The Worst Part of Every 'Major' Franchise Mode Right Now

Gather around everybody because while today’s newsletter will be about the worst part of every “major” franchise mode, it’s important to first have a little fireside chat about what makes something the “worst” in a video game sense.

However, to discuss the “worst” we must also talk about what makes something the “best” as well. We talk about our favorite sports games all the time, and I think for the most part favorite and best are mostly synonymous with each other. Those terms are interchangeable because those ideas are intrinsically intertwined.

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Alternatively, perhaps it’s a little more like “all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares” as “favorite” makes up a part of the “best” games in our minds, but I think the point still stands.

For me, the “best sports games of all-time” are most easily summed up through four determining factors:

• Do you think about the game when you’re not playing it?

• How fun was it at the time you played it?

• How do you think about it now years later?

• What impact did it have on you?

I think those four things work for video games and most entertainment mediums in the broadest sense, so I mostly use those same factors when thinking about books, TV, movies, and games.

With video games, you might also consider “time spent with it” as a fifth factor, but I think about that more on a yearly basis with my “game of the year” considerations more than my “favorite game of all-time” considerations.

(For example, how many League players do you know who have thousands of hours in that game and are miserable most of the time when playing it?)

Even though all four of those mediums are different in many ways, and the way you create the “best” things in each don’t necessarily translate to each other, the feelings they drum up within you can be duplicated in each medium.

However, the “worst” video game or book or movie you ever watched does not hit those same four factors in a negative way. A video game can be the worst because it’s simply broken, while a movie may be the worst because the plot is wholly incoherent. Neither “works” but the how matters much more when you get to classifying what makes something the worst.

All of this is to say that while I talked about the “non-negotiables” in some of the major franchise modes last week, that wasn’t an article about fixing the “worst” parts of those franchise modes. Instead, it was pointing out things I felt would help make those franchise modes shine in the best way.

If you’re still with me, this means fixing the “worst” part of any franchise mode would not immediately make franchise mode the best it can possibly be either. It’s not a zero-sum game where if I remove the worst part of the shit sandwich it’s now suddenly a tasty meal.

Still, it’s absolutely important to fix the worst parts of something even as you also try to make other things much better. This is why summing up the “worst” part of franchise mode can mean a couple different things when it comes to a video game.

• Something is the worst part because it hides the best parts.

  • For example, if your user interface is terrible and hiding a bunch of deep features that are incredible, then you could argue the UI is the worst part of the franchise mode because it’s hiding good things on top of being terrible to navigate.

• Fixing the worst part could simply make basic features work.

  • For example, if the salary cap breaks by year two and you can’t sign any players, then that could be the worst part because you can’t even play the game past a certain point without every team falling apart.

These are the two biggest factors to consider when trying to sum up the worst part of a franchise mode — or most video games — and that’s how I will be approaching today’s newsletter as we go through College Football, Madden, NBA 2K, MLB The Show, EA NHL, and EA Sports FC.

(I’m just going to be focusing on the team sports, so something like PGA Tour 2K won’t be discussed here because that’s mostly a career mode to me rather than a franchise mode.)

So if you want to take a journey with me into the land of trash before then telling me on Discord whether you agree or disagree with me, then let’s jump into things now and get to chatting about the worst parts of each of these franchise modes.

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