The sports and racing genres are two of the biggest in the games industry. Each year we’ll get the juggernauts of FIFA, NBA 2K and Forza dominating their respective scenes while others fall by the wayside. However, in recent years entrants from both genres have faced competition in this category from other teams. Teams that don’t quite have the same budget as the big hitters but still get a lot of attention for providing alternate sports games that do things a little differently.
In fact our voting for this category is quite surprising in itself, and you’ll see what I mean when you see the runners up list below. First though a winner must be crowned.
It’s actually quite fitting to have Rocket League win this category, due to its blend of football and cars. In fact Rocket League recently expanded its sports roster to include hockey for a limited time this Christmas, making it a sports game that can evolve more than most others. With the likely inclusion of additional pitches that will have all sorts of terrain changes, Psyonix will be able to throw out all sorts of surprises.
The great thing about Rocket League is that it can either be a solo effort or a team sport depending on your mood. You can have a one on one wheelabout against someone else, or be part of a team and work together to both attack and defend the nets. You don’t have to be particularly good, since the unpredictable nature of a Rocket League fixture simply makes the game fun to play.
Rocket League has managed to beat games like FIFA, Need For Speed, Forza, and NBA 2K because it has injected something refreshing into this category. It’s a game that is incredibly easy to get into, has a lot of personalisation, and can’t be called predictable. More importantly it has that fun factor in spades, and Psyonix has plenty of room to experiment with different ideas to change what players can compete in within Rocket League.
Runners up in alphabetical order:
- FIFA 16
- Forza Motorsport 6
- OlliOlli2
- Project Cars
Avenger
You are kidding me. There’s enough games in both categories, sport and racing, to split them up. No surprise for who the winner is then when you combine the categories like that.
Tuffcub
Racing is a sport, isn’t it? I’m not trying to be pedantic, I know bugger all about these things, but F1 appears on BBC sports so is a sport, right?
Avenger
Yeah it is a sport, and I can live with not one single racing game winning a ‘Sports game of the year’ award, but when ‘racing’ is cheekily put into the title, it seems like it’s been mashed up for the sake of it. Plus I think racing deserves its own category because games like NFS and the Crew aren’t really sport, but they are racing. The same goes for that wipeout style game that was reviewed the other day.
Forrest_01
Personally, I don’t class anything where no physical exertion takes place as a ‘sport’ – To me, driving is not a sport, it’s an activity (to some, a necessity). Same as I don’t believe darts is a sport, it is a game. A competitive one, but a game. To me at least.
Not disagreeing with anything, or trying to say BBC sports is a lie, but to me, things like the above will never be a sport.
But I happen to agree with the other posters in that these particular categories should be split, as they are quite honestly very different when you look at the games that could populate the lists.
Tomhlord
“I don’t class anything where no physical exertion takes place as a ‘sport’.” I agree, that’s exactly why racing is a sport.
freezebug2
@Forrest An understandable misconception that a lot of people will have towards Motor Racing but just to quote from the Formula1.com knowledge base.
Formula One drivers are some of the most highly conditioned athletes on earth, their bodies specifically adapted to the very exacting requirements of top-flight single-seater motor racing.
All drivers who enter Formula One need to undergo a period of conditioning to cope with the physical demands of the sport: no other race series on earth requires so much of its drivers in terms of stamina and endurance.
The vast loadings that Formula One cars are capable of creating, anything up to a sustained 3.5 g of cornering force, for example, means drivers have to be enormously strong to be able to last for full race distances.
The extreme heat found in a Formula One cockpit, especially at the hotter rounds of the championship, also puts vast strain on the body: drivers can sweat off anything up to 3kg of their body weight during the course of a race.
More subtle iterations will apply to other disciplines obviously.
TSBonyman
I think it probably would have been better if the categories were split too.
spurs78
If you don’t believe there’s no exertion in driving f1 cars you have a lot to learn fella, they lose about two litres of sweat per race!
TSBonyman
I’m not arguing that Racing isn’t a Sport – it’s just traditionally they are classed as seperate genres in gaming. ie. If you go on the PS store they are categorised like that, cross-over titles like Rocket League occupy both genres because they are partially one genre and partially another – but not categorically either one imo.
Which is fine, the only issue comes when you start comparing the different classes of the genre.
In my opinion, the ‘racing’ aspect of Rocket League is tenuous at best – there’s as much racing in FIFA.
Aran quite fairly explained the reasoning behind the decision – i just have a different opinion.
Stefan L
The decision was pretty simple on my end, that Game of the Year categories are always compromises, which is why the Action Adventure genre has come to be an all-encompassing behemoth for the last few years. It still is.
We’ve actually got more categories than we’ve had before this time around, and so I decided to fall back on precedent and, as we did a couple years ago, have sports and racing together. They’re motorsports, if you will, even when the games present the racing as being part of a counterculture underworld.