FIFA needs a shake-up!

With bits of FIFA 14 gameplay popping up in various places now, I thought I’d share my thoughts regarding the development of the series.

Due to a technical malfunction last week, my friends and I found ourselves playing a few games of FIFA 12. The game felt marginally slower than FIFA 13 and there were a few amusing impact engine gaffes, but we all agreed that had we not known that we were on the older version, we probably wouldn't have realised.

This fits the feeling I have had about FIFA games since they moved to what is now the current gen. Year on year, EA seem to do the same thing. They make a few improvements to the graphics, add a few new features and game types and generally polish the game. However, when it comes to gameplay, all they seem to do is tweak it. Make some things more powerful and some things less powerful in an attempt to cancel out the abuse of certain ways of playing the game.

When you pick up a new FIFA game, it feels new and fresh. “Finally, you can no longer get easy goals through method X or nullify the opposition using method Y". A few weeks later, however, you start to realise that “method X" and “method Y" have just been replaced with different things, and you proceed to spend the rest of the year waiting for the next FIFA. And then, the next one.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has got a lot better since FIFA 08 (the first FIFA game I owned on the PS3). 360 dribbling, abolition of torpedo defenders, quick throw-ins (etc.) have all made the game better in their own way. I just think that a lot of the changes they have made didn’t need to be so spread out, and that the general feel of the football being played hasn’t improved. It has undoubtedly changed, but for the better? I am not sure.

I was hoping that this year, with the next gen, things would change, but from the looks of it, they haven’t. There has probably been a larger step forward in the graphics department and I believe there is a new engine, but the style of the game seems to have remained the same. I remember seeing FIFA 08 on the PS3 for the first time. My jaw dropped and found myself frantically researching how much it would cost me to buy a next gen console. Early impressions of this game have got me looking elsewhere to find a saviour. I am preying that Konami step up in the not-too-distant future to at least provide EA with the incentive to have a rethink.

I dream of a football game where every style of play can be effective as long as it is mastered, and where pace doesn’t rule supreme. However, while EA can continue to hover up money from the skill-stick-waggling, high-pitch-voiced, UT fanboys, it seems like we may have to wait for somebody else to come in and save the day.