FC 26: Turn your thinking over to the machine

[mystic elk]

Over the last two months, everytime I play this game I find myself wondering how this game was allowed to be released. The usual issues continue in this game like:

• any player needs tikitaka playstyle to send a first time pass to his teammate 5 meters next to him
• rainbow flick glitch
• kickoffs, which were patched in the worst way
• corners: players standstill after short pass corners or after player lock corners
  This are mostly situational issues that I can live with, but the major issues for me are:
• The game encourages passivity, anyone who can control the left stick can keep the ball forever, pressing is nonexistent, If you want to press your opponent and they don't want to play a good game, they can just keep spinnig, you switch to another player, they spin again, and so on. Apparently, this is how EA wants people, just keep spinning and passing back until your opponent is frustrated and leaves a big space for you to send your triangle throw ball and shoot. This is even how squad battles AI designed by EA plays. You would be lucky to get 50% possession from the gold common SBs team. This is a mode supposedly to chill, do evos,and get some meh rewards, but EA still managed to make it sweaty.

• The other main problem, which is obvious from week 3, is the super powerful AI defending, specially around the box. You just can't attack quickly in this game, it is like the AI reads every input I press and is optimized to minimize the risk for the defending team. They created a game where most people discovered that hiding behind the AI is better than defending and facing your opponent manually. It is easy to see that the AI tracks runs, blocks shots, jockeys, and closes passing lanes better than most players. Most people I face now are just minimizing their switching, holding their CAM, CM or CDM and second man press using AI. Around the box, this is perfect for them, the AI basically closes passing and shooting angles and they come from a blind spot to tackle you or they just press L1, switching to the AI player next to the attacker, followed by a tackle and he easily got the ball. All it takes now is to send the "realistic throw ball from the edge of his box to his only attacker to start a counter (meanwhile my 4 defenders are just standing there behind this attacker doing nothing). The defensive AI is just too strong, they not only close passing lanes, contain the opponent (infinitely) and block shots exactly where you shoot them, the AI this year actually intercepts the ball from you, while you are concerned with the opponent-controlled player, the AI just comes and pushes or tackles you. This is crazy 😂.
  Much more can be said about defensive AI but everyone should be able to see it already.

The conclusion for me is that this game is is not really tested, or not really well-designed or the people at EA just don't understand football.
How do you design a game that is optimized to reduce casual players skill? Do you want 15 yo kids just jockeying around with one player waiting for the AI to get them the ball to send the 40-meter throw ball? What skill did they gain? pressing L2 and R1 while rotating left stick? Do you think spinning to avoid opponent pressure everytime is a mind triggering skill? Do you prefer this over making a game where the better player is the who continously tries to play forward, by passing, running or doing skill move to avoid pressure? There is no skill or fun (except winning) in definding with AI and attacking like fidget spinners. This is brainrot at its best.
Maybe this wasn't your objective or design to the game but you just had to release it? or maybe your testing didn't show these easily detectable problems?
Maybe your AI development team wanted to flex their engineering abilities?
I think this game is a result of a mix of bad design, bad testing and wrongly set objectives/requirements from bad football knowledge. I also think the game has become too much for your team to handle, it is heavily nonlinear, maybe hard to diagnose and difficult to maintain/patch, to the point that it has been more than two months where people are complaining about defensive AI and you still didn't release a patch for it. This is a game-killer problem that should have been patched on week 2 after your jockey buff patch.