“A few years ago, it was very easy to add more features” – EA Sports FC 25’s next 5 years with Senior Producer Sam Rivera

2025 is a big year for EA Sports FC, but when isn’t it?

In an annual cycle of football that continues to struggle to replicate, EA Sports FC now has to justify itself on two fronts: not just year-over-year, but as a new franchise to prove.

With the first FC 24, EA Sports introduces PlayStyles, one of the most transformative fantasy additions to its core gameplay in years, giving players football superpowers and unlocking a whole new metagame of combos and strategy.

However, while this is a quintessential ‘backstage’ feature, it’s also destined to distract more down-to-earth fans as they wonder aloud to their friends in the pub or family in their living room why Cole is playing in the Euro 2024 final , Palmer didn’t simply use his silver Trickster PlayStyle to bounce the ball over Cucurella’s head and curl it in with the Finesse Shot+ at 40 yards.

While PlayStyles have done a lot to give individual players more personality, they also push FC 24 in another “unrealistic” direction – even further personalizing what is supposed to be a team sport. This in turn further exposed the flaws of this match in 11v11 football, when the unstoppable force of Ronaldinho consisting of “quick step+” and “technical dribbling” seemed to just crash into the An immovable object called Virgil van Dijk until he falls behind.

The balance between exciting end-to-end skill and realism is a key battle in EA Sports FC 25, but it’s not as simple as stripping the game back to the basics.

“We’re a simulation, but we’re also a game,” explains EA Sports FC senior producer Sam Rivera. “We always have to balance creating something that’s completely simulated with something that’s more suited to the six-minute half of the game.

“Sometimes we have to make some decisions where our priority is not a real simulation – but in general, most of the game is a simulation. It depends on the situation, but the goal is not to get out of the simulation, but to get as close to it as possible Close to football, but we’re still a game that requires compromise.

One of the key systems in FC 25 aimed at correcting realism is what EA calls “FC IQ,” a redesign of its underlying tactics engine that incorporates new, more modern player characters and locations. Now, instead of vaguely asking your forwards to “drop in behind”, you can more carefully plan your team’s offensive and defensive framework, use activity diagrams to create combinations on the pitch, and (hopefully) develop more than just sprints. Cohesive and cerebral style Repost as soon as possible and hopefully someone will eventually cut it back in the right place.

FC IQ is particularly noteworthy, not only because it provides a much-needed refresh to a long-neglected aspect of the gaming experience, but because it does so in every mode in FC 25.

In previous editions, both Career Mode and Pro Clubs have felt increasingly bland compared to this time last year, with each mode falling further behind Ultimate Team in the pecking order as the lack of new features is increasingly perceived as the game ages A tired demo with constant bugs meant they were quitting altogether. But in FC 25, there seems to be a re-emphasis on the entire product, offering more comprehensive progression and new reasons to choose each mode.

“A few years ago, it was very easy to add more features to a game, and if something was missing, you’d say ‘Oh, that’s missing,’ and just add it. Now it’s a lot harder,” Rivera said.

“As you rotate through the year, it becomes more difficult because the game has a lot of features, so now you really need to have a deep understanding of what the gaps are, what the opportunities are, and invest in those areas. So over the past few years, , there’s a big push to understand these opportunities, strategize and start executing on them, and I think that’s the natural path for franchises, where you start to see a lot of investment coming into the game.

“Every year we strive to make better games. We have an advanced team working on technology for the next two, three, four years. Every year we receive feedback from the community and expectations that we want to meet. Team It’s expanding every year and the game is evolving. All of that allows us to create more impactful features. We continue to create a lot of things for the game every year, but I think this year’s features are very different and we want to create more. Features throughout the entire game, not just great features in Career More or UT.”

However, one theory that can’t be ignored is that in the face of future competition, EA Sports has more incentive to improve the career mode and Pro Clubs, rather than just the lucrative Ultimate Team. While the shell of eFootball continues to peel off the odd license from EA’s near-monopoly, there are rumors that the Cristiano Ronaldo-backed UFL (which just delayed its release from September to December 2024) Plans to build on the success of NBA 2K are ramping up, with companies such as 2K and major publisher 2K conducting more rigorous testing.

Interestingly, these rumors also describe any potential future challenger as both a plucky upstart (albeit with an 8- or 9-figure budget proposed) and a football master capable of toppling EA in one cycle with unparalleled gameplay. But given EA’s nearly 30-year head start and the difficulty of developing a smooth match engine from scratch, there’s a lot of confidence that FC can withstand the “new manager backlash” others are expecting.

“We welcome competition — if there’s competition, that’s great,” Rivera said. “But the key here is we want to provide value, things you love, things you enjoy: the more, the merrier. Every year we have new experiences, more features, more choices.

“What I can tell you is the formula for creating a good football simulation game, we know it, we own it, we have a very large community who love playing the game. We know the game has to be reactive, we know the visuals The effects have to be good, the mechanics have to have enough depth and variety. We know the fundamentals of football need to work well, controlling the ball when running, everything has to work well.

“This isn’t going to happen in one year, two years or five years. So we know we have this, we know we need to continue to invest in the core gaming experience while also creating new experiences, and at the same time we make sure every mode adds value. So that’s what we focus on.

But even if you’re ahead in quality, it’s still hard to squelch the competition if your community is ready to jump ship.

EA Sports FC’s community cohesion has waned in recent years for a number of reasons, with players protesting toxic matches and engaging in hostile celebrations, opponents deliberately denying the progress of others, and overall an overly competitive edge.

So crucially, this is another cornerstone of the experience that FC 25 aims to improve. First, giving players a more robust career mode to relax in takes the pressure off rewards and store pack-focused Ultimate Team as the only place to play. And Rush is a new game type (not a game mode) that offers a more casual, community-driven and comfortable environment – giving players a space to relax and enjoy the game, away from the excessive hyper-competition and daily reward grind .

“The first one is working with our community team to understand what players want,” Rivera said of the steps EA has taken to build a more active community. “The second step is to balance the experience and make sure we provide enough value, enough choices, and enough resources to keep you coming back. This is not a simple process, but a combination of multiple factors.

“Also, often communities will tell you they want ‘this,’ but don’t actually know what that means. So you need to have the experience of knowing, ‘What you want may not be this, but it is this.’

EA was keen to stress that Rush had no technical basis in relation to its previous (now shelved) five-a-side mode VOLTA, lest it undermine the effort to design a smaller game played on smaller pitches. Likewise, it works across all game modes, and you can use fancy new cards in Ultimate Team, your entire youth squad in Career Mode, and 3 friends in Pro Club.

Finally, EA is also working to address perceived inaction in responding to player feedback, and has formed a new dedicated internal team tasked with proactively assessing and responding to changes – this time within the game cycle, not just within the product. between years.

“We’ve had a live team for years, but more recently we’ve built another team who play the game as end users during the regular production cycle and provide a lot of feedback,” Rivera explains. “This group is made up of people who play games regularly and know a lot about them, and we just want to get more feedback all the time, not just when the game goes live.

“Perhaps the most critical part is creating the right solution to the problem. A lot of times we hear things like, ‘The pass is too strong,’ ‘It’s a no-brainer,’ but when we actually watch the game, The passing game wasn’t the problem, it was the interception that was too weak.

“Once we figure this out, it’s up to the producers and designers to load up the test bench and copy the case and check it with the engineers and animators, and then we have a solution. If the fix is ​​just adjusting a variable, then we don’t need to patch it Done. If the fix requires code changes or new animations, they must be included in the patch.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruud van Nistelrooy and about 5 legendary Italian strikers once said: “Goals are like ketchup, when you try, you don’t Neither will get it until they both come out at the same time” – FC 25 seems to be that way with gaming features too, especially when EA calls this season’s career mode update “the biggest update in a decade.”

Just like real-world football, the endless discussion is always about “what’s next”, and EA Sports FC’s plans have stretched into the 2030s.

“I don’t think this is something that happened randomly, we know where we’re going long-term: We want to create the most realistic simulation possible in terms of gameplay,” Rivera said.

“There are some things we need to think about, we want the game to be super responsive, we want the game to give you as much experience as possible. We have a long-term strategy for the next 5 years and we want to invest in more than just features, but It’s the entire game offering, including live service, which consoles we support and in which regions. So we have a plan and build capabilities based on a 5-year or even 10-year strategy.

EA Sports FC 25 will be released on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch on September 27th. For more information on our initial impressions of the game, you can read our hands-on preview.