Crappy sports video game commentary

[thesloppy]

I've been playing a lot of NBA Playgrounds in the last week, which is a fantastically fun game, but the play by play is horrible. It's not even the announcers themselves (Ian Eagle and EJ 'The Mayor' Johnson'), as much as shoddy production/coding/QA. It of course suffers from the standard shortage of play-by-play content in general, but also occasionally triggers positive responses for missed/shots dunks, has multiple bits which reference the same specific, odd topics (ball-room dancing? My mama's pride.), and you can practically hear EJ struggling to read/emote someone else's written BS on a few snippets.

To my memory sport video game commentary has always been horrible, which prompted some questions:

• Has there ever been a game with good commentary, and enough of it to carry you through significant repeated play? What's your favorite?
  
• Shouldn't we expect more? I imagine these dudes are getting paid at least tens of thousands of dollars for what the results say can't possibly be more than a day's work. Who set that standard, and why does the industry sustain it? Couldn't a full two week's of dedicated work produce something infinitely better? These guys aren't billionaire athletes juggling massive training regimes, with hours of practice to account for. Video game producers expect you to play their sports game for literally hundreds of hours, but will provide you with 4 total hours of play-by-play.
  
• How would you define the ideal amount/method of commentary in a modern sports video game?

It seems like if you expect a game to be replayed 100s of 1000s of times ideally it should carry an amount of commentary equal to time spent/expected playing the game (considering down time for time-outs, playcaliing, menus etc.), but that's probably a pipe dream. Realistically I think I'd like to see maybe 3-4X as much commentary as what's standard now, but also with some better AI regarding shit like: normal vs. excited commentary 'modes' and when/why to trigger each. Making exclamations rarer to the point where you may only hear them repeated once every 2-3 games, rather than 2-3 times per game. Most sports games' commentary is stale and repetitive literally half-way through your first game, which has come to be unacceptable for practically any other facet of gameplay, and it seems like it's past time for evolution.

[Groundhog]

NBA 2K is the one sporting title that gets serious playtime from me year after year, and I have muted the commentary team for at least the last 3 or 4 years.

[bhlloy]

NBA 2k is really solid, and I'm pretty sure they are continually adding stuff during the season as well

Other than that not so much. EA games don't seem to have moved forward at all since 2009

[Ajaxab]

This is part of the trap sports game developers and publishers have fallen into. It seems that for most of the genre's history, devs have been trying to create interactive sports television. Incredible amounts of resources have been devoted this interactive sports tv project and commentary seems to be one of the areas where these resources have been allocated.

If we could have devs step out of the interactive sports tv box, we might actually get something different. I wouldn't mind dumping the commentary and all the other resources that go into licensing tv networks for presentation to trade that for some alternative approach. Maybe VR will be that different thing. I'm not sure. But the genre could use a shift in thinking to give us something truly new.

[Marc Vaughan]

On the subject of commentary its fairly hard to do - not least because the games don't unfold in 'real time' but are accelerated meaning its harder to get snappy comments in before the situation passes ..

It's for this reason that the comments are frequently fairly 'banal' apart from when there is a definite delay/pause in action - ie. a shot is taken/foul occurs etc. ...

Where they try to do 'dynamic' commentary otherwise they often need to clip it to move onto something more important, how they interrupt this could be improved and make a good difference in some games feel imho.

PS - My experiences are nearly exclusive to soccer games, PES and FIFA ...

[Kodos]

**Bam!**

[nilodor]

I really enjoy NBA2K's commentary, it's pretty interesting and doesn't seem to be too repetitive. I actually like having the different commentary teams. I thought they would be pretty thin but it's actually been pretty good. I'd like to see a little more contextual stuff, more knowledge of league history (e.g. you've just won the championship, it deserves more discussion than they have at the home opener the next season.)The commentary around cpu generated players or moved franchises is pretty poor. I think there could be some generic commentary around the player archetypes (playmaker, 3-D, etc.) to make it not so thin.

I had a cool moment in NHL a couple days ago where I called a guy up from the minors for his first game, it had a cool little bit on him in the middle of the game and a little discussion when he got an assist in the game later. Little touches like that go a long way to make up for hearing "waffleboarding" a million times.