The Two New Golf Video Games Are Awesome, But One Is the Clear Winner
It’s been nearly a month since EA Sports PGA Tour made its long-awaited return during Masters week on April 7. That means gamers have had ample time to compare and contrast EA’s newest offering with the series that rose up in its eight-year absence: PGA Tour 2K. Having spent the last few weeks bouncing back and forth between both titles, I’m excited to offer this look at how EA Sports PGA Tour and PGA Tour 2K23 stack up.
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Graphics
EA’s producers and marketers spent considerable time hyping their game’s visual fidelity — and they delivered. As you’d justifiably expect from a brand-new, next-gen title that took nearly four years to develop, PGA Tour is far and away the best looking golf sim that’s ever been brought to market. Thanks to EA’s Frostbite engine, LIDAR scans, drone flyovers, Augusta National agronomic data, and old-fashioned conversations with course superintendents, the game’s more than 30 venues provide a genuine sense of place. Because each course has been engineered to play in a slightly different way — with St. Andrews sporting 100-yard rollouts and Harbour Town offering the chance to flag approach shots on spongy bermuda greens — each course has its own identity. These features shine through thanks to the game’s array of shot types, making a round at Bandon Dunes a markedly different experience than one at TPC Sawgrass.
Right now, 2K23 doesn't compete when it comes to how these courses look side by side.
It’s true that 2K’s real strength is in its vast library of user-generated courses, but that’s a credit to the users themselves. Judging studio against studio, the same officially licensed courses present in both games look nothing alike.
Winner: EA Sports PGA Tour
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Gameplay
I’ve been playing golf video games dating back to Tiger Woods ’99, and EA Sports PGA Tour is the first golf sim to ever make me think my way through a round.
PGA Tour features 20 different shot types, allowing players to chart their own way around a given track and to employ some creativity in the process. For years, golf sims have featured standard shots — drive, approach, pitch, chip, putt, usually a flop, maybe a punch — and most every shot in most every round has felt more or less the same. But PGA Tour finally makes a virtual round of golf feel like a real round of golf.
During one of my first rounds at Augusta National, my ball settled over the back of the green at the par-3 4th and I found myself actually thinking through the different ways to save par. Rather than aiming straight at the pin and employing as much spin as possible — as I would in any other golf game I’ve ever played — I opted to aim left, check a low runner into the slope, trundle the ball over the fringe, and watch it work its way sideways toward the hole. As nerdy and granular as this sounds, it’s revolutionary for a golf game and a massive step forward in terms of what it means to be a sim. That, and scorching a 290-yard stinger with a 2-iron is just plain fun.
If there’s a drawback, it’s that PGA Tour isn’t challenging enough. You can win a major in career mode on the hardest settings, with the AI scoring turned all the way up, well before you ever max out your player’s stats and abilities. In part, this is because you’re never really going to hit the ball very far offline. Odd as it sounds, PGA Tour is really a game about shot selection and course management; the execution is a little too baked in.
While 2K23 is a more straightforward experience with fewer options and less in the way of creativity, it will allow you to blow the ball off the planet with a poor swing. The perfect golf video game would likely be found in pairing EA’s shot types with 2K’s swing stick.
Short of that ever coming to pass, EA would benefit from making its own swing mechanic more sensitive and more subject to operator error. Considering PGA Tour’s arcade mode still features the old-school, button-mashing mechanics players will remember from the Tiger games, it makes sense to greatly dial up the difficultly on the harder levels for those interested in an elite sim experience. Introducing wider misses, more scrambling, and more in the way of risk would make PGA Tour’s already significant gameplay advances even more meaningful.
Winner: EA Sports PGA Tour
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Online Play
PGA Tour features daily, weekly and seasonal tournaments on varying difficulties from Arcade to Pro to Tour, giving players a range of competitive experiences. Then there’s head-to-head matchups and social outings, which support live play from up 16 users at once. You can actually see other players on the course and watch their shots in real time. This was a feature in EA’s Rory McIlroy title in 2015, and it returns eight years later, while 2K23’s ranked matchmaking mode still features just one player and one shot at a time.
That said, EA doesn’t offer anything in the way of 2K’s “Online Societies,” which allow groups of users, large or small, to run their own tournaments. You could set up a quick tournament or a short season with a few of your friends, or you could join TGCTours, an online hub for thousands of 2K users that organizes 18 weekly events, organized by settings and skill level. The site features daily leaderboards, a promotion and relegation system, and its own world ranking.
As it stands, EA’s initial online tournament experience is a little too detached. You play on your own, you post a score, and you earn some rewards; but it never really feels like you’re part of an event, playing against other users. In addition to giving users the opportunity to organize their own events, EA would be wise to consider recreating a TGC Tours-like experience on its own servers — grouping the wider community of players by flights. EA will never be able to offer the sheer quantity and variety of courses available available in 2K, but an online career arc would give players something to work toward and a reason to keep playing week after week.
Winner: PGA Tour 2K23
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Course Offerings
Those of your who have read these columns in the past know about my affinity for 2K’s custom course designer. The 2K series was born out of a niche game originally called “The Golf Club,” built solely around golf-course design. Over time, that game evolved, secured the PGA Tour license, changed its name, and eventually put Tiger Woods on the cover.
While 2K has gotten bigger and better over time as a golf sim, the course designer is still the primary reason to pick up this game and to keep playing. Individual users have produced a staggering number of real-world recreations and original designs.
Having spent a month with both games, I feel comfortable telling you — if you’re looking for a PGA Tour sim — to go play PGA Tour over 2K23. And if you’re only comparing what the studios themselves have produced on a course-by-course basis, EA comes out ahead, thanks to superior graphics and gameplay.
But if you’re looking to play Pine Valley or Cypress Point or Royal County Down or whatever course you can think of — you’ll be shocked at what you can find on the game’s servers — you’ll still want 2K23.
Winner: PGA Tour 2K23
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Product roadmaps and future releases
Both PGA Tour and 2K23 release periodic updates with new courses, features and fixes.
2K23 recently added Payne’s Valley and Spyglass Hill to its official stable of courses and will soon debut Pinehurst No. 2.
PGA Tour, meanwhile, will roll out the year’s three remaining major venues — the PGA Championship at Oak Hill, the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club (North), and The Open Championship at Royal Liverpool — in addition to Olympia Fields (North), site of the 2023 BMW Championship, and Marco Simone, home to 2023 Ryder Cup. The producers are also currently working a Ryder Cup gameplay experience, but they are tight-lipped on details.
As for what comes next? 2K has been working on a two-year product cycle, which would theoretically point to a potential PGA Tour 2K25. EA’s producers, separately, took four years to get to this point and are not yet committing to a future timetable. For now, they’ll be updating this version of the game based on gameplay data and player feedback.
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Big Picture
EA Sports PGA Tour has set a new bar for graphics and gameplay. The question is whether the game is deep enough and challenging enough to keep players around after they’ve bested career mode and maxed out their golfer’s RPG progression. My above suggestions related to EA creating its own online career arc and dialing up the difficulty would go a long way to extending this game’s ongoing replay value.
As for PGA Tour 2K, what was the only PGA Tour sim on the market now feels like its been lapped in relatively short order. Sooner or later, the graphics engine is going to need a serious upgrade to even approach what EA is offering.
More to the point, the HB studios team would be well served to focus on what it really means to be a golf sim. Too much of the ongoing development of this game is related to features that either alienate the game's most ardent fans - consumable golf balls - or don’t add gameplay value. Relationships with influencers may be good for marketing and social media presence, but this doesn't matter much for the players at home who already own the game. Too often with PGA Tour 2K, it feels like the users are creating the content and value.
Hopefully, with EA back in the market and two Tour titles available, each studio will push the other to up its game.