FIFA 22: The Same Old Story (Except Worse)
Sorry that it’s a post about a fucking football game but I need to get this off my chest because it has been driving me nuts since I was about fourteen. Roll your eyes or scroll right on by. Whatever you want to do.
So I went through a phase in my teens are getting the new FIFA game near enough on release. From FIFA 12 to FIFA 18, I bought it every year without fail until I just decided that it was a pointless exercise. Not to sound elitist but I don’t play FIFA games with the mindset that most would because most don’t really care about the games’ problems. They just want their dopamine fix of getting the player they want in a pack or even just to play as their favourite team in career mode for about three hours before getting bored of it. EA Sports know that that is their audience. Someone who reviews animé and video games excessively in his spare time is not their audience.
I bought it every year to play the Pro Clubs game mode with my friends and if you played it as often as we did (1000 games across 4 games!), you begin to notice all the glaring issues with FIFA and how lazily it is put together as a video game. I don’t really like to give developers a slagging off but when I say lazily, I mean LAZILY. There are game-breaking bugs in that gamemode that went unfixed for YEARS. One such bug was that if the opponent spammed a certain tactical change on the D-Pad, your player would seize up and become unresponsive to button prompts for several seconds.
Speaking of the control being taken out of your hands, the most egregious problem with FIFA games is the scripting element which is now worse than ever. Essentially, what EA do is code the game in such a way that, during online play, stack the odds in favour of one player or another. I think the reason they do this is to try and simulate failure and success so the player gets the illusion of satisfaction when they win. Obviously there is a certain element of skill involved and you do have to know how to play (how to exploit the systems) to be in with a chance but the game has decided for you anyway. They do this by slowing down player response times and increasing passing error and shooting error in the script. Although they deny that “scripting” is a thing in the game (they instead call it dynamic maximum something-or-other), it has been proven frequently through data-mining.
Instead of giving the player accurate football “simulation”, the player just ends up thinking that they didn’t really deserve to win. This is especially noticeable in FIFA 22. Every single game that I’ve played, I have either wiped the floor with someone but lost or drew or I have barely tried, played deliberately lackadaisically and won the game. I’m not alone in this experience of feeling either fucked over by the programming or unsatisfied in victory. This is outside of the game generally feeling sloppy to play with incredibly slow movement on the ball, completely illogical movement off the ball and frequent wayward passes and shots. I’ve also found horrid bugs in players’ hit-boxes and collision detection.
Every year, they seem to add improvements that are supposed to change and revamp the game in particular way but end up breaking it and then reversing it. In FIFA 22, it’s dribbling and it’s so hideously overpowered that it basically renders you untouchable. Previously, it’s been goalkeeping in FIFA 15 where they decided they were going to improve them for the better - for some reason - and made the goalkeeper incredibly poor and unreliable to the point where you could walk around the goalkeeper and score into an open net without fail.
They also enjoy focusing on tertiary and inconsequential stuff that doesn’t matter like atmosphere and dynamic crowd noise and putting the word dynamic in front of basic systems to make it sound like they tried. Admittedly, the crowd noise does sound good in the headphones and it does make the game undoubtedly more immersive even if the wonky A.I offsets that immersion. You will find yourself turning it off by the 10th time the obnoxiously loud French P.A interrupts your train of thought just like you’ll find yourself skipping by all the other stuff that they’ve added for immersion purposes.
This finally brings me to my point.
EA only give a shit about intangible additions that fundamentally do nothing to the gameplay. Former games journalist Steve Burns put into words on a VideoGamer video review concerning FIFA 16 that the FIFA games are less concerned with providing a footballing experience and is more interested in making a “Sky Sports Simulator”. That sums up everything wrong with FIFA games. They want it to be played the same way that one watches it on the television. It is fantasy video game in that respect and it is abundantly clear that they are not interested in producing anything else.
Little changes like the goal being lifted slightly off the floor from a ball-impact or the 4th official holding up the injury time minutes on the board add nothing. But EA know that Joe Public will point that out and go “That’s cool” and that’s it. They also know that the types of people who are tasked with reviewing the game don’t give a toss about the content so will just give it at least an 8 every year consistantly (with few exceptions). What I’m saying here is that, quid pro quo, they get away with making shit games every year. This year is no different. Next year will be no different. Like all popular AAA games that come out every year, they are too afraid to change the form in real experimental ways that affect the button-to-button gameplay.
Here’s the thing. If you actually genuinely like the FIFA games in face of their inherent and obvious flaws, that’s great. For me, I cannot swallow every single year that journalists and critics are fawning and pontificating with grandeur about how great the FIFA game is to play as though it’s the first time they’ve ever played one.
Or I could just not care because yearly sports game don’t change and they never will and I may as well just accept it as I am secondary to the target market.
FIFA 22 is still the worse one in the entire series though.