually more creative in modes and tend to have more varieties of them than the western games. Western games are more "serious" when it comes to sports and you don't find a lot of wacky things in it -- but you can in the Japanese games!
(Japanese loves humor and they are very creative with it. You know it's ridiculous but you can't help but love it)
The Japanese baseball games Power Pros have Success Mode(which I will cover in more detail later) and every year, they come with different stories and "what ifs". In this 2011 version of it, you can go back to the Samurai Warring era and play baseball with the historical figures you would be familiar with if you are interested in that era or had played games like Samurai Warriors.
Can you imagine Nobunaga Oda throwing fireball like Aroldis Chapman? Have you ever thought "what if these Japanese warlords actually battle for territories in a baseball showdown"? Now you can! You never see this kind of creativity from the western sports games, not even in the more arcadey Super Mega Baseball 3 as western games never go outside the box. If it's a baseball game, it sticks to regular baseball. It can be based on real life, or in a virtual world, but it's always players playing baseball or you coaching a regular baseball team. Sure, there can be a game like Blood Bowl that dedicates itself to the fantasy, but you don't see a game that includes both real life baseball (you can play the Japanese league in Power Pro) AND fantasy, wacky baseball in the same game.
(Here's a Japanese raw stream of the gameplay. You can drag through it and check out the mode cuz it'd take me too long to elaborate and that's not the objective of this article anyway.)Another thing that is very different between the East and the West is the storytelling, or narrative, in sports games. I am sure some of you will go "wait a second, storytelling in a sports game?" Yes, storytelling in a sports game. With the rise of career mode in sports games, these games are now partially life sim, or at least I believe they should be. I mean, it's MyPlayer(NBA 2K), I want to live a life and feel how it is to be a pro player, but the west tends to only tell a story inside the court. They don't go deeper than that. Essentially, you are just playing through games after games to accumulate career stats.
Career mode from the East goes much deeper. In Power Pro, the "MyPlayer" experience is cut into two modes: Success Mode and Life Mode. Every year, the Success Mode has a different story. One year, you are a high school guy trying to win the prestigious Koshien (which is the equivalent of March Madness in high school baseball in Japan). Another year, you are a university player. In some editions of it, you can choose between different schools and all of them have different characters and style. One of the schools tends to be a slice of life story and you train and play like a regular high schooler with ambition. In another school, you could be the one reviving a dying baseball club and have some anime-esque hot-blooded story moments with a bunch of misfits you recruited to join your journey of the ultimate underdog.
You then plan your life in the three years or so. You train, you befriend your teammates, you shop and go around town looking for events, and you can even date girls. Now, this is the shit I am talking about. A "MyPlayer" experience should involve both in and out of the court as no life is complete without both. After you are done with high school or university, you get drafted, and then you can save your created player for use in multiple modes.
If you want to pursue a pro career, you can then use him in Life Mode, in which you play out his life in the NPB. You play for the team that drafted you at the end of Success Mode and you can even continue dating the same girl if you choose to! In Life Mode, you play out the everyday life of a player but there are out of games things to do as well. You can date a girl, marry and start a family and your children would even go to your games and cheer for you! You can also befriend your teammates, train together, and just feel like you are truly living the life of a pro player.
It's simply incomparable to what the west brings in this aspect. What you get from NBA 2K series are some horribly written, forced storylines. Remember Spike Lee's story in NBA 2K16? That started these horrible executions of absurd stories every year and I don't even get why they are continuing to do that every year. Some games like FIFA or MLB The Show just focus mainly on the matches or games and have very little life element.
(Soccer Life by Banpresto is a game where you live out the life of a footballer. It's a rather repetitive game and the life aspect is rather shallow, but this is the kind of narrative I am looking for in my perfect game).
To sum up the experience using one game, the East brings the full Persona experience in their story mode as you not only play the games(dungeons in Persona) but also actually live a life(high school sim and everyday's life in Persona) while the West provides just the games -- imagine Persona as a straight dungeon crawler and has limited story outside of crawling up the dungeon, that's not a very fun game, eh?
But to give you a more thorough example of what I meant, I will compare two of the best horse racing sims in the market: Starter Order and Winning Post.
It's not the fairest to compare the graphic of the two, as Winning Post is a product from Koei and has far more budget than the indie Starter Order, but let's look at how they present the information and how the game mechanic works.
(You can clearly see the info and understand them, but it's not very appealing to the eyes)
In Starter Order, you play as a ranch owner. You can bet on horses, expand your stables, and eventually breed the next generation of great horses.
Starter Order has a very extensive database of jockeys, horses, and a living world. However, it is a game that suffers from what I described above. It has graphics, but plays like a spreadsheet and is kinda...lifeless. While I praise the game for the detailed everyday operation, the amount of races, the day-to-day auction of horses, and so on, it's a pretty intimidating game to start and I don't expect anyone besides the horse racing enthusiast to ever try it.
(Building screen of Winning Post 8)
(Both screens extracted from this Youtube video. Winning Post 8 interface never bombard you with words. They are very slick and don't overwhelm you with information.)
While Winning Post plays the same way, it does provide the life aspect as I described above. It has a stronger immersion than Starter Order as it has life events, NPC interaction, and you can even have family and build up a 100-year horse racing empire. You are not just passing the days and playing against yourself, you really feel like every week is different and there are things happening around the world for real.
(Events are told by NPCs, offering extra immersion than a "Your horse is injured" message. It makes you care because others care about the event.)
(Highlight picture of the hottest contenders in the prestigious Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, hyping you up for the race.)
They make the most important G1 races in Japan feel extra important with their presentation. Different music, newspaper coverage in-game, characters chatting about it, and I can feel that race is important -- even without knowing Japanese at all! Meanwhile, Starter Order and a lot of other sport games don't provide that kind of immersion. It's not even just the sports sims that make me feel that way. PC Building Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator, and even American Truck Simulator provide the same kind of feeling -- every day's pretty much the same. I think the extra immersion is extremely important to a perfect game, as I believe they are what makes a game fun to play. A good example is Stardew Valley or, the OG of the genre, Harvest Moon. They are different from Farming Simulator in that they have stories, and there are so much more things to do than just straight farming. We are there to experience not just the farming part of a farmer's life, but his entire life.
So, after all the analysis, what truly is the idea of my perfect game? What are the good things I extract from all these games to put into one?
I don't have a fixed sport for my perfect sports game as I believe the idea can be used for any sport. No matter what it is though, the first thing I want to do is that I want to simulate the whole world. So say I am doing a basketball game, I want to include all the pro leagues in the world and not just the NBA. I am looking to build a sim game here and I want a full living world where players can start from anywhere and play anywhere. All the leagues will use their local languages for extra immersion with subtitle ready.
Ultimately, the goal is not only immersion, but also tracking the entire sports scene in one. This is quite different from a lot of sports games that only focus on the cream of the crop. I want every player to be trackable and new talents to come in every year. I can see this dude plays in the Philippine Basketball Association from year 2028 to 2030 and his stats, and then where he lands on after that. I want the opportunities to be realistic, like it's unlikely for a player to go from a bad league to a good league in one go unless he just happens to be the best in the league or have the connection with his agents or some life-based factors.
If the sports are widely played in interschool competitions, as it would with the likes of basketball and baseball, then there'd be schools as well. I don't expect to include every school in the world but I want a solid number to simulate that part of the sports scene. This also makes it that one can play a player all the way from high school to pro for a complete experience -- or even coach after retirement.
Oh, I also want both genders to be available. I am not joking when I say I want to cover the entire sports scene.
There are multiple types of scalability in my perfect sports sim game. Firstly, the attributes have to be completely scalable from the lowest to the highest level. This might sound easy to do but even the best game suffers from it. Like Football Manager has a hard time scaling through the levels of football leagues in England and the lower level gameplay might not be the most well-simmed.
Out of the Park Baseball is one example that has great scalability with realistic stats across all levels of leagues and that'd be the one I am looking to build.
Another type of scalability is the time. I want a sports game that can scale infinitely into the future and be able to generate a virtual world if necessary. There are plenty of sport sim players who love virtual universe building so we need that covered for sure. The dream is to have realistic players and staffs generating consistently throughout the years and the whole world to be run seamlessly. I also want some players to be the second generation or third in an established sports family and have their parents' attributes play a part in their potential and playstyle.
Database size is a concern if we are building this game for real though, as I expect this kind of scale to eat up a lot of disk space.
If you have read my analysis above, you will know that I care about storyline of all kinds and I truly believe that it will leverage a sports sim game by providing extra things for a player to care for than just the game performance and result. For all the criticism I have of NBA 2K, I think they do have some great ideas like the press conference, endorsement, and social media. All of these should be a part of the simulation.
Besides that, I am certainly implementing the full life experience. I want relationships with the agents, the GMs, the fans, players, sport show hosts even, maybe real-life friends and family to mean something. Befriending them or not being kind to any of them will affect your career and how others see you or react to you. This also scales to the whole world and NPCs will also be doing their own things and have different preferences. Like real life, some people just ain't going to like you no matter what and how you deal with that is part of the fun.
Life is full of events and I want the game to be full of these. I don't know how to truly execute this though, to have so many entries of dynamic events that everyone playing it will experience a totally different career throughout their in-game life. I want it to be in-depth and full of choices. I also want it so that min-maxers cannot just min-max training all the time. I want to encourage roleplay, and not just turn everyone into a training machine. The player will need to balance life and training and too much of one thing will hurt the development. The player has to relax sometimes and there are random events and things to be had outside training. Those things will be very useful as well. Maybe you meet an NPC who can help you with something, maybe you find sponsors, and perhaps you meet a better coach to get you further.
Another thing I am considering implementing is country-based storylines. If you come from a place where this specific sport is not a big thing, or you are an one-of-a-kind talent out there, you will be garnering a lot of attention if you make it big. One thing that gets ignored a lot by sports games is the burden you have after you make it big. That's why I want the life simulation to be a huge thing because I think people ignore the actual life of a pro athlete sometimes and I want this game to be about them as human as well, not just pro athlete.
(Statue of Aung La Nsang, a MMA fighter and national hero of Myanmar/Burma)
Aung La Nsang became a national hero after becoming ONE champion. Chien-Ming Wang sacrificed his family life as he became the hope of Taiwan baseball and had every Taiwanese's hope with him in his MLB conquest. Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani were covered everyday by the Japanese media and every move of them was shared to the public. Lee, Chong Wei was the best hope of a Malaysia's gold medal in the Olympics for a very long time.
I want the player to feel like they are truly an important person for their country if the situation is right and how they react to these kinds of attention will affect their life. It might get a little bit political at times but that's the full scope of life and sport I want to cover. Of course, if you are an NBA player from America, you won't really feel get special treatment unless you are on the Lebron level. Meanwhile, you are expected to get superstar treatment just by being a bench player if you are from India.
Also, the player should be able to use their money however they want. You want to go on a nightclub streak like James Harden? Have fun(but be careful of STDs)! You want to invest in various things and snowball your networth? You can too! You want a shit ton of cars and boats? No problem!
For the NPC, I want them to behave differently based on their personalities and I want them to have all kinds of personalities. Some players are looking to play for money, some are looking for fame, some want to stay local because of families, and etc. I want everyone to feel like a legit person and not a bunch of stats and a generated look. It'd be a killer to see their personalities be reflected in dialogues and body movement even though that would require an insane amount of possible dialogue choices and 3D modeling data.
Despite I put a lot of emphasis on other non-sport aspects, the sport mechanics have to be perfect or it's not going to be the perfect sports game. My vision of a perfect sports game is realistic, so all the mechanisms will dedicate themselves into making it the most realistic simulation of all. It all depends on what sport it is, but I expect the game to be perfect in everything related to the sport.
First off, the physics must be perfect. It can be the hitbox and damage of a boxer's punch, or the bounce path of a tennis ball off the surface, or how the car steers in a corner, it must be perfect.
Mistakes and errors should be a thing too because that's a human thing. For all the praises I give to the Power Pro series, the fielding is rather unrealistic. It's near impossible to get a triple because the fielders are fielding the ball near-flawlessly and they throw it super accurately to the bases. MLB The Show has much realistic fielding because the players make mistakes and not every throw and so on are perfect. The outfielders stumble and they might not throw the ball perfectly to the target. The infielders might not have the reflex to get the ball and so on. Every play is completely different, and that cannot be found in the Power Pro series with the players being so consistent with their movement and throws.
I am also a fan of training schedule and the likes. My idea of life simulation already covered the day-to-day activities, but what I'd want from the everyday simulation with the sports in mind are diet and training. I want to be able to set the diet and training of a period, be it days, or weeks, and have the diet and training affect the attributes. There should be no full 99-on-all-stats monsters that are great at anything because players can just buy the points to upgrade those attributes. I want training to influence the player's skill and for the athleticism to be very realistic. If you bulk up, you will lose speed; if you want to be quick, you must sacrifice muscle mass. Of course, you can tune your training well and become great at both, but it will take a huge amount of time and effort to do so. As I said in the life simulation part, I want the morally wrong choices to be available so PED will be available for anyone to use, whether you get caught by it is another story. In coach mode, you can bribe players and etc to do your bidding, I want it so that a player can be a clean, honorable fighter or a dirtbag who will do anything to want. That's straight replayability right there.
I also want the AI to be perfect in sports simulation and how they play also depends on their player type and their personalities. Also, the AI can be "dumb" too. They should not have perfect sports IQ. Some can be highly skilled but do the wrong things sometimes and some can be very smart but lack the skill to pull some moves. If it's an MMA game, then every fighter should fight differently. They can have the same attribute, but their preferred moves and tendencies should be very different. Their gym might also influence that and so on. If the player wants to, they can scout the opponent's previous matches to understand how the fighter fights and game plan against it. Of course, the opponent will also adjust tendency based on how you fight!
The game should be 10/10 in both self-control mode and simming mode as I believe a sports sim game should be playable in both ways. I want the players to feel like they are playing the best sports game of the world when they are manually controlling their players and I also want it to be an absolute delight to simulate.
I also want international contests to be a thing for the sports that have them. The player can represent his country in the Olympics and World Cup and help climb the world ranking for their country. Maybe the country ranking will then affects the quality of the players coming from there. You can be a basketball legend for a historically weak country and affects the country so much that it eventually becomes an elite country of that sport. Anything is possible!
Another thing is injuries. If we are going with the most realistic sports sim, I want injuries to truly hurt the player and there could even be career-ending injuries that close your player career earlier than you want to.
(Traits in FIFA 21)
(Traits in Winning Post 9)
<img src="https://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/iconleak/cerulean/24/link-icon.png"
One thing I absolutely like about sports games with RPG-esque elements is the traits. I want traits to be a thing because they further differentiate every character in the game. FIFA and NBA 2K have solid trait system nowadays and those are the kind I want to have in my game.
I want this game to be playable on every level and the player can play all the roles involved in the sport. You can play as the player, the general manager, the coach, the scout, the agent, and even the team owner. I don't want players to say "If you want to play the manager, go play Football Manager; if you want to play actual football yourself, then play FIFA." and I want a game that covers every aspect of the sport perfectly. The player mode should have the quality of FIFA and the manage mode should have the quality of FM.
As I said before, I want the player to be able to move to other roles in time. After a long or short playing career, you can be hired as a coach, GM, and so on. You could even buy multiple teams or at least the share of them if you are rich and involve in their decisions.
I think a lot of those roles are self-explanatory but I want to say a tad more about scout and agent. As an agent, you will need to find good potential clients that might be future superstars, then help them land deals and negotiate those deals for them. You could even try to affect their life choice, ask them to stop drinking so much, or lead them to better coaches and etc. As a scout, you will need to go around and check out new upcoming talents for your team, or even watch the opponents and report how they play to your team. The team will adjust tendencies with your report in mind so if you tell them the wrong thing, your team might be screwed!
A hardcore sports sim can be very intimidating and that's why I also want accessibility to be a thing. If the player wants less than the whole package, they should be able to do so with ease. You don't want to plan out your diet? Hire a nutritionist and automate it. You just want a sports game without all the life crap? Disable those choices and focus solely on the court.
Fun is subjective and everyone has their own vision of "fun". I think the perfect game should be playable for all kinds of players looking for a their own experience.
(The game should be as customizable as this robot)
Like a lot of entries out there, customizability is a huge thing and I think the vast majority of the player base loves this in their game. I want as many things to be customizable as possible. I think look, jerseys, cars(for racing games), gears and etc are the just the basics of it and I want more than that. For a basketball game, I want the shooting motion and dribbling to be deeply customizable. I think one should be able to capture their own motion through the motion sensor and have it duplicated 1-to-1 into the game. For a baseball game, the player can invent their own pitch, sliding motion, and etc.
Maybe the players can submit their own events and dialogues to the server as well so the game has more and more events generated by players.
While my game is largely single player-focused, I do want some multiplayer functionality out of it. For starters, PvP should be possible and encouraged with such a perfect gaming mechanism and engine. I want PvP tournaments to be a thing and players can enjoy dueling it out with others around the world.
I can also see the potential of an import function. Instead of the game generating all the virtual characters (or regen, if you are familiar with Football Manager), a player can allow the character from other players around the world to be generated in their own game and for the creators to see how their players did in other universes around the world.
To summarize the perfect sport sim game of my dream, it will have:
What if I want to sell the game in a marketing campaign? How do I put it into one sentence?
Live the complete life of a pro athlete and experience a sports world as in-depth as their real life counterpart.
Credit to IconArchive for the 24x24 link image
And thanks for reading through this very long entry of mine!
