The spool-up to a new EA Sports football title should be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the sport. There’s always a new feature or two, and an effort to improve on the year before – shooting, dribbling, overall tactics; these have been under the spotlight on several occasions. What people find, though, is that the game that gets released often feels totally different only a few months later. The team behind FC 27 wants to avoid that.
We sat down with Kantcho Doskov and Sam Rivera of EA Sports to talk about what’s new with FC 27, and perhaps some of the difficulties of a forever-shifting football meta. Micro fixes after launch can add up to big changes down the line, which is something players aren’t always happy with.
“The strategy is to give time to the game to settle down. Give time to the players to master and learn the mechanics.” Rivera talks about how patience will play a huge part in how FC 27 develops over the course of its life: “If something is broken, if we find there’s a mechanic that is not balanced, we will try to wait as much as we can,” and they need to “let the game breathe.”
That’s not to say that if something major crops up, it won’t be addressed, with Rivera jumping in to say that the team will react “if there’s an exploit, for example, if there’s a really bad bug that we need to fix.” The idea here is that, from a balance point, what players get at the beginning won’t suddenly change after a couple of weeks, like it maybe has in the past.
The focus for FC 27 is on attacking and defending mechanics, with the latter receiving the most attention. Players cannot rely on AI teammates doing the job for them any longer; they must take control of a defensive situation and win the ball themselves, which, according to Doskov, was a bigger job than could be achieved mid-cycle – “We had to do a lot of work to get there. We could not patch it.”
“We rewrote the interception system from scratch in order to achieve more consistency,” Doskov continues. “I think that’s what the community has been asking for, and we’ve finally been able to achieve that.” As with most of the FC games, it’s about incremental gains rather than complete revolution, and according to Rostov, “the game is well balanced, and we’re happy with the state that it’s in.”
I like the idea of consistency with my sports games. Playing them is a skill that needs to be re-learned every year, and if the metaphorical goalposts are being moved with every patch, it can lead to a lot of frustration. Release FC 27; let it breathe. Good plan.
Additional reporting by Tom Hopkins for at Gamescom.
