Anytime a sports video game developer tries to do something new with their game, they’re taking a risk. Maybe that new mechanic your team spent a full year working on and refining will go down as one of the core moments that took a series to a new level of fun, realism, or challenge. Maybe you’re about to debut a mechanic gamers will still be pointing to years or decades later when they need an example of a mechanic so bad it’s insulting to be associated with it.
While playtesting and sample groups can help developers, ultimately, the verdict on a new mechanic can only come after the game is in the hands of the public writ large, and that means that sometimes a new mechanic does not go as planned.
Seven Times Sports Video Game Mechanics Left Players Frustrated
Sometimes a new mechanic drops in a sports game, and it’s instantly a hit with gamers, changing how a game plays for the better by adding fun, challenge, and nuance to your in-game play. Other times, a new mechanic arrives, and the only thing fans are looking forward to is whether it’s removed by the time the next game in the series releases.
These seven swings represent attempts by game developers to shake up the game and do something special, which unfortunately fell flat, failed to connect with gamers, or outright made the games they’re in feel unplayable.
Finesse Shot Has Flummoxed EA Devs Through The Years
Some of the mechanics on this list have been unmitigated disasters from the jump and never stopped being so until they were discontinued, but other mechanics earn their place of infamy instead through lifetime achievement. When balancing a system of interconnected mechanics, there’s always the chance that changes to other systems will have unexpected consequences for other systems, and nothing in the FIFA/EA Sports FC series has caused more headaches for developers than the finesse shot.
The subtle side of the beautiful game has always proved more challenging for developers to nail, just ask Thomas Müller, and the finesse shot proves that. In recent years, there have been times gamers felt the move was fully nerfed, opting for power time and again instead, but in its early years, there was the opposite problem. As the mechanic rolled out in its first editions around the beginning of the 2010s, complaints instead focused on the untouchability of the shot. Getting it right has proved a constant struggle for developers, which they must wage anew with each updated edition.
The Madden Passing Cone Was The Worst Best Idea Ever
Or maybe that’s the best worst idea. What can’t be denied is that the passing cone was a solution that came out of the need to solve a very real problem. One of the biggest struggles that football game developers faced in the early days of 3D-gaming was how to accurately represent the dynamic abilities of quarterbacks who were dual threats. This is most famously typified by early-00s Michael Vick being a mainstay on any list of dominant sports game athletes, with his killer pace and acceleration making him unstoppable.
The tradeoff was that pocket-passers, a designation still assigned to most of the top quarterbacks of the time, including then GOAT-battlers Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, felt underpowered in Madden. The passing cone sought to fix that by making you align your QB’s vision or face massive accuracy punishments, with QB Awareness setting the cone size. While there is a lot of room to see great ways the cone could have played out and been tweaked and refined, it never got over the opening pushback and was phased out after just a few iterations.
Kinect Sports Rivals Failed To Save A Failing Peripheral
When the Wii arrived and brought with it well-executed motion controls, it was a shot across the bow of both PlayStation and Xbox as Nintendo countered higher processing power with games that were simply fun to play and still looked great on the Wii’s graphics levels. It’s unsurprising that their console-making peers sought to follow in the footsteps of such a vastly successful gaming system and that motion-sensing controls were soon in the cards for both systems.
The Kinect sought to take things to a new level of user control by using full video tracking to create more unique ways to use the peripheral in game design. Unfortunately for gamers and Microsoft alike, much like the PlayStation Move, the Kinect just never hit like the Wii’s games, and the final game in the Kinect Sports series showed that a good motion-sensing mechanic is not always as basic and easy as Wii Sports made it look.
Fifa 10 On Wii Made You Shake To Shoot
When reading about those motion controls, did you find yourself wondering how they could ever find a way to incorporate them into a more simulation-style sports game, as opposed to the arcade-like play of sports minigames? So did developers, and they never really came up with a good answer, but that didn’t stop the team working on FIFA 10 on the Wii from trying.
The game arrived with motion-activated controls, most notably the shake-to-shoot option. There’s arguably no mechanic more important to get right in a soccer game, and bolting it onto unnecessary motion controls. This system was still far less reliable than a button press, and unsurprisingly did not prove to be a game-changer for the console.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Trips Over Its Own Feet
The Super Smash Bros. series is not your traditional fighting game — its use of damage percentages and off-staging as a way of defeating opponents was a total shift of the playing field, but certainly not a misstep. The series is among the most successful gaming franchises of all time, and for gamers who love Smash Bros. style and the frenetic nature its fights can take on, it is a nearly unimpeachable franchise of home run game after home run game.
So, how does a series like that end up on a list like this? The only way it can is with a silly self-made error. The trip mechanic added a small random chance that every time you initiated a dash or tried to change directions in a run, you had a 1-to-1.5 percent chance of your character tripping and ending up in the vulnerable dazed state. For a fun game with friends, this could be frustrating. For a series with a famed competitive scene, this was a disastrous addition and it was unsurprisingly not a change with the legs to endure through future games.
NFL Head Coach Forgot The Mechanics That Make Management Fun
NFL football games are popular. Football Manager games are popular. It stands to reason that a football game that combines the popular style of Football Manager with the popular brand of the NFL would be a success, and yet when EA tried to spin-off a management-focused version of its Madden series under the NFL Head Coach brand it proved to be a flop.
While the idea may have been a strong one, where the game fell apart was in the mechanics, which provided the framework for the experience. The problem the underlying system of NFL Head Coach ran into was finding itself in between two good options. Moving to coaching-only removed all the gameplay mechanics that were still the majority of most football gamers’ experience with their games, while the backend management failed to hit the depth of the FM series, resulting in a set of mechanics that was less than the sum of its parts.
Green Or Miss Polarized The NBA 2K Community
Speaking of delicate balances in game design, one area that sports game developers must wrestle with is the balance between player skill and gamer skill. How much should your talent on the sticks outweigh or be restrained by the skill of the virtual player you are in control of? Finding the right balance can be critical in the development of a game engine, and with Green or Miss, the developers at 2K found a truly polarizing option for NBA 2K.
For players looking for a strictly competitive game, some gamers stand by Green or Miss as a tool that allows talent to win out. Unfortunately, it brought with it no shortage of complaints, too. Many feel the mechanic removes some of the uncertainty present in real basketball while forcing players’ hands when building their players or squads, as particular builds are considered particularly good or useless with the mechanic.
Have you spent your time in the trenches doing battle with any of these gaming mechanics? Are there any other frustrating mechanics we missed out on? Let us know in the comments!
