Over the past few years I have been a staunch supporter of NCAA Football over Madden NFL. EA Sports has truly dropped the ball on both games in multiple ways over this entire generation of consoles (PS3 and 360). Many can blame the glitches and problems on the apparent dependency that developers have on releasing software updates and patches through online interactions. While these kind of ‘hot fixes’ are vital to software (including games) it seems to have left the door open to sloppy development over the course of a year. This isn’t even the biggest problem facing EA’s NCAA Football at this point – it is the college football landscape itself.
In case you haven’t paid any attention to college sports over the last few years, there have been teams moving from conference to conference more than Bobby Petrino switches teams (and women). On top of conference changes and re-alignments, the NCAA has recently approved the move to a new playoff system (finally). This is welcome news to the people that still pay attention to the NFL’s minor league affiliate, but for gaming fans it is a dreaded issue that is too far into the future to allow them any sort of desire to want to invest in more broken games without any sort of tournament or playoff system for college football gaming. Why waste time and money on a game that changes faces so often?
College football is a joke in many ways but when it comes to the hypocritical billion dollar deals for the services of ‘amateur’ athletes with coaches that make millions of dollars a year over networks like ESPN – why is it that the gaming end of things is so strangely broken as well? College football is a farce and NCAA Football is a digital farce that continues the NCAA’s views that making money off of college football is paramount. The broken BCS system is just as broken in the video game as it is in real life but now there are gamers clamoring for something worse than fixing issues that plague a game… they want options.
Gamers want to edit players, names, conferences, polls, ranking calculations, awards, coaches, CPU intelligence and many other facets of their game. This is all simply because that whenever EA Sports slaps together their annual sports titles they are constantly closing off customization more than opening it to users for a better experience. Maybe they should take a look at how much games like Counter-Strike can become huge in the PC market – all because of modders and an active user base.
NCAA Football 13 went from $60 to $45 rather quickly this year. It was as if it was a hyped up movie that hit theaters for a week before going to DVD and your local Big Lots bargain bin. EA Sports has proven over this generation of consoles that there is no level too low for them to stoop in terms of laziness and development to keep your money coming in with their effort consistently falling. This isn’t to say that Madden NFL doesn’t have issues mind you (we will hit that later) – but with the NCAA season coming to a close and many college football fans looking to next year we must wonder – what is EA going to do in NCAA 14 that will keep gamers from thinking “I’ll just wait until next year – if at all.”?
Let the 2K College Football rumors begin.
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