UFC 6 Career Mode Somehow Gets WORSE Every Year

First off, I want to say the gameplay improvements this year are incredible. I've never had more fun actually fighting, the way each fighter feels true to their real life style is awesome, and the new animations you can equip add a lot to that. Genuinely some of the best UFC gameplay we've gotten. That said, career mode is still so bare bones it's honestly disappointing, and I wanted to break down why.

Training

I know you can already sim a specific drill once you have completed it with your current character, but once you have created a few characters and gone through career mode a couple of times, I would love an option to toggle on full simulated training for new characters without having to grind through every single drill from scratch just to unlock that ability.

This is something a lot of players have complained about and it was even addressed in one of your blogs, where it mentioned that the pacing and frequency of training had been tweaked. However I have now gone through three full careers and it has felt exactly the same and just as grindy as before.

Worst of all, simulating training still punishes you with reduced rewards. You only get 5 stamina for the week compared to 10 if you complete the drills manually. If the goal is to give players the option to sim training for convenience, it should not come with such a significant penalty attached, especially for returning players who have already proven they understand the system on previous characters, especially since this has been the SAME TRAINING for the last 3 or 4 years!

Next I want to bring up simulation mode. I love the concept of this mode with its more realistic stamina and damage settings. However I am not sure if it is a bug, but in career mode with simulation mode turned on, the game feels way too easy on normal difficulty. The moment you bump it up even one notch the CPU fighters feel like the greatest of all time with knockout power that feels disproportionately high compared to my own. I will be piecing them up on the feet the entire fight, clearly winning every exchange, just for them to land one punch in the second or third round and knock me out completely out of nowhere. It does not feel like a fair or realistic difficulty curve, it just feels like the CPU gets an unearned one shot advantage the moment you raise the difficulty.

 HUD It is not good. I have not seen a single person who actually likes it. Everything on screen feels oversized and it takes away from the realism of the experience. I end up turning the HUD off every time I play and the game genuinely looks better without it. I would love the ability to press a button to quickly bring up the HUD when needed and have it disappear again shortly after, rather than it being permanently on the screen at all times. Another option could be only showing health, stamina, and other HUD elements after the first round or during the break in between each round, rather than having it visible throughout the entire fight.

While I'm on the subject of repetition, the social media feature has the same problem. You get the same handful of messages over and over and it gets old very quickly. I do like the ability to respond to social media if I want to, but the text messages just get repetitive fast and shouldn't be constantly shoved in your face.

Fight camps and a GM style mode

Fight camps used to be something you could choose between in older games, and that's been gone for a while now in favor of just one generic gym. I'd love to see that come back, and even go further with something like a GM or franchise style mode where you could build up your own gym starting with low rated fighters and manage their careers over time. simulation style or jump in and fight for them and manage their careers and build up your gym and fighters 

Gym life around the league

Specifically talking about career mode here, not the gym feature they added this year, but it would be cool to be able to see which fighters around the league are training at which gyms. If another fighter starts going on a losing streak, there could be a chance they switch gyms entirely, and you'd maybe just get a little notification about it. Small stuff like that would add a lot of life to the world. And if you choose to stay at a smaller gym and start having success, eventually becoming champion, it would be great to see that gym grow over time, with bigger named fighters starting to come train there. The tradeoff being that sparring against lower level fighters at your gym might not push your development the same way training at a bigger gym with tougher competition would.

More things to spend money on

EA has done this well in their soccer game, where you can buy things like condos, hire training staff, etcetera. Even something small like that adds a lot of immersion. It would be great to be able to hire better staff as you progress through your career, with things like improved recovery, or staff that specialize in helping develop certain attributes or skills.

Fight card and results visibility

This is the immersion stuff that really gets to me. You can't see where you're placed on a fight card, which card you're even on, or the results of the other fights on that card. After your fight you just get a cash bonus for things like fight of the night or performance of the night, but there's no actual info on who won those, how they won, or what happened on the rest of the card. In older games you could actually follow that stuff and build a mental picture of the guy you're about to fight based on their history. Now it's just numbers and rankings with no story behind them. When you get offered a fight, you should also be able to easily see that opponent's fight history and how those fights went. That's not some deep tape study thing, that's information any real fighter could just look up in two seconds.

Pre fight intros and walk outs

These are way more basic than they used to be. They used to announce your height, weight, where you're fighting out of, and both fighters' records. Now it's pretty much just "And fighting out of the RED Corner! SMITH!" and that's it. I used to love watching Bruce announce all the pre fight info before a fight to really feel immersed and make my record feel real. Also they messed up the walk outs too. I used to enjoy seeing what my current strengths are or if I'm on a KO streak etc and used to think about how it could be once they build on it, but now literally it just says the same corny things every time starting with "Fights really well when they are in a flow." When I first read that for the first time I literally said "Oh come onnn."

Post fight interviews and callouts

Post fight interviews would add a lot too, especially if they let you call out other fighters for a shot at getting offered a fight with them. Calling out an unranked fighter who doesn't have a fight scheduled could come with a decent shot at making that happen, and as you start stacking wins against good competition, your chances of landing a callout with a ranked fighter could improve based on your recent form and the quality of opponents you've been facing. Little touches like that would go a long way toward making the world feel alive.

Weigh ins, weight cutting, and press conferences

People have been asking for this stuff forever. Press conferences aren't a huge deal to me personally, they tend to get old fast like they do in 2K, but I don't think they'd hurt to have. Weigh ins on the other hand feel like a no brainer, and I think they could go even further with a real weight cutting system. Give fighters a walk around weight separate from their fight weight, so if you're naturally bigger but cutting hard to make a lower weight class, that's a real commitment with a real payoff, like a size advantage over an opponent who isn't cutting as much. But there should be tradeoffs too. Cutting a ton of weight could affect your chin or your cardio depending on how well you handle the cut and rehydration, and you could even hire better training staff to help manage that. On the flip side, fighting closer to your natural weight could come with its own perks, like better cardio and no chin penalty, plus more time to actually train instead of cutting. And then add real consequences for missing weight, where either fighter could agree to go ahead with the fight for a reduced purse, like fifty percent, or just reject the fight outright if the other guy misses weight.

A missed opportunity with the story mode

And honestly, the craziest part to me is that they made a story mode about a wrestler this time around, even though they spent all their development time making stand up striking feel amazing and have openly admitted that most people would be disappointed they didn't touch anything on the ground. You would think they'd have leaned into how great the striking turned out and built a kickboxer story instead, where you start out in Pride or some other organization as a kickboxer and then work your way into the UFC. It feels like such an obvious connection to make between the gameplay strengths and the story mode they chose to build, and honestly it makes me wonder if the different teams working on this game even talk to each other.

Removing WFA was also a miss. A lot of people liked that, and they could have just kept it in and added an option to skip it for anyone who didn't want to go through it again. But starting straight into the UFC at 0-0 breaks immersion in a big way. There should also be a system where if you're performing badly enough you can get cut from the UFC and have to go back down to Pride or WFA and work your way back up, the same way it actually works for real fighters.

Heavyweight is also incredibly bare bones in terms of actual fighters. I only ended up fighting 3 real heavyweights and the other 15 fights were against jiu jitsu guys and wrestlers, even though everyone knows heavyweight is primarily a stand up division. I actually went up to heavyweight specifically trying to avoid fighting a bunch of grapplers and still ended up running into the same problem. On top of that, there needs to be an option to move up or down weight classes whenever you want. It's pretty lame that as a heavyweight you can't drop down to light heavyweight even if your character would realistically be able to make that cut.

Customization also needs real attention. The Black hairstyles in particular look way too fuzzy and unrealistic. I get that they added a few more body type options this time, but I wish you could just select the body type of a real UFC fighter if you wanted, like being able to pick Ciryl Gane, Izzy, or Usman's build to make the process easier. And the fact that you still cannot edit your fighter's reach at this point is honestly laughable.

Final thoughts

It really feels like all the development time went into the pre UFC story intro, which most people will only play through once if at all. If that had existed alongside real improvements to career mode, I'd get it, but it feels like one came at the cost of the other. And it's not just me saying this either, multiple reviews at launch have already pointed out that the new career hub still boils down to navigate menus, hit the bag, fight, repeat, despite all the added dialogue trees and narrative events. It's reassuring in a weird way to know it's not just me, but also frustrating that people reviewing the game for a living are saying the exact same thing I am.

It sucks to feel disappointed because the gameplay improvements this year are such a massive step up that normally I'd just call this game a win and move on. But I've been patiently waiting since EA got the license for them to address career mode in a meaningful way. I do like that they've never committed to annual releases, but it doesn't feel like they're using all that extra time to actually work on the game, and it ends up feeling like an annual release anyway.

It just sucks going year after year thinking "okay, next time they'll finally improve it" and continuing to be let down. Especially because, like I said, this might be the biggest jump in gameplay quality they've ever had. So here I am again, sitting here patiently thinking now that they've nailed the gameplay, surely career mode is next, right? 😂

I do think keeping the story mode separate from career mode was actually a smart call, since not everyone wants to play through a scripted narrative every single career. But choosing to spend that development time on a separate story mode instead of fixing career mode itself is not what anyone actually wanted. Career mode needs a full overhaul, and honestly it needs to come in an update or DLC. We shouldn't have to wait another 3 years just to find out whether they finally decided to address it.

Loving the gameplay, just wish career mode got even a fraction of that attention. I have so much more to say but at this point ima leave it here.😩