There’s no denying that sports and storytelling go hand in hand. The life of an athlete is a constantly active biography. An athlete’s life is detailed from beginning to end. There are progressive arcs, allies and rivals, and written and recorded statistics to monitor the legacy.

The sports video game is the artificial reality where the fan gets to exist in the sports world. Sports video games have come a long way in philosophy. When sports games first existed, the objective of the game was either to beat a computer or a friend. That competitive aspect still exists, but game designers have continued to inch closer to the core of sports fandom.

The goal of the modern day sports game is to create a simulated version of a real-world sport within a video game. Game designers continue to look for new ways to open up options for players to participate in all domains of a sport’s universe. There are the actual games, the front office management, and then the life a singular player is exposed to (dishonorable mention to the worthless social media tabs every game employs now).

“The life” aspect has been a particular focus in sports franchises as of late. FIFA, Madden, NBA 2K all have heavily scripted gameplay modes. NBA 2K has focused on its MyPlayer mode granting a lot of freedom to the player, while EA Sports decided to craft a more linear approach.

MLB: The Show has stayed the course with its singular player mode by focusing mostly on creating your own player and simply playing the games and improving your player. Madden 06 brought this style of gameplay to the forefront with its revolutionary ‘superstar’ mode.

Now that there are several examples in recent releases of story-modes, let’s take a look at what the game developers are getting right and wrong.

FIFA 18: The Journey

from mlssoccer.com

The Journey started in FIFA 17 and has now added the 2nd part in FIFA 18. I currently own FIFA 18 and have played through the first three chapters. The first comment I have is that having not played FIFA 17 I have no connection to the characters in a direct sequel. It’d be like jumping into The Hunger Games or Harry Potter’s second book and only taking cliff notes from the first book. The Journey Part 2 opens up with a short recap of Part 1.

In Part 1, Alex Hunter is an 18-year soccer phenom who goes on a miraculous tournament run to win the FA Cup which his absentee father never accomplished. Hunter also has a rival kid he grew up with named Gareth Walker and the two become frenemies. In Part 2, you continue Hunter’s career with a Premier League squad and compete in a preseason tournament where you fanboy over Ronaldo and talk trash to Gyasi Zardes.

The Journey does the Mass Effect style of dialogue options where you have three choices. You can either be Captain Planet, Kawhi Leonard, or an absolute tosspot. I recommend being the tosser because all the other options result in boring conversations. Having the three-pronged dialogue tree doesn’t make the story any more dynamic. The story has to be good on its own merits, which was how Mass Effect succeeded.

The idea behind The Journey seems to be to provide a spectacle where Alex Hunter is whisked around the soccer world winning cups and meeting famous people (Hunter meets Thierry Henry who introduces him to James Harden). I dug into the story mode at first, before I had to play games as the LA Galaxy and found out Jermaine Jones is arguably the worst soccer player in FIFA history.

The Journey Part 2’s bold move was to have a fake transfer story to Real Madrid fall through for Hunter. It was hilariously telegraphed and is the severe blow to any believable storytelling the game is attempting to convey. If the news reported a star player wants to go to Real Madrid, wouldn’t Real Madrid have already spoken to the player’s agent or the media about it?

FIFA’s Career Mode where you control one player has never been a true interest of mine. Having control of a team in soccer is a much more rewarding experience. The Journey adds some value, but not enough to make it a must-play experience.

Hunter’s face and body aren’t customizable like your MyPlayer in NBA 2K always has been. EA Sports made a similar decision with its Madden story mode as well.

NBA 2K: The Neighborhood/Livin Da Dream

from Reddit; B-Fresh, the worst character in all of video gaming

The irony of 2K’s attempts at story-based MyCareer gameplay is that it’s the best gameplay and the bar-none worst storytelling.

Whenever the legendary Spike Lee passes, his Livin Da Dream contribution to NBA 2K16 will, hopefully for his sake, have been erased from history by Russian hackers. I own 2K18 and played 2K16 with a friend where I got to witness a handful of scenes of how awful Livin Da Dream was. The writing was atrocious. The voice acting was garbage. The mode itself restricted players to play only a handful of NBA games in their first season. The whole point of MyCareer mode was that you could play as one player on an NBA team through an NBA season.

Adding the story element was to enhance the MyCareer experience by allowing emotional investment to your player’s career. Now the question this article poses is, is that investment needed? How far should game developers go to achieve this if an emotional investment is the intention? A big problem Career modes have in sports games is eventually the player runs out of a willingness to play the game mode. The hardest part of getting through a career mode is getting to a point where you feel like you can retire. The only time I’ve ever done this was in Madden 07.

I’ll let Jamieson Cox of The Verge have the last word on Livin Da Dream before we move on to The Neighborhood, “It’s a story that ends in a tragedy you’ll find almost welcome if you react to these characters the same way I did.”

If there’s anything that 2K carried over from Livin Da Dream to The Neighborhood, it’s the shitty characters. Your own player character DJ is a hobbled mess of a human being. DJ’s best friend, B-Fresh, is the sort of person I’d never let near me in real life. The immersion is gone from the jump. DJ is scouted in a streetball game and gets a workout in which he is then signed to an NBA team. The Neighborhood focuses less on narrative-based gameplay, which was a reaction to how terrible Livin Da Dream was, and is more your player playing games and meeting other NBA players to have meaningless conversations.

I’d prefer The Neighborhood’s approach to MyCareer if it could do away with the lacking attempts at comedy. My advice for 2K, if you’re going to add some story to your future MyCareer modes, take it seriously.

Madden 18: Longshot

from USGamer.net

Give me some credit people. I had to do some actual research on this one.

I remember when a former co-worker of mine told me about Madden 18’s story mode. All I remember him telling me was that there’s a Dan Marino cameo and you play a football game in the Middle East. I could imagine that being cool to some people. But I inherently know that I don’t buy Madden 18 for a Dan Marino cameo or to play an exhibition football game in Dubai.

I watched several scenes from Longshot on YouTube, which has a 3-hour supercut of the entire story. Several scenes in, I watched way more than I should have.

To its credit, Longshot was the most inspired attempt at trying to tell a story to evoke a reaction from its player. Longshot is a bizarro version of Invincible. Now just because the attempt at the story was inspired, didn’t mean the result was any good.

Where Longshot ultimately misfires is that it focuses way more on this preposterous journey of quarterback Devin Wade and his last ditch effort to get drafted by an NFL team than actual gameplay. Wade and his friend Colton Cruise are scouted at a combine by some TV executives who have this idea for a show aptly called Longshot. There’s a decent backstory that comes into play and sets the foundation for how the story plays out.

The gameplay suffers the most because you never play in an actual NFL game. This is Madden 18, not Rudy the video game. There is football gameplay but it’s all contrived. There are also massively dull numbing quick-time sections.

WWE 2K18: MyCareer

from 2K.com

Sports… sports entertainment… same difference and I have more ranting to do.

I rented WWE 2K18 for a couple days just to play MyCareer and see if it was worth shilling out $20 for (it’s not).

WWE games are lauded for allowing creative customization, and 2K threw up two hefty middle fingers to casual gamers in this respect. 90% of the game’s contents are locked behind virtual currency. From clothing options to hairstyles to individual wrestling moves. Don’t worry gaming fans, you can use real money to buy more virtual currency.

2K has been making small adjustments and improvements to the WWE game as a whole and trying to reinvoke some of the vigor from WWE games of the distant past that were heavily praised. The sad truth is that WWE games from over a decade ago had better-crafted story modes than 2K’s effort this year.

There’s a hilarious inner fourth wall debate the game is constantly having with itself. 2K never truly goes all in on the fact that wrestling is a scripted business and you’re a performer working a job. 2K half-asses the concept and while MyCareer can be fun in stretches, the loading times are so unbearable I gave up playing early on.

The match rating system is still stupid and broken. I had a match go up a full star for ‘dramatic moment’ when I kicked out at 1. When I kicked out at 2, the match rating didn’t go up at all.

Mario Tennis Aces

Relax. I’m kidding.

The Verdict

I don’t see a world in which a sports video game pulls off a Scorcese-esque story mode and it’s universally praised for being a fun mode in the game. Gamers aren’t flocking to stores to play Madden, NBA 2K, or FIFA because they’re excited for the next visual novel. We like to play simulated versions of professional sports.

I don’t want to dismiss the idea of a cinematic mode completely, because there are always flashes of gameplay value. It’s almost essential for WWE 2K to get this aspect of the game right because it’s a game based on a television show. As for the actual sports, I prefer the NBA 2K approach of melding together the MyCareer experience with occasional cutscenes but gameplay focused. It’s a streamlined experience that allows the player to develop his own story. As I said before, 2K screwed up by adding too much unnecessary nonsense. If 2K and EA Sports really vied for a more authentic story, there’s true potential.

Authenticity is the name of the game, but it’s a monumental task for a game developer to juggle. How can a player’s experience feel authentic if we have to pre-determined scripted sequences?

My ideal sports game has a storyline that branches but stays compact enough it doesn’t stretch real-world logic too thin. If these story-modes whiff on anything, it’s the inability to account for real-world logic. It’s another aspect of the game that’s hard for a developer to truly predict.