Franchise Modes Are Too Easy, That's a Problem

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It might come off as a bit “elitist” to say franchise modes are too easy, but I do think a lack of challenge impacts every major franchise mode in our modern sports games. I don’t think it’s ever been that hard to rebuild or create dynasties in franchise modes — outside of the OOTPs and Football Managers of the world — but it’s something that feels more pronounced these days for a couple reasons.

For one, it’s not the early 2000s anymore, and so the novelty of a franchise mode is sort of behind us. Even as good as some of the franchise modes were in the early to mid 2000s, part of why they were so good was because anything new that was added was fresh. Many of us experienced minor leaguers in a baseball game for the first time in MVP Baseball 2004. Bringing that sort of realism and depth to a mode is always appreciated, and when it’s fresh, it almost doesn’t matter how well it’s actually implemented.

Now that we’ve had these modes in our lives for decades, we’re more picky and still looking for something new. But one of my big issues is that as some of this depth is added, we seem to be eschewing the difficulties that come with being a general manager. These layers of depth are not creating a situation where a franchise mode is really any harder to conquer than it was back in 2000.

We’ve always had House Rules to try and put limiters on our success in franchise modes, but I don’t think it should really be on us to always “nerf” ourselves. I believe there are both “sim” and “arcade” ways we could make franchise modes more difficult, and so that’s what I want to talk about today.

The Sim Ways To Harden Up Franchise Mode

Let’s start with the obvious that if the gameplay is easy, then none of this matters. For the most part, this means I’m mostly ignoring gameplay because it is its own issue. I’ll talk about things that are gameplay-adjacent, but really if you play on Rookie or just find the game too easy, yes, nothing is going to make it too hard to win titles in franchise mode.

Ratings Do Matter

That said, I believe the single biggest thing we can do to make franchise modes harder is make ratings matter more. Now, this is a complex issue because every game is different. A game like Madden only has to worry about NFL players, while a game like The Show, NHL, or EA FC has to worry about way more minor leaguers and players in lower leagues. What this does in games like The Show is compress the ratings scale more, which is bad. Players in the majors are not going to be in the 50s or lower because then where would they be when in the minors?

Still, the gulf between Aaron Judge and your typical Double-A outfielder is wide — and that should be reflected in every way. The problem is while Judge might be a 95 overall, that minor leaguer is still going to be around a 50 overall or so at worst. We leave half the ratings scale off the table, and that’s before we consider how much value is provided by a 7+ WAR player versus a replacement-level player.

Madden has less of an excuse to not create larger gaps between Patrick Mahomes and Trey Lance (again, there’s no NFL minor leagues to worry about), but we also know ratings aren’t all that matter. We have badges/traits/etc. that tie into ratings in many of these games, and all of that goes into the ratings soup. We also know someone with top-end speed can be a 50 overall and still be really effective in these games because stuff like awareness isn’t relevant when you’re controlling the action.

Point being, more goes into a rating than just an overall, but we don’t use enough of a range for most of the individual attributes either. So, yes, we need to stop worrying so much about overalls and more on how these players play their positions, but all these issues are intertwined to some degree.

I want to do an in-depth breakdown on just ratings/attributes at some point for this newsletter, so I won’t go through every single thing I would change about player ratings in sports games right now, but until we use the entire range of ratings and figure out how to translate that to the gameplay, we’re going to have trouble making superstars matter as much as they should in terms of their value on and off the field.

Salary Cap Woes

Sports games have made lots of strides in trying to implement real salary caps and the rules of the various collective bargaining agreements that form the basis of the financial structures of the games we play. However, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in most of these sports games. Whether it’s a better implementation of small stuff like two-way contracts in NBA 2K to bigger things like the crushing realities of small-market teams in MLB still not being fully realized in The Show, there’s always going to be room for improvement here.

But beyond that, it’s not painful enough in these sports games from a financial standpoint. Franchise modes — whether you’re dealing with a salary cap or not — should be full of painful decisions based on your finances. Even if you’re the Dodgers, there still comes a point where you are making decisions about letting people walk or trading them to avoid paying them.

In short, money does matter in these franchise modes, but it doesn’t matter enough yet.

I think developers are likely concerned about turning people off by having salary cap management turn into a Souls-like where you’re always making tough decisions and having lots of bad outcomes, but that’s the life of a GM. At some point, if your team is good enough, the checks always come due and you can’t pay them anymore. Or, in the case of a team like the Pirates or the Marlins, even if you’re not good, you can’t retain your own guys or go out and get lots of help.

It’s not all downside either, part of the fun of a franchise mode is trying to figure out ways to replace value. Moneyball is full of great scenes, and of them involves the discussion around how to replace runs.

We get excited to figure out ways to replace outgoing seniors in College Football 25, and as much as it sucks to lose a superstar, much like a Souls-like, the challenge can be part of the fun if we stop running from it. Make money matter more and make cap casualties a bigger part of the experience.

Trades Are A Virus

Much like House Rules for our franchise modes, we can keep our own teams from making bogus transactions by having checks and balances in place for how we do trades. But short of 30-team control, trades are a sort of virus that find weaknesses in the player evaluation system and screw up squads throughout franchise modes. In effect, the issue is more with other teams than your own when it comes to difficulty here.

On top of that, it’s not the same issue that impacts trades in sports games every year. For example, this year in The Show one of the problems is that teams care so much about positional depth that they’ll make bad trades from positions of strength to fill perceived gaps elsewhere. In prior versions of The Show, the issue was more not valuing prospects enough overall.

Point being, developers are always dealing with new issues with trades, and as much as you can point to a bad trade like Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis in real life as proof that bad trades happen in real life, it’s not the same reason over and over again for why a bad trade happens in real life. In a video game, it usually is the same small set of reasons for why a bad trade happens, and that means it has a much more obvious universal effect on teams throughout the league.

What I would say here is we should obviously make it an option in every sports game to have to approve all trades. On top of that, I think there are too many trades in most sports games. In most sports, trades are extremely rare. Considering the size of rosters, the number of teams, and a variety of other factors, the amount of trades is minuscule in comparison.

Beyond that, making our own trades should be extremely challenging. It’s far too easy to “win” a trade in most sports games because we just get to keep turning the dial until we get the desired results. We can rack up 15+ draft picks in Madden like it’s nothing.

And, again, I get it — trades are fun to do. Still, the ways we complete them is far too binary. We should get less feedback, not more when doing trades. Don’t tell me why the trade isn’t working for you once we’re in negotiations, and certainly don’t give me 10 tries to make a trade work. Putting your best offer forward right from the start and coming in with an actual plan should be the basis for any solid trade system — not trial and error.

Progression And Regression

I’m going to talk about “arcade” ways to harden up franchise mode in the next section, but I think potential/progression and regression fit in both camps because it’s always hard to say why a player reaches their potential or fails. Yes, the regression monster comes for all athletes at some point when they hit certain age curves, but beyond that, a lot of why some players shine and others fail remains a mystery to an extent.

Either way, we’re talking video games here not real pro athletes, so it should be about what are the most fun and engaging — and challenging — ways to handle these ideas. I’m in the camp that production should be less important to progression and regression than “other” factors because I think the mystery is part of the appeal. Through the years, I find I get really bored in games like Madden where you’re just trying to hit stat thresholds or do other things on the field to gain XP. I personally enjoy a system like the one in College Football 25 way more.

Yes, it may seem weird when your player doesn’t shoot through the roof in overall after winning the Heisman and you don’t get to choose how your players improve, but it is more engaging and ultimately more challenging this way. You still end up creating powerhouses in CFB quite easily, but I would say that’s usually because of how easy it is to recruit players rather than how much players always improve. Plus, the fun of progression in that game is you never really know how good a player will become. You have an idea based on skill caps and their star rating, but it’s never quite a guarantee.

On the other side, I know regression is a tricky topic with sports games because we’ve had plenty of conversations about it being silly when someone comes off a season of hitting 50 home runs and then regresses no matter what due to the aging curve. I get that 100 percent, but usually what happens in these games is there are too many good players rather than too few. I think NBA 2K is the major game that has run into issues with having not enough good players in some versions after X number of years, but it’s usually not a major issue.

In college games, we obviously don’t need to worry about regression in the same way, but I think we need to think about regression beyond just an aging curve. Regardless of whether production plays a major part in the progression model or not, there should be more opportunities for regression. If we can get better for a variety of reasons, we should also be able to get worse for a variety of reasons as well. This means maybe your ratings go down and never recover after a major injury, or maybe you have a bad season and are never as good again. If we add more unpredictability and more uncertainty into these systems, we’re doing more to create potential problems for us on our road to domination.

The Arcade Ways To Harden Up Franchise Modes

I don’t especially like “Be A Pro” modes in any sports game. I like managing full teams rather than one person. What I do think they do well at times though is go beyond the realistic into silly territory. I think we need more “silly” with our franchise modes, and most of that comes back to the people side of things.

Personalities Turned Up To 11

There are plenty of stories of people being difficult in a locker room, and those difficulties can help tank seasons. From Aaron Rodgers to Donald Sterling, owners/GMs/players can all be a reason things are more challenging than they need to be. This is a tricky territory because you’re licensing the rights to these players and can’t just call Aaron Rodgers a locker room cancer or whatever — and you definitely can’t do a Donald Sterling storyline for a variety of very good reasons — but there has to be some leeway here to create complications.

I think the idea of managing a locker room can be a much bigger factor in franchise mode than it is currently. There is the saying that winning cures all and you don’t need to like your teammates, and while that has certainly been true before, you need to lean into the extremes more to make franchise mode more challenging. Every player should have some sort of personality, and we should be balancing those personalities throughout a season.

A “defective” locker room should be a massive detriment for your team. If you amplify personalities and create more drama, you open up more chances for trade demands or ratings that go down and so forth.

I brought up the silliness that can become a part of “Be A Pro” modes, and that’s the stuff like the “ugly” girlfriend in Road to Glory or the off-the-field elements in something like Success Mode in MLB Power Pros.

You have to create friction off the field as well as on the field, so it can’t just be that your QB isn’t throwing your WR enough passes for why the relationship is breaking down. I don’t know if we can really have your star QB getting in hot water with his tight end because he’s banging his girlfriend, but we can certainly have stuff like the offensive line turning on the QB because he didn’t get them Christmas presents.

It would have to be a little silly rather than serious to get around some of the licensing issues, but there’s plenty more ways to create tension in the locker room. These moments of drama create so many more ways to nullify your strengths out on the field, and while that might be a little absurd, it’s in pursuit of more challenge.

Superstars Should Hold You Hostage

There is a big difference between Tim Duncan and Allen Iverson in terms of how easy it is to manage their personalities — and how much teammates like them. On top of that, one was way easier to keep happy than the other. I think superstars in video games should usually trend towards Allen Iverson.

Superstars make franchises and keeping them happy should be a top priority. To some extent, you should always be their hostage because they’re what matters for your bottom line and your win total. Every season you should have to be focused on meeting their demands or making them happy in some way. Contracts exist and all that, but their happiness level impacts all elements of your team. If your superstar is unhappy, then the team isn’t going to function properly.

In an NBA game, it’s more pronounced and more of a ticking time bomb for something really bad happening to your franchise, but even in the NFL, it’s a major issue when one of your biggest players suddenly wants out. For example, what would you have done in the Myles Garrett situation, and how cool would it be to have lots of those moments in your franchise mode?

Bottom Line

Time matters and developers probably want us to be able to improve teams on an expedited schedule, but we should stop pretending it only takes 2-3 years to turn the White Sox into a World Series contender. Creating more challenging franchise modes will ultimately incentivize people to play longer or figure out more ways to compete and win.

We shouldn’t just look to “realism” for how we solve these problems either because video games are never going to perfectly mimic real life — nor should they. If we had to perfectly read out NFL defenses every snap, we’d never win, but in the same way, developers can create more challenges on and off the field to make it so it isn’t just how good or bad we are at completing passes for why we ultimately succeed.