There are lots of sports games that have been released since gaming started. The graphics of each sports game are leveling up! I can assure you that! Try comparing the sports games before and now.
However, even though it is obvious that the graphics of sports games are evolving, some gamers are still not satisfied with that. This is somehow true if you compared the graphics of sports games from open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2. Some categories have better graphics than sports games. Why is this? Why do sports games have bad graphics? Let’s find out!
Why do sports games have bad graphics? The reason why sports games have bad graphics is because sports games are released every year, which leads to developers only choosing to implement 1 or 2 major features per year! Updating the graphics like the graphics of open-world games will take years to complete and be released to people.
Are Sports Games Really That Bad?
Actually, no. Since sports games have different developers, some thrive to make their videogame astounding in the eyes of the people.
There are lots of sports games that you can play. There is Madden NFL if you like football, there is FIFA if you love soccer, and there is NBA 2k if you love basketball.
Lots of options around the category of sports games. Some are not quite interesting while some are addictive. You just choose your poison.
Should Sports Games Be Realistic?
Most of the time, the way a game feels is more important than how real it is. This makes games full of hidden features that give the player an advantage. Whether it’s coyote time in platformers, extra-large hitboxes in shooters, or health-bar tricks, game designers have figured out how to give us the perfect fantasy we all know and love.
But there is one type of story where fantasy and reality clash more than any other: sports games.
Anyone who has kept up with the development of sports games over the last 20 years has heard the argument (and seen the marketing) that the latest game in a series is much more “realistic” than the ones that came before it.
It’s not hard to figure out what this means. If you pick up a game like FIFA 12 and compare it to FIFA 21, the former feels like little more than an arcade game, while the latter screams realistic complexity and difficulty… Compared to, at least.
But it’s not so easy to talk about realism when we’re talking about games. Especially when all you’re doing is moving joysticks and pressing buttons on a controller to simulate a physical activity… In real life, you don’t use a controller to play football.
We want realism because we want to feel like we’re playing our favorite sport at the highest level possible. After all, if you’re crazy about sports during your favorite season, you want to see the biggest plays (and maybe even change history) on TV.
So, a higher level of realism adds a lot to a game because it makes it feel like more of a challenge. Making it feel like each goal, point, or touchdown was earned more.
Even though we want to feel like we are playing a real sports game, especially when the graphics are so good, we have to face the fact that we are not playing real-world sports.
As we sweaty-palm our controllers and try to score the last point before the end of the game, we have to take a step back and realize that all we’re doing is pressing buttons to make our on-screen avatars move in ways that look real. No, you can’t just press circle (or B) to kick a ball, and you can’t just push a stick forward to run.
In this way, it’s hard to talk about how realistic video game sports are because, unless we’re talking about high-end VR simulators like Eleven: Table Tennis, our actions take place in a different reality than what we feel.
This brings us back to where we started, where we talked about how creative development tricks can make us think something is real when they aren’t really trying to be real.
Without a doubt, the people who make sports games use very complicated systems to give you an edge when you play sports online. That could mean being more flexible about where you pass the ball or do a skill move, or even making changes to the difficulty on the fly so that you always feel like you’re facing a challenge you can handle.
As we peel back the layers, it’s clear that sports games use a lot of loopholes to make players feel like they’re playing a realistic simulation of a sport, instead of putting in every detail that would make the game as hard to master as the real thing.
In the end, this leaves us with a question about how we look at things. Where do sports games’ realistic parts come from? Is realism achieved by trying to make a perfect copy of what it’s like to play the sport in real life, including all the physical movements? Or is realism a complex mix of finely tuned game mechanics that make the player feel like the best athlete on the planet?
How Close Are Sports Games To Reaching Their Graphical Peak?
Graphics Might Still Have Room To Grow
You’ve probably looked on the Internet for ways to improve Windows for gaming and speed. It happens a lot, so it shouldn’t be too surprising. The graphics of computer games keep getting better every year, and there are a few reasons why.
With new features like ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, it might seem like computer game graphics have reached their pinnacle. But it might look like the changes that are happening now are slow and not very important. But the world of games could be going in a whole new direction.
Where Ray Tracing Stands
Ray tracing is a way to make virtual environments look like they have optical effects like reflections, soft shadows, depth of field, motion blur, and more. It was first used for computer-made still images. But, over time, it ended up in video games.
It’s not easy to explain how ray tracing works, but the results are easy to see and understand. It’s a way for games to show lighting more realistically. The graphics in games that use ray tracing can be very realistic.
Even though light, shadows, and reflections might seem like the best parts of graphics, ray tracing is a real game-changer that keeps getting better as time goes on.
Virtual Reality Is Still Fancy
It looks like VR games are the new frontier that developers are most interested in. Even though headsets are a bit heavy, they offer a very immersive experience that seems like it would be great for gaming.
With VR, there are also a lot of changes that need to be made to the graphics. For example, common resolutions like 1280 x 720, 1920 x 1080, 1366 x 768, and 1440 x 900 aren’t good enough for VR. This means that developers and engineers have to find ways to make higher resolutions work better. With the rise of cloud gaming, these changes have to take into account the speeds of the connections that can handle these higher resolutions.
There’s also placement and point of view. That is, the people who make games have to make virtual worlds that keep track of where the player is as they move around. With a 360-degree view, developers need to know that players can look in different directions at any time. This makes it hard to tell a story that depends on users seeing certain things.
All of these things push developers to improve on the tech that’s already out there, which means that VR visuals still have a long way to go.
Final Words
To conclude, sports games have bad graphics because they are released every year, which causes developers to only implement one or two major features per year! Updating graphics, such as those in open-world games, will take years to complete and release to the public.
