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.😩Current fighter count by weight class in UFC 6 👀
Current fighter count by weight class in UFC 6 (why heavyweight career feels so repetitive) Been running a heavyweight career and noticed I keep fighting the same handful of guys over and over, way more often than I remember from a lightweight save. So I went through and counted up the actual roster by division, including how many are active versus retired. Here's where things stand right now: Flyweight: 16 total, 15 active, 1 retired Bantamweight: 23 total, 19 active, 4 retired Featherweight: 27 total, 23 active, 4 retired Lightweight: 34 total, 28 active, 6 retired Welterweight: 39 total, 30 active, 9 retired Middleweight: 30 total, 21 active, 9 retired Light Heavyweight: 30 total, 14 active, 16 retired Heavyweight: 25 total, 16 active, 9 retired Women's Strawweight: 20 total Women's Flyweight: 17 total Women's Bantamweight: 17 total Light Heavyweight actually has the thinnest active pool in the whole game at just 14, which surprised me, with Heavyweight not far behind at 16. Compare that to Welterweight's 30 active or Lightweight's 28, and I start to see why it felt so off. Flyweight's numbers are smaller too, but the real division just doesn't have as deep a pool of fighters in real life compared to something like lightweight or welterweight. What makes it worse for heavyweight specifically is you don't even have the option to drop down and chase the light heavyweight belt once you've cleaned out the division. So you're stuck working through that small pool with zero flexibility to look elsewhere for fresh fights, and it gets stale fast. And that's not even getting into everything else I've been pointing out is off with career mode (it's a lot). The thin pool also creates some genuinely weird results in career mode itself. Tai Tuivasa will show up highly ranked, sometimes even as champion, despite having lost his last seven fights in a row in real life, which is currently the longest losing streak in UFC heavyweight history. With so few real fighters to draw from, the game ends up propping guys like that up near the top of the division, which breaks immersion. EA's said they'll be adding new fighters monthly, so hopefully this evens out over time. But right now, if you're picking a division for a career save and want to avoid fighting the same handful of guys constantly, or a ton of created fighters, the heavier weight classes are clearly giving you a smaller pool to work with, especially light heavyweight. To be fair though, I do think this is better than last year, if I'm remembering right. Anyone else running a heavyweight or light heavyweight save notice this? Curious if people are tracking what gets added in the next roster update.
Predetermined
Why does it feel like all of these Ufc games predetermine whose attack tracking will be better and whose counters will actually deal damage before the match starts? In every single version, this one being no different, in my matches either my head movement actually evades and my counter deal damage. Or one of two things happen, I'll pull a hook, but the hook hits me anyway, or I actually evade the hook, but my counter deals no damage and they jab right through it and break my nose. It's freaking stupid.
A job well done
Not gonna lie the hall of legends is absolutely beautiful I hope you guys extend on it more people like even people that didn’t win belts like cub Swanson or lyoto or shogun striking in this game feels authentic I wish the grappling was amplified to be as deep as the striking but EA you got me a job well done.
UFC 6 or UFC 5.5?
After putting time into UFC 6, I honestly can’t believe how identical the meta feels to UFC 5. Everyone is still playing exactly the same: endless head movement, slip counters, pull counters, canned combos, and fishing for the same openings we’ve been abusing for years. It’s uncanny. New game, same playstyle. The craziest part isn’t that players want to play like UFC 5—it’s that they can. If the exact same strategies, timing, and exploits carry over with little adjustment, how different is the gameplay really? People are already fighting in UFC 6 like they’ve got 1,000 hours in UFC 5. That says a lot. The movement feels familiar. The counter system feels familiar. The combo meta feels familiar. Even the pacing of fights feels familiar. When you load into a match, it doesn’t feel like players are learning a new game—it feels like they imported their UFC 5 muscle memory and never skipped a beat. A sequel should evolve the gameplay, not preserve the exact same meta. Right now, UFC 6 feels less like a fresh experience and more like UFC 5 with a new coat of paint.
Feedback on the EA Sports UFC 6 Beta
After spending several hours with the beta, I can say this feels like the biggest step forward for the series since EA Sports UFC 2, especially when it comes to striking. However, the game still has a lot of balance and technical issues that need attention. Striking This is easily the best part of the beta right now. Every fighter feels unique Strikes have real weight and impact Matchups feel much more important now — powerful strikers can completely dominate in stand-up exchanges There are a lot of new combo options, even for non-strikers Body work is finally meaningful and extremely effective I also really like the parry/counter system. It reminds me of UFC 2, where a successful parry allowed you to heavily punish your opponent. The comparison to UFC 2 also comes from the character physics — fighters move and react in a very similar way, which gives the striking a more dynamic and impactful feel compared to the previous games. That said, there is one major issue with the pacing: The game feels too fast overall Middleweight feels like flyweight right now The gameplay should be slowed down a bit so exchanges and animations are easier to read Grappling There are some good improvements: Submissions are more interesting Transition fakes are finally useful If your opponent bites on a fake, they lose noticeable stamina However, grappling still feels unfinished technically: Transitions often have poor responsiveness Sometimes inputs feel like they do not register at all This is especially noticeable on PlayStation There is also a serious bug: After activating “flow” and initiating grappling, transitions stop working properly for a short period of time Interface / UI The interface also needs improvement. Right now: Some UI elements are difficult to read during fights Important information is not always clear at a glance The HUD feels visually overloaded at times The overall UI should be cleaner and more readable, especially during fast exchanges and grappling situations. Bugs Here are some issues I noticed during the beta: At random moments, the game suddenly feels like it is running in slow motion Matches sometimes slow down dramatically for no reason Bugs with transitions into half guard Unblockable rear choke situations still exist After certain grappling sequences, the game stops processing transitions correctly Balance The biggest problem right now is stamina and block balance. Stamina Stamina drain is far too low. This is especially noticeable: during constant strike spam when missing strikes in later rounds Stamina consumption needs to be significantly increased, especially for missed strikes. Block Block health is too weak. Because of this, many fights turn into mindless pressure and trading. I think the game would benefit from: higher block health stronger defensive tools heavier stamina penalties for reckless pressure Final Thoughts The game has huge potential. The striking is the best in the series so far, and for the first time in a long time, fighters truly feel different from one another. But: the overall pacing needs to be slower stamina and block balance need adjustments grappling requires major polishing the UI needs to be more readable several bugs are serious enough to hurt competitive play If these issues are fixed before release, the series finally has a chance to take a real step forward.Standing TKO's would've put UFC 6 over the top (and still can)
I'm loving UFC 6 (except for flow state visuals, which desperately needs an option to toggle off), but I think standing TKO's would've absolutely given it the undeniable true next gen feel. Just more finishing scenarios. The finish makes all the difference in the world.