Introducing Soccer Relegation to American Football

[bonannogiovanni]

Kotaku.com interview where Rob explains how relegation and promotion works in the game's unique "Road to Backbreaker" mode.

[ezio]

Good read.

I can't wait to play this mode

[Primal80s]

I'm for it. I think that it gives the gamer something to aim at. Taking a bottom league team and building them up to a top-level club will be fun in video game terms. I hope it's not as corrupt and monopolising as the real soccer league system though, which sees one of four certain teams win the league year in, year out. A team in the league below has practically no chance of ever being top of the top league because of the vicious cycle that goes something like this:
Team A wins. Team A gets the biggest prize money for winning. Team A buys the best players in the world (no salary cap in European soccer).
Team B come middle of the league. Team B gets less money. Team B buys less good players. Team B comes around the same place in the league.

Every now and again the cycle is momentarily broken. A wild card Team C with a great manager and decent players might make it into the top 4 briefly. The top 4 respond by buying the best players from Team C usually. Then Team C goes down.

< /rant>

I look forward to working my way out of the cellar of the BB leagues and up to the top flight anyway. I think this is a game that gives a great self-satisfaction (in my opinion) when the user does something right. I feel great just throwing complete passes, knowing I picked the right play and the CPU hasn't decided to punish me with a scripted sequence I have no control over. Erm. I am ranting a bit again. I'll just go over here for a while...

[NoDakHusker]

I've always wondered what American sports would be like if they had the relegation system. I love that system(and one of the many reasons I love soccer) so I'm very excited to get into Road to BB.

[dmick4324]

Cool, definitely going to give this mode a try.

[MikeRo72]

Blitz the league I and II had this relegation system as well.

[mestevo]

I wonder how well your standings are communicated in the game, or if at the end of the season you just kind of appear in a new league with little warning, kind of like making the playoffs in other games, with just a quick popup box saying 'your team made (or didn't make) the playoffs' and that's it... no hype running up to it, nothing when you've clinched, etc. Blitz the League was unique in how story driven it's league was (in addition to the overemphasis on abilities and injuries, true to the Blitz name), but it was very prominent how many games to go until your team advanced to the next league.

Nothing new in this article, but hopefully it's the first of many over the course of the next few days.