FIFA 16: 7 Things EA Must Fix

With details for FIFA 16 set to be revealed soon, many are beginning to speculate as to what EA may look to improve with this year’s entry. FIFA 15 was considered a misstep for the series, with issues both on and off the pitch. Here’s a list of the seven biggest things we want fixed for FIFA 16.

Career Mode

A mode so in need of an overhaul it could justify an entire list of its own, FIFA's career portion has been stagnating for far too long.

Both player and manager careers are uninspiring bores that do nothing to keep players returning to the single-player component of the game. The 2014 World Cup entry introduced some interesting new mechanics, like player training and rivals gunning for your position in the team, which added some desperately-needed innovation to the floundering mode, only for these to be completely ignored in the main entry a few months later.

We need a sense of agency as a player. The biggest talking point for any football fan is where their favourite player is heading next, and which stars are heading to their clubs. Equally, we need to feel like the other 19 or so outfits are living, breathing teams with managers looking to gazump you in the transfer market and destroy you in the league.

Press conferences also have as much impact as the square root of sod all, and it’s about time we actually got to see our manager sat in front of those awkward sponsor boards providing Cantona-esque philosophy to generic questions.

The times between transfer markets and especially between matches are vacant. To be able to train players or run drills focused on improving certain aspects of the team which proved particularly weak in the previous match would be a great way to keep us invested. The problem with Career mode is that you often “win” within five years, having bought the world’s greatest talent, so one way to address this when it comes to training is to make positive effects from drills a temporary boost: the better your players perform the drill, the more games the effect lasts.

Transfer Windows

Touched upon in the last issue, the transfer window in Career Mode is awful. Why is it that we still can’t complete any pending transactions in the final hour of the window? This is especially frustrating when you’ve just sold a key player to fund your big-money buy, only for it to fall through simply because EA doesn’t think that time exists between the big hand meeting the little one.

EA needs to adopt Football Manager’s excellent approach to transfers this year, combined with NBA 2K’s amazing presentation, where you can hammer out the terms of a transfer immediately, in the room with both agent and player, offering a deal which can be accepted, rejected, or a compromise offered. Of course, if it’s Raheem Sterling’s agent, he’s likely to call you a knobhead and storm out no matter what, but that’ll make for an interesting moment nonetheless.

Ultimate Team Price Ranges

Price Ranges proved hugely controversial when they were first introduced in Ultimate Team, and it’s clear that a lot of work still needs to be done in order for fans to be truly satisfied with their inclusion.

Firstly, EA has a monumental task of setting the prices of cards for a market that doesn’t yet exist. The whole reason the devs were able to assign values to every card in 15 is because they could see what it had sold for previously. Not so now. Better balancing must happen from launch, and with EA now controlling the market from day one, there could be more issues to come.

Players need to be more richly rewarded for their time online with better coin payouts for matches. The whole reason Price Ranges were introduced was to cut out illegal coin sellers, but players turn to coin sellers simply because the game doesn’t represent good value for money or time. When FUT bucks can cost more than the price of the game itself and reward but a handful of gold packs, and you get less than a Sunday League player’s pay following each match, it’s easy to see why players are dissatisfied. The reason why players stick with Call of Duty and Destiny is because of the steady trickle of rewards that tells our brains to be happy with what we get, even if it is just a new armour skin.

The Ultimate Team system shouldn’t feel like it forces players towards forking out more cash in order to get good cards, and this delicate balance needs to be achieved this year, finally. One way to do this would be with solo challenges in Ultimate Team for those lacking a quality team. Big coin payouts for completing these challenges would help fill player coffers to create a decent all-gold Ultimate Team.

Stick to your guns

Each year EA unveils some fundamental change to the FIFA gameplay experience – FIFA 14 had headers and FIFA 15 had 'next-gen' goalkeepers – but this often doesn’t quite hit the mark and is quickly nerfed with the first post-launch patch, bringing the game back to its magnolia middle ground. EA needs to stick to its guns and nail down what innovation it wants to bring to the beautiful game.

With this being the third new-gen FIFA entry, it’s about time it truly felt like a leap, both visually and technically.

Goalkeepers

That said, goalkeepers last year were awful. Whether they were De Gea good or de Goey bad, the fact is EA missed the mark with the update. Fix goalkeepers, but rather than dragging them back to the bland bowling pins between the sticks they used to be, get the changes right and fulfil the potential of goalkeeping innovation.

When I saw FIFA 15 at a preview event, and this feature was first unveiled, my thoughts immediately turned to how personality could be enthused into each keeper. Hopefully EA can pull this off with FIFA 16.

World Class players should be different grade

How many times have you played as Cristiano Ronaldo, sprinting down the wing of the iconic Bernabeu, only to be caught by the likes of Kolo Toure, who runs like he’s dragging a tyre and the car it belongs to behind him?

The reason why players jump to the likes of Barcelona, Madrid, PSG, Chelsea and all the other great clubs is because they host the world’s greatest talent. But in FIFA, these players don’t feel special enough. When Zlatan gets on the ball, it should feel like nobody in the world can take it from him, because he believes he’s that good. Let us, for just a few minutes on a digital pitch, get a sense of how good these players really are.

Of course the best players in the world have their off days (just look at Radamel Falcao’s season for Manchester United, yikes), but we want these players at their best. John Terry giving attackers a torrid day, Barcelona’s front-three giving opponents nightmares, Erik Lamela giving the ball away at every single opportunity: true realism.

Better servers

EA’s servers are laughably bad. Every time the latest Team of the Week gets announced, players rush to Ultimate Team to try and buy packs to snag the latest In-Form cards. They also head to transfer market to take advantage of all the unwanted star players. The trouble is, EA consistently fails to deal with the influx of transfer dealings and crashes. Every. Single. Week.

Disconnects during multiplayer matches, as well as stuttering and horrendous lag, are all far too common, and it’s about time that EA upgraded its servers to meet the needs of its many gamers to provide a stable online environment.

Of course, not much can be done to stop cry-babies quitting early after you give them a footballing lesson.