Over the past few decades, football (or football, if you are not from the USA like me) has not changed much. Sure, there are novel rules, improved tactics and much more money involved in a contemporary game – but his heart is still about digging the ball at the goal more than the second team. How does a series like EA Sports FC improve every year when the sport he emulates does not introduce huge changes? For me, it’s about updating the quality of life, and FC 26 has them in Pikach. You heard the sentence “Death for a thousand cuts”, but it’s more like “set by a thousand pieces of tape.” It is not that every problem has been solved, and many micro problems, such as misleading, changing players and strange equipment animations have returned with FC 25-but at least at the beginning of FC 26 in the right direction in almost every aspect.
The novel gameplay settings are a phenomenal example of this. In the past, everyone used the same game style, regardless of whether they dived in competitive matches in the Ultimate Team, or trying to win the league with the processor opponents in the manager mode. This year, EA divided things between two different settings: competitive and legitimate. Thanks to the competitive statutory, you can expect a quick action and smarter members of the AI team, to which you can be used to previous FC/FIFA games. Meanwhile, legitimate will be more realistic in relation to what you see on the real pitch every weekend. Players are slower and you need to exploit your tactical intelligence to get to the position of scoring.
The most vital part of this change is that these two options do not affect each other. This means that EA can tune the competitive mode, but it is needed without changing the balance of legitimate mode, which they could not do in previous versions of FC. Until now, I only played a dozen games with each setting, but they are already clearly valuable. Players come to various FC 26 modes for various reasons: players in their career mode want to play, which plays so close to real life, while players of Ultimate Team and clubs want fair and balanced online competition. These two ideals sometimes worked with each other in the past, so giving us two completely separate styles of gameplay allows EA to serve both communities.
Strange in implementation is that the legitimate preliminary setting is constrained only to offline modes. This means that you can not even exploit it in the matches of the battles in the team, even though they are the only content for one player in the Ultimate Team. I hope that this is something that I hope to add, because it is strange not to include all the content for one player by default, especially when he does it exactly with the novel version of the season pass.
Before immersing some other positive changes, let’s get to this season, because it is one of the biggest points of competition for me. Last year, EA introduced a paid season to FC 25 at the end of the cycle, so we knew it was coming, but seeing how it would fall on the first day. You can ignore it and stick to the free version of the pass, and even earn enough currency in the game to buy it without spending money in the real world, but I would argue that it could be the worst version of the season pass we have seen in a sports game.
The problem with the FC 26 season pass is that you do not earn only prizes for the best team in which people are (unfortunately) conditioned to spend money. You also earn a lot of awards for clubs, players’ careers and managerial careers. The latter is that things really become disgusting, because one of the great draws for FC 26 is that icons and heroes are ultimately available in the manager mode. For the first time you can take classic players, such as Luis Figo, Toni Kroos and Julie Foudy and put them in the manager mode. This should be a revelation, but instead EA made a strange decision to close many of these players behind the passage of the season.
There are several reasons why it is frustrating. The first of them is that you probably won’t be able to get enough XP for them, playing in the manager of the manager. EA can implement more ways so that the team players do not achieve XP, but thanks to how they are constructing now, you will need To immerse yourself in this lootbox opening simulator, if you want to finish a sufficient number of passes to win all prizes in your career mode. Even as someone who first plays the best team, this change sucks. I already know how bad FC may be, and I hate that it has expanded to more players in a way that seems to be a bang.
As if it was not frustrating enough, players in their career mode probably do not earn enough final numbers of the final currency for the team to buy a seasonal pass in the mode itself. This means that you have to spend real money to unlock players such as Gianfranco Zola, Miroslav Klose and Park Ji-Sung. Remember that this is only the first seasonal pass. If FC 26 still closes icons and heroes for future passes, we will probably see desirable players such as Ronaldinho, Ruud Gulllit and Johan Cruyff, they also hid behind the payment.
This is an unfortunate situation in which EA stinks, trying to get even more money from the player base than usual. It’s bad enough that the best team players are dehydrated, but now you can’t even enjoy the offline career mode without feeling the money.
What makes it even more painful is that most of the modes have fun updates of their tried and real formulas this year. For example, the novel Live Hub manager allows you to delve into specific challenges and get novel T -shirts for your club. These are the next step towards historical mode, such as the Negro leagues option MLB the showBecause you will be forced to recreate moments such as double Jamal Musiala from Bayern Munich or take a mid -level club, such as SK Rapid or Strasbourg to European glory. The classic version of the career mode still exists, but the Live Manager provides a rotational list of challenges that will check your skills on the pitch and outside.
Even Ultimate Team is home to several compact but significant changes. Everything from the return of tournaments to the possibility of choosing cosmetics at evolution seems carefully made to provide improvements, which fans have been asking for for years. We will have to wait a month or two to see the impact of a slower team power curve and I hesitate to assess the stability of servers until they live for everyone, but my early experience is positive.
Although I am not a player of clubs, novel archetypes certainly aroused my interest. Without a dedicated group, it is unlikely that I will spend too much time in clubs, but the Archteype system seems to be a better way to deal with progress in my undered eye. While the finish has certainly settled in the mode in the coming weeks, a clear sense of momentum forward makes me regret that I don’t have a group of 10 friends to play.
I have more to play this weekend, but so far FC 26 seems to provide sufficient changes in the quality of life, which after a few years of stagnation I feel more positive in the product on touching. However, I cannot not be nervous how much every mode earns. I have always felt that it is relatively basic to ignore spending additional money, unless you wanted to compete at the highest Ultimate Team, but this year it is less true. Now even players in career mode are not secure. FC 26 is the most demanding money so far and I can’t not worry about where we’re going.
