Adding More Teams to FIFA is Simply Not Good Enough

The addition of women’s national teams to FIFA 16 has oddly resulted in a lot of people becoming suddenly happy to praise EA. Why is it odd? Simply put, EA covered women’s sports with their UFC title, but this was pretty much ignored.The addition of women’s football shouldn’t be a shock to people who actually bother to follow the sport, even more so given the dramatic increase in coverage it’s received in recent years. But simply adding more teams is not enough to fix the slowly sinking FIFA ship.

EA have always did a fantastic job of including as many leagues and teams as they possibly can. The rise in media attention on women’s football (BT sports showing a number of games) naturally led to more people being able to watch more games, both international and league. Individual clubs devote more time to their female teams, with most of them featuring on their respected clubs TV channel/website. The women’s game is growing, and EA know this, hence why they’ve added it. It’s not a feminist movement, nor is it a victory or defeat for anyone.

Women’s international teams are a welcome addition, but it does not pave over the cracks that FIFA franchise has begun to show. FIFA 15 is easily one of the worst additions to the franchise since the games wrestled back the crown from its Far East rival. Awful outfield player A.I, ball physics that make no sense and broken keepers are just a few issues plaguing FIFA 15. The decline in quality has resulted in Konami’s Pro Evo starting to regain some ground in the battle for dominance of the market.

Sure it’s nice to have some new teams added to the game, but if the core issues are not fixed then what’s the point? There’s barely been any additions of note since ‘Be A Keeper’ mode back in FIFA 11. While the core gameplay has been tweaked, the game still falls short of ever achieving a real sense of balance. Lobbed through balls, pace and crossing have always been the main factors of any game, often making other features or tactics utterly irrelevant. It reduces a sport all about tactics and build up into a question of who has the fastest players.  Defending has never been quite right, often turning out to be a option used more out of hope than expectation. Corners and headers have never made much sense, nor has the dated penalty taking system.

Ultimate Team started life as one of the best reason to buy FIFA, but soon became a creeping death. Micro-transactions have wrecked life cycle of the game. There’s no longer a natural progression of building up a team, instead it’s people buying their way to the top. EA’s obsession with marketing Ultimate Team as the core game mode resulted in a number of sites selling the in-game currency for real money, which in turn created a culture of hacking accounts in order to sell the players/coins held within. EA poisoned its own well, and it’s not getting any better.

FIFA’s visuals have recently been dragged into the spotlight, and not for the right reasons. Player models range from decent to utterly horrendous, looking nothing like their real life counter part. Animation is another topic that often springs up when looking over FIFA’s faults. Most players share similar movements, regardless of size or body type, detracting from the realistic look FIFA aims to achieve. There are often cases where the animation looks jarringly robotic to the point of hilarity. FIFA was once able to get away with this, but not anymore. Konami have impressed with their ability to create realistic looking player models that move naturally, a far cry from FIFA. The visual success of Pro Evo ramps up pressure on EA to match, if not surpass, Konami’s improving title.

EA’s famed severs are publicly accepted as being awful. Random disconnections plague each online game mode, with player’s records being blotted with losses down to EA’s failures with their severs. When game modes punish players for disconnecting mid-game it’s vital, and expected, that the severs will at least work. The ease in which the severs go up and down is unacceptable, it’s 2015 not 2002. A quick look at any EA twitter feed will display a wealth of people bemoaning the failures of EA severs. This isn’t a case of people hoping EA will fix the issue, but a case of they MUST fix the issue.

FIFA, as a franchise, is on a slippery slope down. The sales may still be strong but last year saw a slight shift in the market. Pro Evo started to re-emerge, mainly down to a push from various popular ‘FIFA Youtubers/Streamers’. The growing frustration with FIFA 15, and perhaps some money from Konami, saw Pro Evo pick up momentum across the board, albeit towards the end of both games’ life cycles. EA may be proudly announcing new teams, but it can not afford to ignore the issues FIFA 15 presented, or the fact Konami’s old king of the pitch is starting to make a comeback. Papering over the cracks was how FIFA was toppled to begin with, history could soon be repeating itself.