Sam Darnold just won the Superbowl after two seasons of stellar play in which he went 31-5! This came after six years of disastrous play and little improvement for three different teams as he went 21-35 and seemed destined to wind up as a backup for the rest of his career.
His career recovery and unexpected progression over the last few years have been incredible and aren’t really anything we would see from sports video game modes like franchise, career, and MyPlayer. Unless you saved up your skill points until year six and then spent everything to become a superstar overnight, which you could, of course, do, but it’s certainly not the intent of the game in any of the sports game franchises or career modes in games like Madden 26, NBA 2K26, MLB the Show 25, or EAFC 26.
The intent of these games is quick, linear progression in the first few years (depending on the series), which is realistic for some players, but most players have much more complex development and career progression.
Whether it’s Daniel Jones’ intriguing comeback in Indianapolis last year in football, Derrick Rose’s famous MVP-to-bust-to-reliable-6th-man career path in basketball, or Brent Rooker’s improbable run from afterthought to genuine slugger in baseball, sports careers can be complicated and unpredictable.
But in sports games, predictability is built into the progression systems, especially in modes that focus on the user player, such as My Career modes, in which you play through a personalized career in a given sport.
While each game has slightly differing progression systems, they all rely on similar types of game mechanics and thus have relatively the same types of strengths and flaws. In this article, I’ll go over how these game mechanics lead to unrealistic player progression that’s too predictable, fast, easy, and boring.
Player progression and talent development in these games can sometimes get close to real player development in some instances. Still, for the most part, the real thing feels much more dynamic and narrative-driving than what you get in the games, and attempts to alleviate these problems either don’t work or lead to other issues.
Here are the biggest issues with player progression in sports video games and how to address them.
Progression is Too Linear
As we see with quarterbacks like Sam Darnold and Daniel Jones, mid-career breakouts can happen. We also see pitchers in the MLB fluctuate like crazy in talent and stats due to injuries, rules changes, batter trends, and tweaks to form.
Guys like Lucas Giolito can go from one of the worst pitchers in the league to one of the best, and somebody like R.A. Dickey can go from relative obscurity to Cy Young winner and then back to the dust pan of history without a second thought (this career arc famously happened in football with Madden 12 cover athlete Peyton Hillis).
In sports, you’ll also see guys get off to a great start in their careers and then fizzle out, like Robert Griffin III in the NFL or Michael Carter-Williams in the NBA. It’s also common (especially in baseball) to see someone struggle mightily in their 20s but have a successful late-stage career.
Stars like Nelson Cruz and Jorge Bautista became all-star sluggers late in their careers after being journeymen earlier. These things are common in different sports, but they rarely happen in games like MLB The Show or Madden.
In sports video games, player progression is almost always linear, with skills building on top of one another year after year, with slight variations in skill increases built into the games as their version of “randomness.”
Players very rarely experience years of stagnation or sudden bursts of extreme development. The career arcs of players always seem to move in the same direction, and very rarely do you see any unique change or dramatic shift in a player’s skills, unexpectedly or unpredictably.
It’s all very formulaic and frankly boring. There is no room for intriguing player progression like the ones described, which hurts the authenticity of these simulation games.
I just want some more randomness and some more variance in how players progress and develop.
Player Progression is Too Dependent On Performance
Speaking of player progression, when it comes to user-controlled players or teams, every game seems to peg player progression almost entirely on user performance. This is, of course, by design and is intended to create a fun feedback system in which you are rewarded for good performance with skill points that will help you develop your player(s) faster.
This gives you a hit of dopamine when you play well, but is this actually realistic? Does success early in your career give you a better chance of sustained success down the line? Does having one great game mean you’re likely to develop more skills and abilities?
The data is unclear, but we certainly have a ton of examples of one-year wonders and rookie standouts who didn’t pan out, so should sports video games really pin development solely to performance? It also begs the question: if not solely performance-based, what other factors should be included, and is it fair or realistic to add them to a video game that obviously values user performance above everything else?
It also creates the typical problem of players advancing too fast and maxing out their players within just a few seasons, which, of course, is unrealistic, but isn’t necessarily a focus for me, because players who care about slowing that down usually have the opportunity to adjust progression sliders in the game settings.
Development Traits Are Inflexible
Development traits are one of the few factors that are not explicitly linked to performance, with these traits already predetermined and acting as a multiplier (or de-multiplier) on your performance-based skill point reward. The problem with these development traits is that with each of the sports games, it’s very rare that a player’s development trait changes over the course of a player’s career.
In real life, a player’s development rate will vary based on several factors, with the primary one being coaching, along with health, performance factors, age, offseason regimen, and numerous others. In games like Madden or MLB The Show, coaching skill and other factors don’t change your development traits at all, and it’s rare that your development traits change at all.
This contributes to the linear nature of the player progression in the game and limits the randomness that makes real talent development and progression so dynamic and fun.
Regression Only Applies To Old Age
This one is pretty simple. I want more regression to occur at random points in a player’s career and force them to fight through it (perhaps through training mini-games or other challenges) to regain their normal forward progress. I don’t want players to only regress when they hit the back half of their career.
This is something that could benefit all games, but could particularly help NBA 2K, which has a pretty customizable progression experience that is generally better than their peers, because of their customizable “peak” ages, but struggles with strict linear progression that usually results in most players in franchise mode being above 90+ overall within a few years.
How To Fix Some Of These Issues
These are obviously some complex issues, and I don’t pretend to be an ultimate authority on game design or mechanics, but I (much like any fan of any media) have some half-baked ideas on how to fix problems that might just exist in my head and might not actually be a problem for anyone else!
The end goal of these solutions is to add more randomness and unexpectedness to player progression and to implement systems that create more dynamic, realistic player career arcs in sports video games without ruining the fun gameplay-reward loop built into most franchise and career modes.
My idea is to create different progression “modes,” similar to how Madden lets you set the game to simulation, arcade, or competitive, depending on what you want from the game. I think you should be able to set the progression to dynamic, realistic, or basic, depending on what type of gameplay you want.
The basic mode would be the current linear progression that we currently get, with different development traits but little to no variance beyond that.
The realistic mode should be modeled after real-life historical career arcs, with the player’s development tied to a previous real-life player’s career progression. So for instance, if you started up a franchise mode in MLB the Show and started playing a franchise mode and got to your first “1st year player draft” all the players in that draft will have career projections that will model previous players like a Geovany Soto and get off to a hot start before falling off a cliff, or someone like Brent Rooker who struggles until a breakout year at age 28.
The dynamic mode would allow players to play training mini-games or make strategic choices to develop faster. The game would also throw wrenches into players’ development and/or randomly boost certain players.
This mode could also weigh the coach’s skills and the team’s training staff’s quality in determining how fast a player develops. The mode would include many of these factors and would ideally be hard to predict, creating the randomness and dynamic impact that I’m looking for.
