Last 2 years i was able to play the hell out of fifa and get to the new year with it. January for 14 and March for 15. This year? It's november and I'm already empty on the "give a crap meter". So what's wrong with this game and this series?
-Loose ball glitch. The loose ball glitch where human only AI will not only ignore the ball but sometimes back away from it like it's a snake make the game feel really silly at times and quickly reminds you that you're playing a video game, and a poorly coded one @ that. This glitch has caused me to get scored on, not get scoring chances, and generally lose possession and be frustrated. It sucks yet satisfying to lose to the ai when they make a nice play. No one wants to win all the time. It's game killing and frustrating beyond belief to lose because of a glitch. That's no fun.
-Manager mode is so stagnant and broken I don't know where to begin
1) CPU roster management is basically non existent. They sign and sell players with no rhyme or reason. If they bother to have any roster turn over at all. Sim ahead 5 years and teams will be almost identical. That's really boring.
2) There's no difference in playing in different leagues. Yes, you have the overlay for the lucky 2 leagues Bundesliga and BPL, but that's it. There's no real reason to go out and play a Mexican Club or Dutch club unless you're a die hard America fan or PSV fan, etc.
3) Youth players take too long to bring up and play. If you sign a youth player within 1 month of starting your career, you will not be able to realistically see him for 3 years, maybe 4. At least in PES there's already a youth system in place. FIFA's scouting and youth system is empty, minimal, and poorly maintained. Not to mention all the bizare glitches for physical growth stunting, may bump for cpu only, and the glitch where you simply cannot loan out a newly signed player no matter what you do.
4) Scripting. Low end teams play like Real Madrid, and often, high end top tier teams play like garbage. My final straw was beating Gladbach 3-1 with Dortmund, only to lose 5-4 to Ingolstadt in week 2. I was up 4-1 at the half and they scored 4 goals in 20 minutes of the 2nd half. Just stupid. But this happened in my Serie A manager mode all the time... I'd beat Napoli and Milan only to lose to Cesena and Carpi. Sometimes I'd get routed. You'd know when it was happening too because the ai would be aggressively intercepting every pass and defending tooth and nail, where as against the higher tier teams they'd be passive. Easy to see coming and equally frustrating for the win and lose respectively.
5) ZERO immersion. The stories of the week are the same for years now. No in game screencaptures like madden or pes, and no stat tracking year to year. Hell, no stat tracking at all in other leagues. Want to see how Zlatan is doing in Ligue 1? Tough luck. Messi vs Ronaldo? Who? lol. I like immersion and just diving into the game and EA/FIFA has failed at this for years.
6) Board has fired you=Game over. Why isn't there an owner/board mode? If I want to play as Palermo or Frankfurt and only them, why is ea telling me no? Who paid who for this game exactly? If I get fired by the board that's it for me, it's over. What kind of stupid crap is this? You can't even adjust how lenient the board is with you. In fact.. of all the ridiculous bugs this mode has, the ONE they fixed is starting a bad starting 11 to keep your exceptions low. How insulting is that? Forget the other crap, lets fix sometime people are using to enjoy the mode more. If that isn't a straight middle finger from EA, I dont know what else is.
7) No, I don't want to manage your country. I can't turn off invites to manager international teams. How hard is this to add? But nope, let's make sure people can't change the starting 11 so they can keep coaching the team they like.
8) Every. Team. Plays. The. Same. There's zero and I mean, zero difference from playing Barca and Frosinone. In fact, you may get a better game out of Frosinone because crap teams play harder.
9) Player tactics are still broken. Still. And EA sure as hell seems to not give a single crap. If you play any formation with a CDM, or, god help you two CDM's, you are going to watch them both play like CAM's no matter what you tell them to do or not to do. Unreal.
10) Youth academy. So much broken still. No to mention finding individual positions is impossible. Want to find a striker? Good luck. That will likely take you months unless you're willing to save/reload. Also, their faces are horrendous and they look like axe murderers. but thats a minor beef.
11) Loaning players. This should be simple. You loan list a player, and within a week they should be gone. 100%. Why make it anything other than this? Youth academy players simply dont get loaned out period when you sign them, too. At least not during their 1st year.
There's really a lot more I could say but that's the major gripes with MM.
Back to gameplay:
-the CPU ai constantly effs up their crosses, giving you free possession. Yes even with your cpu pass error to 50.
-Yet, the CPU ai will also score maybe 20% of their free kicks from half with incredible headers
-Corners are essentially a waste of time for both human but especially AI.
-CPU ai can make dazzling turn around shots roofing it, because they're not subject to a power bar like humans. They make shots and score goals not possible for human, which is incredibly unrealistic and makes the game have a strange /weird flow to it.
-Human passing is beyond atrocious. The leading is so bad, and often my passes are simply sent to the wrong person all together. Turning off some passing assistance only makes things worse.
-The in game, pre game, post game presentation is the same cut scenes for years now. Years. YEARS. Commentary is terrible. Boring, boring, boring. Think of all the ####ing money people dump into EA and this is the microwave TV dinner presentation we get in return. It's stunning.
-This last one seems small but... jesus christ the captain armbands are boring and ugly. Let me choose from 10 armbands of various colours. You know how ugly it is to play as Palermo with yellow and red captain armband with a giant C? Ill volunteer to make those armbands for you
It's middle November and I'm already done, and perhaps for good with this game and EA in general. The contempt for the average consumer this company has , in my eyes, is too much. To me its not laziness. No, this is a developer who knows they dont have to do much more to earn dollars and has decided that they're going to milk it. Much like how MS announced a decade or so ago that IE required no further updating, we've been left with the internet explorer of sports games. I bought PES and have no idea if I'll like it, nor do I care. I encourage people to buy PES and light a fire under EA and futher fund Konami as a strong competitor. EA has stopped caring about FIFA in a meaningful way and people need to voice their concerns and vote with their wallets.
/endrant
-Loose ball glitch. The loose ball glitch where human only AI will not only ignore the ball but sometimes back away from it like it's a snake make the game feel really silly at times and quickly reminds you that you're playing a video game, and a poorly coded one @ that. This glitch has caused me to get scored on, not get scoring chances, and generally lose possession and be frustrated. It sucks yet satisfying to lose to the ai when they make a nice play. No one wants to win all the time. It's game killing and frustrating beyond belief to lose because of a glitch. That's no fun.
-Manager mode is so stagnant and broken I don't know where to begin
1) CPU roster management is basically non existent. They sign and sell players with no rhyme or reason. If they bother to have any roster turn over at all. Sim ahead 5 years and teams will be almost identical. That's really boring.
2) There's no difference in playing in different leagues. Yes, you have the overlay for the lucky 2 leagues Bundesliga and BPL, but that's it. There's no real reason to go out and play a Mexican Club or Dutch club unless you're a die hard America fan or PSV fan, etc.
3) Youth players take too long to bring up and play. If you sign a youth player within 1 month of starting your career, you will not be able to realistically see him for 3 years, maybe 4. At least in PES there's already a youth system in place. FIFA's scouting and youth system is empty, minimal, and poorly maintained. Not to mention all the bizare glitches for physical growth stunting, may bump for cpu only, and the glitch where you simply cannot loan out a newly signed player no matter what you do.
4) Scripting. Low end teams play like Real Madrid, and often, high end top tier teams play like garbage. My final straw was beating Gladbach 3-1 with Dortmund, only to lose 5-4 to Ingolstadt in week 2. I was up 4-1 at the half and they scored 4 goals in 20 minutes of the 2nd half. Just stupid. But this happened in my Serie A manager mode all the time... I'd beat Napoli and Milan only to lose to Cesena and Carpi. Sometimes I'd get routed. You'd know when it was happening too because the ai would be aggressively intercepting every pass and defending tooth and nail, where as against the higher tier teams they'd be passive. Easy to see coming and equally frustrating for the win and lose respectively.
5) ZERO immersion. The stories of the week are the same for years now. No in game screencaptures like madden or pes, and no stat tracking year to year. Hell, no stat tracking at all in other leagues. Want to see how Zlatan is doing in Ligue 1? Tough luck. Messi vs Ronaldo? Who? lol. I like immersion and just diving into the game and EA/FIFA has failed at this for years.
6) Board has fired you=Game over. Why isn't there an owner/board mode? If I want to play as Palermo or Frankfurt and only them, why is ea telling me no? Who paid who for this game exactly? If I get fired by the board that's it for me, it's over. What kind of stupid crap is this? You can't even adjust how lenient the board is with you. In fact.. of all the ridiculous bugs this mode has, the ONE they fixed is starting a bad starting 11 to keep your exceptions low. How insulting is that? Forget the other crap, lets fix sometime people are using to enjoy the mode more. If that isn't a straight middle finger from EA, I dont know what else is.
7) No, I don't want to manage your country. I can't turn off invites to manager international teams. How hard is this to add? But nope, let's make sure people can't change the starting 11 so they can keep coaching the team they like.
8) Every. Team. Plays. The. Same. There's zero and I mean, zero difference from playing Barca and Frosinone. In fact, you may get a better game out of Frosinone because crap teams play harder.
9) Player tactics are still broken. Still. And EA sure as hell seems to not give a single crap. If you play any formation with a CDM, or, god help you two CDM's, you are going to watch them both play like CAM's no matter what you tell them to do or not to do. Unreal.
10) Youth academy. So much broken still. No to mention finding individual positions is impossible. Want to find a striker? Good luck. That will likely take you months unless you're willing to save/reload. Also, their faces are horrendous and they look like axe murderers. but thats a minor beef.
11) Loaning players. This should be simple. You loan list a player, and within a week they should be gone. 100%. Why make it anything other than this? Youth academy players simply dont get loaned out period when you sign them, too. At least not during their 1st year.
There's really a lot more I could say but that's the major gripes with MM.
Back to gameplay:
-the CPU ai constantly effs up their crosses, giving you free possession. Yes even with your cpu pass error to 50.
-Yet, the CPU ai will also score maybe 20% of their free kicks from half with incredible headers
-Corners are essentially a waste of time for both human but especially AI.
-CPU ai can make dazzling turn around shots roofing it, because they're not subject to a power bar like humans. They make shots and score goals not possible for human, which is incredibly unrealistic and makes the game have a strange /weird flow to it.
-Human passing is beyond atrocious. The leading is so bad, and often my passes are simply sent to the wrong person all together. Turning off some passing assistance only makes things worse.
-The in game, pre game, post game presentation is the same cut scenes for years now. Years. YEARS. Commentary is terrible. Boring, boring, boring. Think of all the ####ing money people dump into EA and this is the microwave TV dinner presentation we get in return. It's stunning.
-This last one seems small but... jesus christ the captain armbands are boring and ugly. Let me choose from 10 armbands of various colours. You know how ugly it is to play as Palermo with yellow and red captain armband with a giant C? Ill volunteer to make those armbands for you
It's middle November and I'm already done, and perhaps for good with this game and EA in general. The contempt for the average consumer this company has , in my eyes, is too much. To me its not laziness. No, this is a developer who knows they dont have to do much more to earn dollars and has decided that they're going to milk it. Much like how MS announced a decade or so ago that IE required no further updating, we've been left with the internet explorer of sports games. I bought PES and have no idea if I'll like it, nor do I care. I encourage people to buy PES and light a fire under EA and futher fund Konami as a strong competitor. EA has stopped caring about FIFA in a meaningful way and people need to voice their concerns and vote with their wallets.
/endrant
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