Oh yeah..Fair game as BAP Goalie

I have found the uncanny valley that has ruined EA Sports games for me.

They've turned their sports games into a religious sim.

They're influentially scripted. This sounds stupid, and I only have observational data, and am absolutely not a game dev, but here's my evidence.

As you play through the "individual player career" mode, the games follow one of a handful of scripted plots (they're the same regardless of difficulty, what changes is how well your player and your digital teammates and opponents do their thing), and it un-subtly rewards or punishes you for pulling off a specific action that you are ostensibly being taught to do (a trick move, for instance)... and the game will blatantly set you up with opportunities to do it.

Pull the move off adroitly, or a couple of times in a row? You're gonna be rewarded with a better chance of scoring a goal or otherwise have your performance boosted for the next few seconds.

Decline to try it, or * up? Play is going the other way, with the other team having a boost to their skill for the same few seconds.

It is absolutely not realistic once you notice it. And once seen, it can't be un-seen. You can predict when the opposing team is going to take an un-avoidable run at your character. You can watch the opposing goaltender become an unbeatable highlight show. You can tell when your avatar is going to fail a challenge issued by the coach if you make the wrong choice during an in-game inflection point.

But there are set events (in the game! during gameplay! which is supposed to be dynamic! because it's a sports game!), where it's clear that the script engine ends up on a branch where, unless you do something absolutely perfect, you absolutely cannot score, and you are almost certainly going to wind up taking a penalty for something that is extremely nominal, if you even performed the penalty-taking action at all.

It feels, honestly, excruciatingly Christian in the reward/punishment mechanic, and has frankly ruined my enjoyment of the game, because I am no longer playing a sports sim, I am playing a database decision tree with a snazzy GUI that will * with your input sensitivity to get its way, regardless of the player's skill or choices.

You can literally watch your player get shoved around by the engine when there are no NPCs in the vicinity.

This has gotten increasingly prevalent and obvious in their newer titles, which is more of an indictment about their reuse of * code than anything else, because I first began noticing it in their NFL title a couple of years ago, then it was much more obvious in a more recent vintage, and it is beating me over the head in the current iteration of their NHL franchise.

There's a solution, of course, and that's to remove the forced narrative, and let the player's play determine the outcome. But giving all the NPCs that extra splash of autonomy in lieu of this clumsy predestination is apparently too expensive to code, and they've already cut the budget by re-using audio clips from the last decade of VA work.