The Little Things That Can Drive You Mad in Sports Games

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We have “the little things” threads on OS for various games, and in those threads members point out small things that are really cool in a specific game. They’re little things because you might overlook them or they’re very specific to one part of the game you might never see.

We tend to avoid doing “crap on the game” threads because they can get out of hand, but a “pet peeve” is the negative version of a “little thing” to me. However, I think it’s a term we throw around a little too loosely at times because a pet peeve shouldn’t be something that seriously impacts your happiness with a game moment to moment. Or, at the very least, it should be something you realize might bother you but won’t bother most “normal” people.

At this point, all the major sports games have been out for some time, which means we probably have pet peeves for all of them. We’ve played them for weeks to months, and this is the time of the year where the malaise can set in as we trek towards the holidays. There is an awareness that these are our sports games for the foreseeable future, so you either accept that or probably get off the train and wait for next year’s games to come around.

I’m staying on the train — at least when it comes to some of the games out now. And with that in mind, pet peeves are just part of the experience.

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That said, I like thinking about the “little annoyances” in these games because they can be very odd, specific, or random. These annoyances can be a lot of things, but I want to be clear that these shouldn’t be major issues.

For example, this week I’ve seen a couple people mention the defensive matchups and defensive settings will revert even after you change them in NBA 2K25. This is an issue that’s been around in various forms for years. While it’s a very specific issue not everyone will notice because you need to control the other team to even change the defensive settings — which most people will not go out of their way to do — this is not a pet peeve. It’s a legacy issue if not just a big issue even if it’s specific to the AI. It’s impacting gameplay in a major way for some people. If I want a team to stop going under screens, I want the setting to stick even if I made the change for the AI myself by switching what team I was controlling for a moment.

So What’s A Pet Peeve? And Which Are Bothering You?

Pet peeves are, well, stupider than that issue. They’re real problems but they’re not real problems. They might annoy you, but they’re not going to be a real reason you stop playing your favorite game. They’re a topic at the bar you bring up with someone when you just want to keep things light.

The pet peeves I’ve been thinking about this week go back to my newsletter from a couple weeks ago when I was talking about whether to restart a dynasty or not in College Football 25.

It maybe took a little longer, but I did restart, and I was reminded again about how goofy some of the coach customization choices are in this game. Cosmetics are absolutely a pet peeve here because they’re not going to change my experience in any major way. I don’t want to create someone who looks like me or whatever, and while I get that is appealing to some people, it’s not what’s going to majorly change the way I feel about dynasty mode.

But if you want to talk about the illusion of choice, look no further than the generic head options in this game. There’s now hundreds of choices! Hundreds! So many! That’s more than ever before in an EA Sports game! Big wow!

I mean look at all those heads!

EA made at least a medium-sized deal out of this before launch because they were clearly excited they had finally been able to do some sort of generative system that gave us more choices than had previously been available in EA Sports games.

But while EA has given us more options than ever for this create-a-coach system, most of the heads look out of place for a head coach. Most of these are the heads for recruits, not head coaches. Need I remind you, I’m a man, I’m 40! (Let the record show I’m not actually 40.)

And even if they weren’t just the generic heads that are also used for the recruits and players in the game, most of the heads are not worth picking. They’re all varying degrees of the same 25-to-35-year-old man, and the ones that get stuck with the gray hair or whatever just look silly with it.

There are no bald people. There are no old people. There are no visors. There are not hats. There is no customizing your facial hair, eyes, or ears There are only various forms of the same group of hairstyles matched together with various skin colors and swapped out facial features. Each generic head is take it or leave it with no in between.

And beyond that, it’s not even worth cycling through all the heads because I’m not even sure how the system is organized. The skin colors change as you go through them, but even that stuff just cycles back around as you go through all the heads.

Still, at least there’s an illusion of choice with the generic heads. You could never make that same claim when it comes to the comical “jersey style” decision.

Two choices? Two!? Do you want to wear a Polo shirt or a jacket? We’re one step away from being full-on Homer Simpson with this lack of choice.

To be clear, I care about the “jersey style” selection even less than the generic heads, but I do want to know why this is even an option in the game. There is no way the original plan was to only have two options. However, if this portion of the feature got cut down to just these two options, was there not a conversation where it was just like “hey, maybe we just don’t do this at all”? And if that conversation did not happen, well, it should have.

Maybe it was harder to remove this aspect completely rather than just leave it in as bare as possible, but it strikes me as odd that you wouldn’t just have the coach be in the Polo if it’s warm out, and then pop him in the jacket when it’s cold out.

And that’s a true pet peeve to me. Whether it’s the generic heads or the jersey style, neither of these things really matter in the grand scheme of things. It makes coach creation less interesting and in-depth, but it’s a bigger deal that time is spent on the Coaching Carousel or the coaching skill trees rather than giving me more than two cosmetic choices for my fresh-faced head coach.

Regardless, these are the sorts of things you start to obsess over or fixate on as you play hour after hour of your favorite sports games. These little things start to nag at you, poke at you, annoy you.

So when I post this newsletter on OS next week, I do hope to hear from some of you because I want to know what’s needling you in your favorite sports game. I think these sorts of things reveal a little something about us and our gaming habits, and I always want to know what’s going on with my fellow sickos.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase