Fifa 22 threatens to be a big disappointment, especially on PC. With our suggestions, EA could avoid a debacle
The European Championship is over, the Bundesliga is still on summer break for over a month – football fans are now actually facing a few boring weeks. If it weren’t for the news about Fifa 22.
For a long time, fans and we assumed that PC players would finally get the improvements of the next-gen versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X this year – after all, we only had to wait a year for the technological leap with Fifa 14. Unfortunately, hope was in vain:
A proper story mode
Okay, the Journey mode from Fifa 19 wasn’t perfect. The story of the young Englishman Alex Hunter was often told in a cinematic way through numerous cutscenes, but it was full of logic gaps – not only because the player changes clubs three times within two seasons.
Nevertheless, EA Sports has shown here that Fifa could theoretically also be a good role-playing game in which we make decisions and write our own story. Instead of building on this, however, since Fifa 20 there is only a short story in Volta mode. Unfortunately, this only served as a tutorial for the street football mode and was already over after two hours.
The fact that EA focuses on multiplayer, especially Ultimate Team, is nothing new. After all, the developers earn a golden nose here year after year with the lootboxes. Nevertheless, there are still many players who buy Fifa precisely because of single-player content like the career mode.
A return of the story mode would be a good buying argument in this respect. It could even be better if it was linked to the player’s career, similar to what the NBA2K games already do with the MyCareer mode.
Start as a youth player at a village club, get spotted by a scout there, recommend yourself for the first team through short appearances and loans, fight for a regular place and eventually move to your favourite club to win the Champions League there. Along the way, a few encounters with current world stars, football legends and well-known coaches, plus a few role-playing elements such as learning special talents and essential decisions – and you’ve already piqued our interest.
Building Career Mode
The flagship for single players is currently the career mode: Here we take over a club of our choice as coach and manager and lead it to success. Similar to a football manager game, we take care of transfers, training, contract extensions and so on.
However, the mode has been struggling for years with various problems that EA must finally get to grips with.
Transfers: Far too often it happens in the career mode that players, who in reality are regarded as a symbol of club loyalty, are transferred shortly after the start of the game. Players like Robert Lewandowski or Trent Alexander-Arnold like to move directly to Real Madrid or another financially strong top club. A (hidden) value for club loyalty would certainly help here.
Change of coaches: Currently AI coaches cannot be fired at all, so the same faces are still sitting on the bench after 20 seasons. It would be desirable if they could be fired in the event of poor performance, just like we ourselves. It would be even better if players who retire could take over as new coaches. A Thomas Müller as a future Bayern coach? That would make for more immersion.
Stadium adjustments: Why can’t we still expand our stadium? Okay, maybe it’s for licensing reasons. But then at least let’s get a completely new arena out of the ground, preferably completely customisable! Especially if you fight your way to the German championship with a third-division team, you don’t necessarily want to celebrate it in a stadium with 10,000 spectators.
Yet there are so many great possibilities. The stadium could be put together completely in 3D, and a variant of the skate park editor from Skate 3 could be used. Then there are all kinds of possible upgrades, from the turf to the scoreboard. The area around the stadium could also be used for permanent upgrades by building training fields, youth centres and so on. Fellow baseball fans MLB The Show are also already implementing this feature in 2021 on next-gen platforms.
