When Fog of War Goes Wrong in a Sports Game

The “fog of war” is most commonly associated with Civilization or any number of real-time strategy (RTS) games like Advance Wars, Supreme Commander, or any number of Red Alert titles. You might think you don’t know what the “fog of war” is since you don’t play those sorts of games, but you’ve probably noticed it in sports games even if you never thought about it.

The fog of war is essentially an information deficit that is used to create more uncertainty in your head. That uncertainty gives way to more game mechanics, and it also creates mystery because you don’t know what your enemies are up to. If you’ve drafted in any major franchise mode or recruited players in College Football, then you’ve experienced the fog of war.

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To clear the fog of war when scouting players in College Football, you spend some of your limited pool of recruiting hours and slowly learn the attributes and whether they’re potentially a gem or bust. You have coaching abilities and assistants that can make scouting cost fewer hours — if you invest in those abilities — and there are tactical reasons to continue to scout or simply save your recruiting hours for other recruiting actions.

In Madden or MLB The Show, you have scouts that you utilize in order to discover similar sorts of information about potential draft prospects. Regardless of how you feel about the NFL or MLB draft and how fun the drafts are in those video games, you can at least say there is a logical reason for the “fog of war” to exist. The fog of war has real life comparisons to scouting (how much tape have you crushed, have you seen these guys in person, is this athlete going overlooked at a small school?), and it’s also a game mechanic with upside/downside depending on how you spend your hours to try and get important information that can help you best all those other teams out there.

While I would argue this sort of fog of war can be a bit of a crutch that hides how shallow the draft experience is otherwise in some games, it’s clear that the fog of war can still be a fun game mechanic.

Adaptive AI Is The Worst Sort Of Fog Of War

However, it’s not a fun game mechanic when the developers are simply using the “fog of war” to hide how they’re implementing certain features. It’s even worse when there are no explainers to tell us what something is doing in a game.

Now, there is a fine line between telling gamers too much and too little. If you tell us too much, we might simply exploit a system because now we know how it works and all the magic is gone. On top of that, part of the fun with any game is discovering how everything works, and you never need to do that if the developers just tell you how to win.

If you knew that doing XYZ would allow you to win every time, some of us would have the willpower to not do it, but others would not have that power and the game would ultimately be ruined. After all, this is how “cheese” plays and such propagate. One person figures something out, and then that person tells the world, and then all the sudden you have fresh nano blitzes, one-play touchdowns, and so on and so forth.

Still, telling us too little has negative consequences as well. Adaptive AI is something that EA has coined as a game mechanic within the Realtime Coaching (RTC) engine that drives AI playcalling, which is most notably in its College Football game. RTC got good reviews last year in terms of how it helped AI opponents adapt to what you were doing on the field to make things more challenging and fun. I think in order to not confuse us (and keep some of the “magic” sealed away from us), EA tried to explain how the RTC works by simply going over how the AI would react and adapt to us within this engine. This was a perfectly defensible thing to do and likely the right thing to do.

The issue, even last year, is that EA didn’t do enough to explain where adaptive AI would and would not be in effect. In last year’s CFB 25, there was an Adaptive AI setting for your coach that could be set to one of three values (aggressive, conservative, balanced). This year there are 9 settings you can set the Adaptive AI slider to for your coach. EA went all of last year and the early part of this year without ever officially addressing what the slider means. Now, context clues would seem to imply it only matters for your coach and how he calls plays when you’re not playing the game, but I can see how others could interpret it to mean how other teams would play against you because EA told us that adaptive AI was driving the RTC.

With CFB 26, this lack of information has caused rumors and conspiracies to run rampant among some dedicated franchise mode players, which is a part of the OS audience. Some firmly believed it did change how other teams played against you (whether you played the games or not). It was clearly getting out of hand, so EA finally came out this past week and explained what the Adaptive AI coaching option does in the Edit Coach screen. It does only matter for simulated games, and each option does do something different. This is information we should have always had available to us in the game.

We should not need to guess what Adaptive AI, or Offensive Aggressiveness, or Defensive Aggressiveness means. We should be guessing how the AI is thinking to stop us, but we shouldn’t need to guess where it’s in use and not in use. I believe this issue was only exacerbated by two other issues in some sports games.

Unintended Consequences

Since we now have PC sports games again from EA, we can see under the hood enough at times to see certain things do change the gameplay even if EA doesn’t say anything about it. For example, tweaking certain gameplay sliders in Madden does change the core gameplay in ways EA likely does not intend because EA also has “gameplay styles” we can use. If you change a gameplay slider, that can change the playstyle of AI even though we’re not able to see that with our eyes in these menus — we only know this because some folks dug around in the PC version of Madden to see what values were changing “under the hood” unbeknownst to us. And even if you don’t believe that’s happening, this same thing can also happen when the gameplay slider itself is flipped and actually works the reverse way you think it would when you lower or raise it. Video games are weird and hard to develop, and it’s absolutely possible that stuff like this can happen without developers realizing it or ever planning for it to happen — this is why bugs exist.

Point being, this creates uncertainty because you think you’re just changing one slider value, but in effect it could be impacting way more than that. This causes users to essentially play a never-ending game of Wack-A-Mole with their sliders and lose their minds in the process while then assuming this sort of “under the hood” stuff is possible everywhere. You can see how this would lead someone to believe changing a slider that should only impact “simulations” could possibly impact far more than that.

Hard To Reach Information

With CFB 26, EA was very excited to explain how they implemented far more coaching styles to coincide with real coaches being in the game for the first time (and the same stuff is being touted for Madden 26). This is probably why there are now nine Adaptive AI coaching settings, and again, it’s easy to think with nine settings available that it must do something during games we play since all these real coaches are supposedly acting different from one another somehow. The conspiracies that popped up could have been halted by EA reacting more quickly to the discussions that popped up, but they also could have been quelled by simply allowing us to see the Edit Coach info more easily. This is the other issue that I believe hurts some sports games.

There is Play Now information and there is franchise mode information. One is sealed behind a wall far too often (the wall being the game mode itself) and hard to access, and that is the franchise mode information. How many times have you wanted to look for development trait info, contract info, or various information on a player only to realize that stuff is only accessible in franchise mode? We can so easily access roster information in most sports games when it relates to “play now” information like standard attributes, but we’re not given the same grace when it comes to information that impacts players way more within franchise modes.

Adaptive AI falls into that category. You can’t even see the Edit Coach screen anywhere except in dynasty mode, and even in dynasty mode you can’t see the setting for the coach unless you use that coach. The inability to easily see what each coach’s default Adaptive AI setting was set at means we had to go through the extended process of starting a dynasty and then selecting individual coaches just to see the Adaptive AI setting for that coach. Folks could have way more easily tested theories out if they had the ability to quickly see all the coaches and their information. Instead, since it takes such a long time to see even one coach, it was never really worth doing. On top of that, there’s not an easy way to test this stuff because you can’t change any coach’s Adaptive AI setting in Play Now to test things out anyway.

The bottom line is you can absolutely have information overload in a video game that overwhelms users and confuses them more than it helps them. Nevertheless, you can’t keep them in the dark or not give them access to basic details, especially when you can toggle those options and theoretically “break” the game by toying with them. Give us the means to more easily see basic info for all modes, and don’t shroud gameplay options in darkness when we can turn those mystery dials ourselves.

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

-Chase