All I'm asking for is that the same research, care, and admiration for the sport be put into making the Fight Night games as EA has put into the other games in their Sports lineup. FIFA is a fantastic football/ soccer series of games. The players are realistically attributed, the gameplay mechanics are realistic, and there are multiple levels of play to the game. You aren't just controlling the players on the pitch... before and after each game, you're plotting out viable transfer deals, negotiating loans and sales with other teams, dealing with injured players, plotting out your starting lineup while organizing your substitutes and reserves... and it all happens in realistic seasons based on a calendar that could very well be a real one. FIFA is a great example of a realistic sports game, and the people behind that should be applauded for the research and planning that has gone into that game. Fight Night is a farce, and I've never once met a serious boxing fan who thought differently.
They don't need to take all of the blood out to make it a far superior game... just a lot of it. There's literally millions of boxing fans around the world, and I'm positive there's a market for a proper, realistic boxing game... no one has tried to make one yet, and that's really the
only problem. A rundown of things they could have (and should have) done better:
* The scoring system is autrocious in the FN series. In real boxing, each fighter starts out with 10 points per round (in a 10-point must match, which the FN series attempts to use). If one fighter dominates the other but doesn't knock them down, the dominant fighter keeps 10 points, and the lesser fighter gets 9. If a fighter is knocked down, they're score is reduced to 8. If they get knocked down twice, it goes down to 7. If a fighter is knocked down three times in a round (and that match is not using the 3-knock down rule wherein if a fighter is knocked down three times it becomes a technical knockout), then there score becomes 6, and it continues down to 1 (although I've never seen a fighter get a score of less than 4 and live to tell about it). This is a basic, universally-known scoring system that the Fight Night crew either refused to implement, or didn't know enough about the sport to implement.
* They should have (and could have) made it harder to knock down an opponent. Even on the highest level of difficulty, I have to work pretty hard to finish a fight without knocking out my opponent.
* A realistic scheduling system would make the game 5,000 times better. The game shouldn't choose who I fight... I should. I should have a manager and an agent advise me on who I should fight and why, but in this game, you end up with a small handful of potential opponents which is extremely un-realistic. On that note --
* A realistic ladder system. If I start out at the bottom of the ladder I should have to work like hell to get to the top and become the champion, and then I should have to work to stay on top. Round 2 did this exceptionally well, but they obliterated that feature in Round 3. Why? Also, in Round 2 (the better of the two games), you couldn't select who you wanted to fight (which brings me back to the previous problem I have with the series). It limits you to a set range of fighters, and then it limits you further to fighters the game selects. You can choose a fighter to challenge from that very limited range of fighters, and in real life, that doesn't happen.
* The option to hire and fire an actual corner crew. You should get to hire a trainer, a cutman, an agent, and a manager... in the very least. And there needs to be a far better selection than two or three people for each. One trainer is good for speed, another is good for strength, the third is bad at both... that is one of the laziest systems I've ever seen in a sports game.
I could go on and on for hours, days, maybe even months, about all of the things they could have done to make the game more realistic and thus appealing to both serious boxing fans and people who just want to beat on other people. I don't think it's too much to ask for that the people behind Fight Night work toward making it a proper simulation, and put as much work into it as the FIFA or Madden teams do.
"In an interstellar burst, I'm back to save the universe"
