5 reasons Player Career mode is a dumpster fire
1. Objectives/requirements to transfer to other teams are ridiculous
I'm currently playing a striker who's rated 94 and winning awards, but can't transfer to many top tier clubs after two seasons. Every great club requires the striker I made to have 158 "Successful Pass and Goes" - but those are not a feature when you play as your player (rather than as a team). So it's literally impossible. My player has ZERO. Have had the same with unrealistic numbers of sliding tackles with CAM position. Would literally have to set a single-season record for sliding tackles which, considering the ease with which yellow cards are earned attempting them with a non-defense position player, all seems pointless.
2. Most Playstyles are inaccessible.
Because of the strange requirement of choosing a personality type (which adds nothing to the experience other than annoyance) in player career mode, and Playstyles being reliant on this fake personality, only certain play styles are available to you. Also, not all Playstyles are available... I've seen players in Ultimate Team (a mode I don't play) who are offensive players and have the "Aerial" Playstyle. Not available in player career mode for any offensive position. Perhaps there are other examples of this.
3. Playstyle Plus is mostly inaccessible
You have to maintain 65% of a personality type to have the limited (see point 2) options available to boost to plus. Good luck. If you wanted a "Virtuoso" striker, nope. Part of the reason has to do with personality types not gaining enough points in Training if your position is arbitrarily deemed a mismatch. For example, you get high payback on personality points if you're a "Maverick" striker only if you do the shooting training exercises. If you are aiming for a personality type that is not easy for your position, like a "Heartbeat" striker, be prepared to grind... and never hit the 65% mark. Even if you have training exercises that only boost your personality type and choose every activity that only boosts the one you're trying to hit and buy every purchasable that boosts your personality type, too many personality points in the match day will forever keep you under 65%... Playstyles are probably the most fun feature--it's even advertised in-game - but have been severely hamstrung by this odd obsession EA has with these useless personality types. Maverick strikers are the only ones you can reliably count on to hit and maintain 65% or over.
4. The attempts to make it "story-like" are a disaster
I'm pretty sure there are a few different angles to take, such as taking a more story/cinematic approach (which sounds like a nightmare for EA given how many languages a game like this would have to cover), or making it more of a simulator-like experience, where the emphasis might be solely on designing and tweaking your player in ways that are more sophisticated than the ones that are so seriously compromised by the personality types, limited Playstyle access, etc. The moral of the story currently is gaining personality points, assuming you want access to Playstyles. However, taking on a personality like Maverick, you see that your character says super douchey things in social media, talks trash about the manager, etc. It's like you have to ignore them rather than have them being an immersive element that adds to the experience.
5. The attempts to make it "story-like" are a disaster, part 2
The creation of "stories" is pointless, they're not interesting, it's weird that someone like a player making a comeback is arbitrarily bad at penalty kicks. Other story-like elements like the fake social media posts are corny, laden with stock imagery, repetitive, useless (e.g., being popular on social media doesn't gain you anything and are therefore not really part of the game theory of this), and uninformative. The "Agent" says the same few lines over and over again and yet appears in your task list so you kind of have to open them just to dismiss them from your task list again... and again... and again...
Basically, it seems like EA is randomly hanging onto a personality system that has no use other than to hamper access to parts of the game that might be most fun for most people. The half-baked effort to make the experience story-like makes it feel even sadder since it's so disappointing, cheesy, incomplete... this game mode would be better off without both assuming some other, less rudimentary way of building a player's skills and giving access to Playstyles were to come about.
With 2K building FIFA's new offering, I'm sure the gameplay itself won't nearly match EA's, so we'll all stay here. But for those of us who prefer player career mode for whatever reason, if 2k prioritizes this mode like they have in NBA 2K, the FIFA game will murder FC 26 when it comes to player career mode. EA obviously has this mode as a last priority, it probably doesn't make any money beyond what we pay for the game, and has fewer users than other modes. I'm confused. NBA 2K makes incremental revenue and has tons of users in the player career game mode. So the question for EA is: is this not popular because people don't want to play this mode, or do people not play this mode because you clearly made it a last priority compared to UT et al and the experience sucks?
Anyone's experience completely different?
