even as ultimate team EA Sports FC 25 seems to be making great strides in making it less frustrating with repeatable saves, more casual friendlies, and more powerful rewards, and it also continues to become increasingly monetizable – offering this year in addition to its packs Paid Premium Season Pass.
I’ve played Manager Career Mode for as long as I can remember, but since the mode has ossified in recent releases – with persistent bugs between games and a lack of meaningful gameplay features – I’ve found myself leaning more towards online Patterns are more out of necessity than choice.
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During the recent EA Sports FC 25 preview event, EA talked about creating more social space and less intense competition in their latest football game, but really, I think the best way to ease the pressure of FC 25 is to have a A viable alternative to UT in the form of a satisfying, realistic, and compelling career mode.
Excitingly, looking at the list of major new features in FC 25, career mode seems to be the biggest winner.
First and foremost, FC IQ is a massive overhaul of the tactics engine that underpins FC gameplay. It eliminates outdated and vague “fall behind” and “stay behind while attacking” commands, incomprehensible high, medium, and low work rates, and even Some basic positions are RWB, LWB and CF.
“FCIQ is a universal feature of FC, but it’s also very suitable for career mode,” said career mode producer Andreas Wilsdorf.
“I feel like everything we’re bringing to the game, whether it’s customization, a playable women’s career mode, playable youth teams – which has never been done in a football game – feels like a really meaningful update, At the same time, community feedback, social media systems, and new user interfaces from more countries will be introduced, allowing them to create the games they want.
FC IQ replaces the old backend system with a number of new player roles that you can set up on the active map to show the smooth movement of players around the pitch.
In addition to easily identifiable roles like playmaker and full-back, you can also implement more modern and complex tactical plans, EA uses the “fake full-back” example, where a player nominally starts at full-back but moves inside When you have possession you move into the midfield, like Alexander Zinchenko at Arsenal or Trent Alexander-Arnold at Liverpool, and the ‘Half Wingers’, the CM players who cross from high The ball is pushed wide, like Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne.
While it remains to be seen how transformative these updated tactics will be throughout the game’s seasons, the career mode has been craving more variety over the years, with both your own team and the AI teams you face feeling present throughout the game. Matches in step.
Player characters are designed to add much-needed tactical flexibility to FC 25, which is starting to look seriously outdated compared to more complex simulations like Football Manager, and they already seem to be better than FIFA and FC The tactics available in 24 are relatively static.
“I don’t think you can underestimate the impact FC IQ will have on the pitch,” said Paul Parsons, lead gameplay producer at EA Sports FC. “Player movement is very important to gameplay, not just moments – when is someone critical to success. I think when you look at the feature, your interaction with it tends to be menu-based, But when you’re on set, it does happen on a one-on-one basis.
“If you go into a game and look at the heat map after the game, you’ll see it has a very real impact. We do have other features, professional fouls, new playstyles, things like that that add to the basic gameplay.
However, not all players can easily take on any role and play it perfectly. Each player has a “+” character that they are familiar with, and world-class players can also have a “++” character. This means they are naturally capable of doing their assigned work well and are able to time their work better and control their space more efficiently.
In career mode, you have the additional ability to coach players in different roles, or improve their familiarity with their current role, so hopefully there’ll be a better sense of progression and evolution in the tactical setting – whereas previously you might have just set You can play once and play through multiple seasons as long as you’re interested.
AI managers are obviously also using these more diverse strategies, and should have dynamic AI behavior, meaning you’re not fighting the exact same game plan over and over again.
“So you’ve got characters that can evolve and change, from false nine to poacher, and that takes weeks or months, depending on how good the stats are,” career mode lead designer Pete O ‘Donnel explained. “But you have a coach, or you can make transfers, so we want to give players options. Maybe you want to go the coaching route, or change my tactics to suit the most important players. So there are many options and that’s what we want conveyed.
“It’s about min-max. If you don’t do too much, you’re not going to make too many mistakes. But if you do falter about it, then you can hire a coach to improve, to change the development Planning and really starting to grow and see those green edges come up – but if you don’t have those green edges, they’re still going to do that, and that’s okay, but we want them to do better, make better timing runs, that sort of thing matter.
Another area where the career mode does look dated is the visuals. There’s a reason why the community values the prospect of youth with realistic face scans over almost anything else – generic player models simply don’t lend themselves to immersive experiences. But for FC 25, EA introduced “Cranium,” which refreshed the way players without face scans behave in the game to more closely resemble the target.
As someone who supports teams outside of the “top 5 leagues”, having a team made up of average players is one of the most jarring aspects of the career mode, especially when you finally reach the upper tiers and start Mix in realistic-looking scanned players to join your squad, so Cranium is a very welcome addition – especially as it also works with youth team players.
“We surveyed the feedback on FC 24, and you can see that in the updates we made for teens,” Wilsdorf said. “One of the famous questions we know is ‘Why does my 14-year-old player have a big beard?’ Everything we read, we’re trying to fix – of course.
“What I love about the career mode community is that, like the fans themselves, they are very passionate. They are vocal in a positive way and hold us accountable for what we want for the mode. We are completely honest and say that not every update is It works as it should. I think what we really want to show this year is that we care about career mode. Career mode is very important to us and I hope it succeeds.
But in the end, career mode is also a big beneficiary of the new 5-player game type that replaced VOLTA: Rush. Sprinting is a short-sided type of play played on smaller pitches where offside begins in the final third and serious fouls are punishable by a ‘blue card’ penalty.
You can play Rush with your friends in Ultimate Team or Pro Club, but in career mode you can compete in Rush tournaments with your youth squad at set points throughout the season, measured using their current overall performance. Their ability, or ability to use youth players to get the best out of them in youth football – like when Erling Haaland scored nine goals for Norway’s U-20 team.
Not only does this sound like a better way to mix up the mid-season grind than international management, but it also introduces more interaction with the youth teams and developing your own players – something that’s much loved in career mode On the other hand, there are also long-term requests for new features.
“Rush is a completely new experience when you play the game,” said Gameplay Design Director Kantcho Doskov. “Even myself, I’ve played FC and FIFA for years, but when I play Rush I’m like ‘Wow, this is different’, right? You’re playing with your friends and you’re controlling your Avatar, but you’re always in action. It’s not like a traditional club where you don’t touch the ball for a few minutes, you’re always there, you’re always close to the ball or defending the ball, which is more attractive.
“With Rush, we have the opportunity to think, ‘What can we do there?'” Wilsdorf said. “Imagine if you could play with a young Messi – that’s where we brainstormed – and thought let’s do something for young people that has never been done before. On the one hand it’s the opportunity, on the other hand It’s about getting things done.
In addition to these core additions, the career mode also gets some concrete new gameplay features, including a fully integrated female career mode and its own transfer market, as well as the player careers of icons such as Pirlo, Beckham and R9 (if you Pre-ordered, boo)) and “Live Start Points,” a new feature that allows you to pick up real-life seasons from real-life locations.
At first I wasn’t sure how big this was, but then I thought back to the time I made a save in the Champions League against a team that was doing really well, only to have the “wrong team” advance. It’s done in different ways, so that’s a nice touch.
However, what we’ve seen so far from EA Sports FC 25 is a final renewed emphasis on career mode as a viable option, which can only be a good thing for the series.
