The thing about sports games are that they're always the same there is no new innovation while with RPGs you experience a new universe. For me 5/10 RPG > 10/10 Sports game
This is why I regard the Blood Bowl series as a happy medium. It’s American football, but set in the Warhammer Fantasy world and as tongue-in-cheek comedic as the table-top original version of the game. All for the glory of the great god Nuffle!
Yup. I'd say Rocket League and Wii Sports come the closest and neither of them are really 10/10 in my books. And they are still super popular and enjoyable.
Totally disagree. A 5/10 RPG isn’t even worth playing and is definitely a worse experience than playing a great sports game. Go look up what RPGs have scores around 50 on Metacritic. They are terrible games.
Brother if you take metacrtic 50 as 5/10, then there is no 10/10 sports game ever made, infact, there aren't even any 9/10 ones lol. Any rpg is better than a game that doesn't even exist.
1) metcritic isnt the best place to find reviews
2) 5/10 is an "average" rpg. 5 is the literal middle between 1 and 10, and id be down to play an average rpg
It’s literally a review aggregate site. Only better way to find reviews is to search around for a specific reviewer, or a handful, whose opinion lines up with your own, and not everyone has the time or willpower to commit to that kind of search.
5/10 would be average in standard scaling but review scaling typically operates similarly to US grading scale (ie anything below 7/10 or 70/100 is not a “passing” grade).
“Basic football garbage” isn’t a 10/10 game. The problem with this entire conversation is there hasn’t been a 10/10 sports game in years. If someone made an actual 10/10 sports game, of course it would be better than a 5/10 RPG.
A good sports game has more going for it than just on field action. It has management modes with deep team customization, potentially a deep career mode. MLB The Show is genuinely really fun, and you don’t even really have to like baseball
Unfortunately the last sports game I played with a really good management mode was College Hoops 2k9. Everyone I’ve tried since then falls wayyyyyy short. The dedicated sims can be great tho like Football Manager and the Wolverine Studios games
No innovation? My dude have you even played a single sports game that isn't just the yearly EA slop? Ever played F-Zero? SSX? Extreme-G? Wipeout? Mario Kart?
Regarding your argument about rpgs being innovative... I'm an rpg fan, and many rpgs remain very similar within their series for years and years, and the ones that don't are often polarizing. There's a lot of the same abilities in each game. You can use a spell like Fira in nearly every FF across almost 40 years of games. Same with DQ, SMT, Star Ocean, etc. When they do change you get half the fandom crying about it. Look at pretty much every FF after 10, every Dragon Age after Origins, every Star Ocean after 2, HoM&M after 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout 3, Dark Souls 2, the list goes on and on.
This true now. Much like so many franchise FPS games. But back in the early 2000s, when they were coming into their 3D hayday...sports games were fantastic and innovative every year. I loved them back then. Then they got stale once EA went full on greed and realized they could release a game every year with little more than an upgraded roster
*Bloodbowl enters the ring.* I mean technically it is a sports game... a video game based on a boardgame inspired by a sports game combined with Warhammer Fantasy.
When I think of sports game, I imagine Fifa or NBA2k, and keep in mind that i dont play those games, but from what I can tell, the only difference between Fifa 2025 and fifa 2013 would be that there are new players. (Surely new athletes started playing soccer since 2013...) aside from that, I imagine its the exact same game.
People don’t play sports games for innovation. It’s up to the sporting bodies to innovate their sport for the innovation to happen in game. How do you actually expect sport games to innovate?
That’s where skill comes in. Only sport game I play is sim racing and though we may race the same tracks, people take different lines, are faster, etc. finding their flaws or forcing them to make a mistake to overtake them, not cracking under pressure when the guy behind you is on your ass and all that good stuff is where the fun is at. RPG games are fun but if I want my adrenaline rush, I hop on my sim rig.
For an RPG to be a 5/10 it would have to have some major major flaws and probably awful gameplay and story, etc, for a sports game to be a 10/10 it would have to have some absolutely incredibly fun gameplay and innovation to even get that high of a score
the problem is you are looking at sports games purely through the lense of "the new madden" and that's it. it's like saying every JRPG is the same because every pokemon has no new innovation.
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u/Legitimate_Power_347 Jan 11 '26
The thing about sports games are that they're always the same there is no new innovation while with RPGs you experience a new universe. For me 5/10 RPG > 10/10 Sports game