We live in a very polarized world. Black or white. Republican or Democrat. Rich or poor. We are a society of extremes where the terms “gray area” and “middle ground” are foreign concepts.

The same can be said of sports videogames as well. As developers and publishers look for more ways to make their games appealing to “casual” sports gaming fans, the stage is set for an epic battle between “arcade” and “sim” gamers. While the casual gamers make up the vast majority of the market, any attempt to make the game more simple and accessible for these players is met with fierce resistance by the hardcore crowd.

So, who wins? Should developers cater to the casual fan, or the hardcore?

It’s time us to step outside of our “all-or-nothing” mentality and understand that it is possible for a game to please both audiences. Yes, that’s right -- an experience that both arcade and sim players can enjoy, all on one disc.

How?

One word: options.

No, not the Pat-White-to-Steve-Slaton kind of options. I’m talking about the ability to turn things on and off, the ability to fiddle with settings, the ability to decide how I want my game to play.

...we’ll even do all the work ourselves -- we’re called “hardcore” gamers for a reason

I think I speak for my fellow hardcore-gaming types when I say we don’t expect perfection out of the box. We understand that the typical casual gamer would like to come home from buying Madden, pop in the disc, and pound the CPU 62-0 again and again while never even contemplating touching a slider or changing the difficulty level.

If that’s your idea of fun, more power to you.

But for those of us searching for a different kind of experience, give us the ability to create it. Hell, we’ll even do all the work ourselves -- we’re called “hardcore” gamers for a reason -- by tweaking sliders for hours, days, even weeks on end. The only work required on the developer’s end is implementing the ability for all gamers to substantially change how the game plays.

Hardcore fans have no problem staring at screens like this one for hours customizing games.

Give us sliders that actually work. I, and many others, have been harping on this for a while now, but it bears repeating. If I set the interception slider to zero in Madden or NCAA, it should be impossible to intercept the ball. If I maximize this slider, I should be consistently hauling in 10-15 interceptions a game. Similarly, if I set the offensive holding penalty slider to 100, I want holding to be called on every single play. Yes, the results at the extremes would be very extreme, but that’s exactly the point: having this kind of range gives the users the ability to adjust the game to their liking, whether that is ridiculously arcade, hyper-realistic, or anything in-between.

A lot of the ideas proposed by hardcore gamers that would make sports games more realistic have been shot down by developers...

Give us more options. A lot of the ideas proposed by hardcore gamers that would make sports games more realistic (bad snaps in football games, bad hops in baseball games, etc.) have been shot down by developers who claim these types of things would “frustrate the casual fan.” Of course they would. Why would any casual fans want to have their head-to-head matchups against their buddies decided by a random high snap that ends a potential game-winning drive? By simply having these random-but-realistic occurrences defaulted to off and including an option to toggle them on, hardcore fans can have these minor details that they have always wanted without disturbing the game for the casual fan.

So what is preventing developers from providing the options that would help sports games satisfy both arcade and sim players? Here are three potential reasons, with my arguments for why they are unjustified:

1. Developers don’t want to jeopardize their casual fan base. As I've previously explained, this is a rather weak excuse. Developers can simply make the default settings arcade-friendly and give those seeking more realism the sliders and options to make it so. Casual gamers probably won’t even notice (or care) that these options have been included and could continue running for 800 yards a game or averaging 70 points a game with Chris Kaman without being affected even a bit.

2. Developers become attached to the game they create and are reluctant to relinquish full control over how it plays. This may sound a bit far-fetched at first, but consider the response of Adam Thompson (OS user OMT), a designer with EA’s NCAA 09 team in this thread, which questions the user’s inability to control the time and weather conditions for offline dynasty games:

Quote:

"This is done on purpose. If we were to allow this, it would be setting the time on your non-conference games. We certainly wouldn't let you set the weather. We want to make it as realistic as possible. You're a football team, not GOD!"

I understand and appreciate Thompson’s desire to make the game realistic, but is there any good reason why someone shouldn’t be able to adjust these things? If I want to play every game in my dynasty in the middle of the night in a driving rain, what should stop me? If that’s what I find fun, I should have the ability to play that way. I don’t ever recall hearing anyone complain about having too many options or too much control.

3. It’s difficult to include these options in the game while maintaining game balance. Since it seems like very few games have ever nailed down the art of providing effective sliders, I’m more willing to believe that they are genuinely hard to program correctly. But there are some examples of games that have done it (try messing with a High Heat tune file or the shooting sliders in 2K’s basketball games) and done it well. A little extra work during implementation would hopefully create effective sliders, which would go a long way towards finally appeasing the hardcore gamers who want to tweak their games to perfection.