First, I will say that I am having a ton of fun with my player career. Created a WR and it's a ton of fun running routes and progressing him. The mode has so many oversights and bugs and I haven't seen much written about it on here so i'm going to list them and maybe one day EA will give this mode some much needed attention.
- Every player starts as an X-Factor. This doesn't make any sense. It would be way more fun to have to trigger dev scenarios than to automatically be an X-Factor, even as a mid-round pick.
- AI Roster Management is AWFUL. My biggest issue with this is that the AI doesn't bring players off of IR when they're healthy and eligible to return. I'm the Eagles and every person on the roster is on on IR, but even in the playoffs the same graphic pops up with the guys that are hurt and in column of "length of injury" it's just blank. Because the guys are healthy. In the team roster menu you can see that the guys are healthy, but the game won't bring them off IR. It's very frustrating.
- No Option for Full-Team Control. Which brings me to my next point. If the AI roster management is going to suck, at least let us have the option to control it in the same way that we do in Coach Franchise. There's an option to have full control in the games of all players, so why not have an option for full control of the roster? We already pick the plays which is unrealistic. It would be nice to at least be able to do barebones things that the AI is too incompetent to do.
- Weird Bugs. There's some very strange gameplay bugs. At least once every other game my offense lines up to return the punt and every time my QB is offsides. It's very frustrating.
- Lack of Team or League Awareness. The main menu showing the player is pretty cool. Excellent graphically. But there's no sense of belonging to a team. I should be feeling like a rookie walking into a locker room of veterans. I should be seeing things about my team winning 8 straight games to miraculously win the division in wk 17. I should be seeing something about my players setting records in games and for the season. I should be seeing something about being a candidate for MVP and rookie of the year. There's none of this. It just feels like an XP mini game where the whole goal is to constantly earn XP and not win games.
- No Ratings Editor. This makes 0 sense to me. It's in Coach Franchise. Why isn't it in here? I would love to make my WR have worse hands to get the feel of being a rookie that continually drops the ball. And I would love to create a more diverse player by having the ability to change up the base ratings. Just like I mentioned with not having full roster control, this just needs to be an option that can be enabled. If it's not on by default that's fine, but the system is already in the game and we should be able to use it in this mode.
- Playbook Memory? Why do I have to set the playbook every single game? Why doesn't it remember which one I previously chose? And why doesn't it remember if I want Live playbooks set to On? It's crazy. Games on the N64 had better settings memory than this game does sometimes and it makes no sense. Just keep whatever we select for the current game as the default for the next game. It's not that hard.
This mode is a lot of fun and if there was some more love shown to it I think it could be awesome. There's just a lot of oversights in it right now. The X-Factor and Superstar abilities are really cool and it's fun building a well-rounded player to try out the different abilities.
I love how intelligent QB's are when you're controlling a WR and they can understand when you deviate from the planned route. It would be cool if they added some sort of QB-WR chemistry meter to the game, sort of like the Striker Partner system Fifa 18 had, that would determine how likely it is that your QB will anticipate the route you're running if it's not the planned route.
It would also be great to see a Random Play Call option in game to randomize the play calling and make it more organic.
