EA SPORTS FC 24

Chris Davies

Chris Davies

Chief PESsimist
Staff
14 May 2003
UK
Tranmere Rovers
ea-media-fc-16x9.jpg.adapt.crop191x100.628p.jpg


Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developers: EA Canada & EA Romania
Website: ???
Genre: Sports
Player(s): Probably up to 4 locally, up to 22 online
System(s): Probably all known to man
Release Date: 2023

Starting a thread for this a little early, considering there's no solid information out there yet about the release - but this is EA's first football game without the FIFA license, and it's worth any discussion points going in here.

Such as this:

Sky News: Premier League closes in on near-£500m deal with EA to retain exclusive rights

This is really interesting to me, because one of the benefits for EA of dropping the FIFA license (beyond things FIFA prohibited from appearing in the game, if rumours are to be believed) is the cost-saving... But this is a pretty massive bill.

Admittedly, EA would have had to pay this anyway (as well as the FIFA bill), but... That's a big price.

(A drop in the ocean when you look at their over-£10bn yearly sales, but still, they were concerned enough about the FIFA costs...)
 
If it’s still on Frostbite and uses the Hypermotion BS, it’s won’t even be worth using the free EA Access trial we get with game pass every year. I still have a few hours left on my FIFA 23 trial, it’s THAT bad I don’t have any passion to play it.

Let’s see. I think it will be more of the same but of course, would love to be proved wrong.

FUT will get their full attention again and we’ll be complaining about the same old stuff we moan about every year.
 
EA have a chance to make a great football game. But I could bet that this will be the same like all Fifa's befor but with different UI with some different colours.

But all my hope is for my first minds.
 
Chris Davies said:
ea-media-fc-16x9.jpg.adapt.crop191x100.628p.jpg


Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developers: EA Canada & EA Romania
Website: ???
Genre: Sports
Player(s): Probably up to 4 locally, up to 22 online
System(s): Probably all known to man
Release Date: ???

Starting a thread for this a little early, considering there's no solid information out there yet about the release - but this is EA's first football game without the FIFA license, and it's worth any discussion points going in here.

Such as this:

Sky News: Premier League closes in on near-£500m deal with EA to retain exclusive rights

This is really interesting to me, because one of the benefits for EA of dropping the FIFA license (beyond things FIFA prohibited from appearing in the game, if rumours are to be believed) is the cost-saving... But this is a pretty massive bill.

Admittedly, EA would have had to pay this anyway (as well as the FIFA bill), but... That's a big price.

(A drop in the ocean when you look at their over-£10bn yearly sales, but still, they were concerned enough about the FIFA costs...)
Click to expand...

Those numbers are crazy. And it'll keep getting crazier. Its moving more towards huge numbers such as transmission rights for live sports events. Its crazy to think fifa wanted 300M annually and premier league is getting 80M annually in this deal. Fifa is a big name but i think the premier league brings much more to the table.
What do you lose with fifa rights? The world cup and the marketing pull? Content wise not much else?

Anyway. Interés to see how EA move Forward after 30+ years under the fifa name. I want to think things will change but I don't think towards simulation. At this point I'd take a new engine and take it from there.
 
My 2p is always the same with FIFA.

As long as they keep their FIFPRO license, most of the clowns that play the game not for gameplay but for cards/characters will be happy as their idiot brain will be hyped to see Neymar with his golden hairstyle version 6 in a squad update / purple golden card with a number on it.

This is also highlighted further with modding. Most idiots who mod their game actually want mOrE graphics or faces or leagues or kits rather than actual improvements to the game.

Also, the number of people who play the game for "offline" is dwindling further in comparison to "ranked"/UT. It must be below 1% now.

I still firmly believe EA will take this game to a completely online only affair. Perhaps even FTP at some point.

How will EA Sports FC go? For one its a terrible name for the game (and actually an old one from the 00s). I can tell they have been focusing on improving the system to deal with more live updating and getting it closer to the other franchises. Also recent versions have not improved offline modes (especially Career) for years. Even given several false promises over the past 4 years too.

So track record says this will be brand change for the entire game. See how that affects them and then go from there. Remember it will no longer be FUT. Just UT or some other name. So theyll make a huge deal out of that.

Still. EA may surprise me!

EDIT: Also forgot to point out something. People who keep suggesting that we need a new engine should be careful what you wish for and dont understand how engines work. There is nothing wrong with Frostbite, its actually one of the better ones. The problems are just priorities, design and legacy systems holding them back.
 
My only hope is that they will divide online and offline side of things, or even better divide the stuff sim and arcade. There is nothing wrong with that, online players (kids) can continue enjoying the stuff they do and other players who want simulation can play that way. I am afraid if they don't do that now with the new name they won't do it in the future.
If we speak honestly latest fifa have some really good stuff under the hood but stuff like skating and some problematic animations keep the game to do some annoying stuff for the player. Variety is really another level, graphics are good on next gen, some game mechanics work properly, passing, shooting, all is there but it was not executed right becouse of the animations. I think with few stuff changed we can have much better game even now but if they start to develop the game with sim in mind that would be the most happier day for all football game fans.
 
The only thing that may change EA direction, is that FIFA was around the production and giving them some "obligation" regarding the gameplay accessibility and all. In big : Fifa influencing Arcadey gameplay / reactivity / resulted in illogic physics and gameplay moves.

But i really, really doubt about it. I believe it's Fifa stopped their contract with EA not the opposite. It's been the longer partnership regarding Video Games history and we can salute that.

Now i don't see anyone buying that licence : it will be only for one DLC World Cup mode, that's all. EA didn't needed FIFA for having all the league they needs.
Perhaps in Megadrive time, with some money + to FIFA and hop you got all the real names, but it was another era where Video Games wasn't took seriously.
 
Paul-v said:
EDIT: Also forgot to point out something. People who keep suggesting that we need a new engine should be careful what you wish for and dont understand how engines work. There is nothing wrong with Frostbite, its actually one of the better ones. The problems are just priorities, design and legacy systems holding them back.
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The issue is since PS4 era, they create one engine for all their games. It doesn't at all justify their non-sense (vanilla) football game, but it was a big issue when there was a change to adapt it for a football game.

But as everyone knows already but i repeat if the sales doesn't drop drastically, they won't lay a finger to change anything. FUT is a dopamine, and tons of people aren't at all like us who wants something at least realistic. They buy it by habits, it's became abnormal not having FIFA (EA FC) in your catalog
 
Is there a regulator in place in regards to Premier League licencing? How does it help competition when EA can chuck money bags to monopolise it. It frustrates me that it doesn't more sense to have your licencing/brand across multiple football titles.
 
Every single person will say that the problem with this game is the engine, or animations, or even skating problems, and that's only a small part of the bigger part the game has problems with that is design. This game is designed to be FIFA street with 11 players in the pitch. Speeds of the players, probability of the defenders to fall in a feint, the possibilities to dribble past a defender with 5 skill dribblings, fast passing, absurd physics. Is not even the animations are bad. Is how they trigger, and the fact that they are triggering wrong ON PURPOSE, because EA wants an arcady experience, rather than a simulation one.

Still, mods solve this to a certain extent. I know that @Paul-v has been able to mod the game up to an extent where the game feels kinda realistic, and me, myself, have been working on modding the game too (yet I haven't released cause I haven't got satisfied yet with what I am pursuiting), so trust me, there's still a light, at least, in this year FIFA 23, if we can mod it up to a certain extent where the game itself is playable.
 
Paul-v said:
hope what? that a random new engine will change the entire game mechanics, the 4 key designers thoughts and all the existing coding theyve used since Ignite?
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The only hope we could have is that the new mechanics are less arcady, but knowing EA, they'll be even worse. Best of cases, they'll be the same. Still though, probably, new engine will be similar or handled similar to Frostbite and they'll recicle the animations, so I don't really think that there's gonna be too much of a difference. Just new code and the fact that previous tools can't be used. Best of cases graphics will be a bit better, but let's be honest here, if graphics ain't better is not because they can't do it better because of the engine, is just they're lazy to work on the faces. So in any case, we won't be loosing too much with this new EA Sports football game, essentially it will be FIFA without FIFA license.
 
The engine has always been a very marginal problem to me. If the direction is to create a game to hook people online, even an engine that could potentially simulate real life physics would be bended for that purpose.
 
Enough options and sliders could make it a great football game, for those who (like me) just find it far too braindead and unfulfilling. As someone else has said, there is a hell of a lot of amazing stuff in the engine - it's just that the sums are being manipulated to exacerbate the "fun" (which, if you used to play PES and you're looking for realism and a satisfying grind, isn't fun at all).

But as far as I can tell, this kind of stuff can't all be modded in - it has to be there from the start. So it would need some hero within the product team to say "a lot of people still play Career Mode and wish for some gameplay that's less 'three minute halves with free runs to goal' and more 'how do I break down this stubborn midfield'".

...but the fact they've now added three-minute halves and "playable highlights" pretty much confirms who they care about. (Who cares if they add that stuff - as long as the sim players get some love too. But, we don't.)

The engine is good; how it's being utilised, and frankly butchered from a single-player experience year after year (by deleting swathes of AI and replacing it with the dumbest 1v1 'Im not allowed to even look at you' bullshit for eSports play) is, IMO, bad.
 
Chris Davies said:
Enough options and sliders could make it a great football game, for those who (like me) just find it far too braindead and unfulfilling. As someone else has said, there is a hell of a lot of amazing stuff in the engine - it's just that the sums are being manipulated to exacerbate the "fun" (which, if you used to play PES and you're looking for realism and a satisfying grind, isn't fun at all).

But as far as I can tell, this kind of stuff can't all be modded in - it has to be there from the start. So it would need some hero within the product team to say "a lot of people still play Career Mode and wish for some gameplay that's less 'three minute halves with free runs to goal' and more 'how do I break down this stubborn midfield'".

...but the fact they've now added three-minute halves and "playable highlights" pretty much confirms who they care about. (Who cares if they add that stuff - as long as the sim players get some love too. But, we don't.)

The engine is good; how it's being utilised, and frankly butchered from a single-player experience year after year (by deleting swathes of AI and replacing it with the dumbest 1v1 'Im not allowed to even look at you' bullshit for eSports play) is, IMO, bad.
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Exactly.

As I have said before. All that is wrong with "FIFA" or now "EA Sports FC" is the design of the game. You watch any developer interview, they 100% designed it to be the way it is. It is fairly easy to make it more "simulation" but they don't. They also obviously never focus on the single player game and the game is being torn between 11 players on a pitch versus an esport skill game and it breaks in so many ways.

It was the major reason why they re-added "Volta" (FIFA Street) but it never took off because of the FUT side of the game. What they should've done is created Volta separately (with golden cards and all that snazzy stuff) as a FTP game like Rocket League. I know so many people who would enjoy that arcade gameplay, in that kind of setting.
 
danilik said:
"It is fairly easy to make it more "simulation"", however, these words of yours give us offline players hope, obviously thanks to people like you, who dedicate time and passion to our hobby
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Thanks to the community too because without you, we can't find enough energy to test over and over different sliders or mods, patch after patch...

The best gift for me it's a simple "Thank you, I have some good time with this game".
 
Yeah guys, new engine or not, don’t expect anything different. As others have said, they design the game to be like this.

For them, the action on the pitch is an annoying sideshow that delays kids paying them more money to buy players. It’s as simple as that.

I’ve got a new slogan for them: “EA Sports… Greed - it’s in the game.”
 
Development issues with Frostbite have been well reported on for years. It was an engine made for 1st person shooters that got brought into fifa due to it's ability to support The Journey mode and because EA wanted a more universal engine across it's teams.

A new bespoke engine made for FIFA (or sport games in general) to accommodate it's specific needs and ease development issues would absolutely be a positive for the game.


https://www.vg247.com/how-the-frost...e-for-ea-in-general-and-bioware-in-particular

"Whenever you're trying to do something that fits the engine-vehicles, for example-Frostbite handles that extremely well. But when you're building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult," one developer told Kotaku.
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"Frostbite is easily the worst, shittiest, most pain in the ass engine I've ever used in my career, and I shipped Wolfenstein off the Doom 3 tech," said Heir on Twitter. "The exact same game design in Unreal vs. Frostbite will take dozens more engineers, money, and time on FB because of the way its architected and how far behind it is from Unreal (unless you are making BF). There is a reason I chose Unreal Engine 4 as my engine for my next project."
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"We obviously had to take the Frostbite Engine, because there was the internal initiative to make sure that everybody was on the same technology, but it was an engine that was made to do first-person shooters not third-person traversal cinematic games," Hennig told USG earlier this year. "So building all of that third-person platforming and climbing and cover taking and all that stuff into an engine that wasn't made to do that. We did a lot of foundational work that I think the teams are still benefiting from because it's a shared engine, but it's tough when you spend a lot of time doing foundational stuff but then don't get to go ta-da! [laughs] You know, here's the game."
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Young pointed to Frostbite's excellent content engine and shaders for allowing the Madden NFL team to build out a cinematic storytelling experience in a way it couldn't with Ignite. Everything didn't go off without a hitch though. Madden NFL 18 was a transition year: it looked better, but it missed some of the cleaner features and smoother motion players had come to expect from the Ignite Maddens. EA Sports introduced Real Player Motion in Madden NFL 19, a new animation system intended to make the on-field action feel real, but once players had it in their hands, they noticed the bugs and freezes. Even the Frostbite FIFA games have had complaints about choppy pacing and input lag.


"There are often some bits and pieces left behind," Madden NFL 19 gameplay lead Clint Oldenburg admitted to USG. "You're not really aware it ever existed until it gets into Frostbite, and when you start playing the game you're like, 'Wait this thing's not working. Oh man we forgot the motion system.'"
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Despite the two key sports titles making the move, not every EA Sports franchise has switched over. NBA Live 19 and NHL 19 still use Ignite, while EA Sports UFC 3 uses the all-new RPM Tech engine. NHL's steadfast hold against Frostbite has been noticeable to the community, and according to the developers, that's because they don't want to lose features in the transition to the new engine.

"Really, we have so much invested in what's built in Ignite. And right now we feel that we don't really want to go into a transition year where... well, in our last transition year, a lot sort of had to be left on the cutting room floor, right? We didn't deliver to our fans expectations and so right now we've got a critical mass of different modes where people are investing in them, they're playing them. They want Threes. It runs in the current engine. We built our customization in it and so, right now, we're trying to deliver to more fans expectations. I'm not sure that transitioning to Frostbite right away would actually deliver what our fans expect," explained NHL 19 creative director William Ho to USG.
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JUNEFUMA said:
Development issues with Frostbite have been well reported on for years. It was an engine made for 1st person shooters that got brought into fifa due to it's ability to support The Journey mode and because EA wanted a more universal engine across it's teams.

A new bespoke engine made for FIFA (or sport games in general) to accommodate it's specific needs and ease development issues would absolutely be a positive for the game.


https://www.vg247.com/how-the-frost...e-for-ea-in-general-and-bioware-in-particular
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OK. Here I go on a rant, again :D

Switching engine's is a huge undertaking, especially for a series game that has very little development on it in the first place. DICE (and therefore Frostbite) is a huge department of EA, there would be no reason to suddenly move away from it now.

Shall I share the clarity that some of you need to understand why FIFA has barely improved over the past years?

Here is the most I can tell you without breaking a promise with people I know, my modding and tooling and from having access to some source by a certain community member.

- EA has maximum 2 people working on Career mode each year. Most of the time, its 1 guy, usually a junior or someone new to the team.
- FUT / gameplay is the only thing they work on "fully" (for about 3-6 months) work on each year
- The mix of teams from across of world is the key problem with development, this is extremely evident when they patch a part of the game that breaks another part of the game, normally something in Career mode gets broken because of a change elsewhere. In FIFA 23, I am still looking at broken scoreboards after the WC was added.
- The 4 main designers, especially 2 of them, are holding it back from being a simulation game (this is widespread knowledge)
- They still have code from FIFA 12 in the game for Career Mode
- The game currently is split into 2 processes. One is using Frostbite directly, the other is long lasting code from the world of Ignite. The old code has never moved, even though Frostbite has the ability to do what the old code does. This is NOT an engine problem. Its a development problem.
- Career Mode code has NOTHING to do with the Engine, no Engine change will make an improvement here. It is just quick (lazy if you wish) design and programming
- EA consistantly rush programming, not an Engine issue. You can see this if you mod the game at all. Especially gameplay
- There was a point where I was approached indirectly (via a CM) to "show them the way" in terms of Career Mode improvements. By "show them the way", they meant that I, for free, develop something that hacked their game (not modded, hacked, like Aranaktu does) to add improvements they couldnt do via internal code (I did do this with CEM, years ago, some people will remember). I turned them down, for many reasons, including the fact I have a paid job and it was annoy the shit outta them if I did that for another company
- When EA added Volta. They made it so the gameplay from one mode can be separated from another. They never bothered doing it, even though they 100% should!


Yeah, I've definitely been doing this way too long :)
 
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