FC26: Final Thoughts
And so we've come to the end of another cycle. With the great reset looming large on the horizon and the curtain coming down on FC26, I thought I'd briefly go over my thoughts. This is where I wish I could be positive about the state of things, but I think we're all aware that's simply not possible.
In the interests of fairness, I will admit that early access and the opening weeks of the game showed promise with fluid gameplay and manual defending. The latter, of course, proving tricky to master, but then, as with all games, surely it stands to reason the more you play and adapt to it, the better you get. Not so with FC26, as within weeks of release this was patched and thus began the dark age of AI defending.
Anyone who is familiar with my previous posts will know my thoughts on this. Bronze defenders miraculously finding the ability to sprint like a prime Usain Bolt to make a frankly impossible back-tackle to prevent a clear goal will, I'm sure, bring many of you out in a cold sweat at the mention of it. Yet it seems such unlikely heroics weren't sufficient for the AI, who would, upon regaining the ball, proceed to simply pass it around at the back and retain possession at all costs. You logged in expecting to play a game resembling football; instead, what you got was a front-row seat to an experience which couldn't have been further from what football is. Slow, turgid, and boring would be my chosen adjectives to describe the experience of FC26’s gameplay this year.
Yet fault cannot lie solely with the gameplay. We cannot forget that where EA ultimately wants players to focus is on the menus, as this is where they get to entice you into the storefront. Even then, the menus are clunky and unresponsive. I’m sure we all recall trying to complete SBCs only for the game to encounter the bug where you’ve got no players in storage, despite you having 70–80 literally a minute before. Or the bug where the game soft-locks you into the season pass objective menu, forcing you to restart the game entirely. Yet, in all my time playing this game – I never once encountered any slow loading times, bugs, or soft-locks when accessing the store. How very convenient.
But even bypassing the store and not buying FC Points, little did we know the worst was still to come. EA patched the game again, artificially inflating the difficulty on offline game modes. That’s right – now they’re trying to force players like myself, who don’t want to deal with the toxicity of the FC player base, to enter into the cycle. If you were like me and refused to comply, you got to experience the worst DDA this game has to offer. Bronze goalkeepers putting in automatic match ratings of 10 without touching the ball and plucking shots out of the air like they were travelling in slow motion. Your own defenders standing still and not reacting to opposing attackers. Midfielders refusing to leave their own half of the pitch. Strikers dropping back to the CDM position, then not recognising the transition, leaving you toothless up front.
It was at this point I began to withdraw from the game. I privately made the choice to step away from the game entirely at the end of the FC26 cycle. I’d paid for the early access based on EA’s ‘We Hear You’ marketing campaign and fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I was now under no illusion that this had been a lie, but I was going to make sure I at least got the value out of my purchase. I was content to ride it out, say nothing, and just move on quietly. Then came the Festival of Football promo, and with it, tokens. This is where a line was crossed.
If there’s one thing FC26, and the series as a whole, suffers from, it’s the fact that it feels like a second job – a job you pay to participate in. In FC26 there was Squad Battles, Rivals, FUT Champions, and Rush, amongst others, with objectives attached to them. Then there was the meta to keep up with, a market to track, and new promos almost, if not, every month. It’s genuinely exhausting to play, and I found that other games I’d been looking forward to delving into were put to the side to facilitate FC26—a game I was getting ever-decreasing enjoyment from. There’s also the issue of multiple in-game currencies—coins, FC Points, Champions Qualification points—all of which you have to keep track of. So, when the Festival of Football Promo added FoF Tokens as well as Champions Tokens, and I found the rewards on offer were little more than fodder – I snapped. I made my opinions clear on this forum, making clear my intent to walk away entirely.
Through to the end of the game, the in-game currency bloat has remained. But the real kick in the teeth is when the rewards and promo cards added into the game are incomplete, and players are responsible for trudging through the same laborious menus repeatedly to add playstyles onto their own cards. It really is a sad indictment on the state of a game when even the developers can’t be bothered to finish the content and expect the player base to do the job developers are paid to do.
Which brings me to the marketing for FC27. A splash screen every time I load the game. Not just an advert—an advert which places me two clicks away from making a £125 purchase for FC27’s new Ultimate Plus edition or whatever it’s called. I don’t care what the press reviews say. I don’t care what the marketing says. I don’t care what the online content creators say. I don’t care what’s included as part of the bundle. No game which has ever been released has been worth a price point of £125 on release. So, when the last three months of content in the current game has, in my opinion, been incomplete, why should I buy your new game at a grossly inflated, or in fact, any price? Clearly, I shouldn’t.
So, when it got noticed by EA (Hi guys, I know you can see this) that I wasn’t engaging and was actively withdrawing from the FC ecosystem I received a code for the closed beta of FC27. I didn’t ask for this. I just received it one day, completely unsolicited. As for my thoughts on FC27, I don’t have any. I didn’t use the beta code and so haven’t played the game. Honestly, I have no interest in doing so.
Good luck to all those that do, and I hope the game is everything you want it to be. However, I’d use FC26 as a cautionary tale about buying into the marketing hype, especially when that hype is being generated by a company with $20 billion of debt following a leveraged buy-out. The same company who need to make at least $1.8 billion a year solely to cover the interest on that debt. The writing is on the wall. We all know, where this leads.
The really insulting thing, however, is EA’s insistence on repeating the "we hear you" rhetoric in the marketing press releases for the second year running. Alphonse Karr said it best "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I have no confidence that any meaningful changes will occur in FC27 and that EA is the price you pay for lying (you might not like the word, but that's what you did) in your marketing for FC26.
As I said, good luck to those migrating to FC27 in the coming weeks and I hope it's what you want it to be. As for me, this is where I part way with the FC franchise and after the last year of 'gameplay', I have absolutely zero regrets about that decision.
Apologies for yet another effort post. If you’re still with me, thanks for reading.
TLDR: Do better EA. I’m out.
BEWARE THE STREISAND EFFECT!
