An appeal to EA, from offline UFC players.
I've been playing UFC games EA UFC 2. I love these games. I've created multiple, full-show events and uploaded them to YouTube using these games. In UFC 3, it was fun. The customisation options were a step in the right direction. Obviously, Game Face isn't coming back, but even without GF, making CAFs was fun.
In UFC 4, the customisation items were limited. In UFC 5, they've stagnated completely. I know this an early access version, but I am putting this out here so the UFC team can consider it.
I wish there was more love shown to the community of offline fighters who play these games for immersion purposes, event mode, putting on shows, making their own universe modes, etc. The focus, as it is with most EA titles, is the online aspect... which is fine, that's the bulk of the playerbase I assume, but I feel it's much easier to appease the offline fanbase than it is the online fanbase.
Think about it. Online players need constant tuning, nerfing/buffing, etc... offline players don't need that, we work with our own settings and sliders. All we simply need is more customisation opens that only need to be added once and never again. We exist in our own island, but we need stuff to play with to keep us busy until the next installment. We don't need constant updates and fixes, we don't need the team to destroy exploits like knee spam and elbow spam. We'll figure that all out with our handy dandy sliders and AI vs AI fights.
The island just needs things to hold us over until the next installment, or the next content update.
Give us full fighter walkouts, allow us to choose the walkouts for our CAFs to give them more personality, allow us to customise their movesets, allow us to give them coloured shorts based on their nationalities, allow us to give them championship shorts (as well as every other fighter on the roster), allow us to choose their post-fight taunts from the roster of UFC fighters instead of having to buy them with coins, give our CAFs coloured tape (red/blue) like every other fighter does. The archetypes are fine and dandy, but we shouldn't be restricted to just the moves our archetypes allow. Archetypes, for offline CAFs, should be used as a foundation, not the entire fighter's identity.
I commend the UFC team for their work on this franchise. The UFC is a hard franchise to tackle, as the sport is very unpredictable and things change literally by the week. But a lot of features we had in UFC 3, have been removed for us offline players, and we'd just like these features added back in... or at least a solid explanation as to why they aren't in the game, an explanation that doesn't ostracise us such as "it's for the online modes". I've seen what other offline-primary players have said on this forum, and I concur with them. Hopefully, our 3 years of speaking up will pay off. If it doesn't, perhaps another MMA simulator will come along and satisfy our needs.
