Sports Games

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• Gameplay DesignNovember 20, 2020
• Hybrid GamesNovember 12, 2020
• Action GamesNovember 7, 2020

Sport genre games are usually based on their real-world counterparts such as football, rugby, and cricket. These will appeal to fans of the real sports and will share some of the same rules. Real world sports games are often licensed to use the teams and player of their specific sport. Some games aim for maximum realism (e.g. FIFA) but others go for a more arcade-like approach to its gameplay. However, there are games that are based on entirely fictional sports. These will often borrow features from real sports, such as the goalposts in Rocket League, but will include features that may not be safe or possible in real life (e.g. cars driving up the walls of a stadium and flying around).

One key feature to making a sports game, a sports game is opponents. Most sports games allow you to play against real or AI (artificial intelligence) opponents. In earlier games, AI opponents were too predictable and could easily be beaten so some developers tried to overcome this by making the AI faster or more powerful, but this was often seen as “cheating”.  This was particularly obvious in racing games, where AI players would always stay just behind the player regardless of how well the player is driving. Some examples of racing games are Mario Kart and Formula 1.

The sports genre includes games which require skill to win against your opponents, which is also required in real life sports. An example of this is in Rocket League as you are required to have more skill than your opponent(s) to score more goals than them to win the game. The player would need to use their skills in different aspects of the game such as defending, attacking, their awareness and more.

Rocket League is a game based on football, but with rocket powered cars. The player needs to use their rocket powered cars to hit a ball into their opponent’s goal and score points to win the round. The game uses a trading feature which can bring more excitement to the game. The players can buy keys to open crates they have been rewarded with by playing the main football feature of the game to obtain rare items which they can trade with other people.

Another feature in this category is multiplayer. Before the Internet became widely used and was fast enough, all multiplayer games were local (e.g. playing against each other on the same console), but as technology developed over time, online multiplayer became possible. Online multiplayer games allow access to many more players but can be affected by poor network connections (lag) and are more susceptible to cheating. There are also safeguarding issues when allowing younger players to play online with total strangers. Local multiplayer games can often be more sociable as you are in the same room but does mean sharing the same screen so players can see each other’s view. For most games’ genres, online multiplayer became the preferred method of playing, however local multiplayer is still popular for many of the sports titles.