FIFA 20 looked to have got off to a great start.
After a very difficult year with FIFA 19, EA needed to bounce back - and with the introduction Volta Football providing a whole new way to play, as well as customisation in seemingly every mode on the the new game, the football sim looked to have got fans back on side.
All was well... until #FixCareerMode started trending on Twitter with long-time fans of the manager mode experiencing a whole host of bugs in the revamp on FIFA 20.
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So, what's the problem?
We unveiled all the issues in the "broken" Career Mode - but here are the problems in short:
- A 75-game Premier League season
- AI teams fielding their reserve players
- Player heights limited to 6'2"
To make matters worse, there have been community claims that EA have been deleting forum posts complaining about the game.
The response
In a FIFA Forum Q&A - Gabriel Zaro, EA Community Manager said:
"The team is currently working to investigate community concerns and are looking to address them in future Title Updates."
This includes:
- AI teams dressing low OVR rated lineups in inappropriate situations
- While we have made improvements this year to lineup selections, especially with respect to how the team is chosen when formation changes are made, we have also heard the feedback that people are still seeing situations where a weaker starting 11 is chosen than should be. We are currently investigating a fix that will allow for better accuracy when determining match importance and how it relates to the AI line-up algorithm. We need to also ensure that any changes in this area do not have a negative impact in other Career Mode systems.
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- When the AI is in control of top teams, they are sometimes appearing low in the table, occasionally even being relegated
- We have seen this being reported by our community and we are currently investigating what may be causing this to happen so we can work on identifying a resolution in a future Title Update.
- Improvements to the scheduling algorithms to avoid match congestion
- From the feedback we had received in FIFA 19, we made addressing these concerns a priority in FIFA 20, and implemented logic improvements to this system early in the development cycle, where the results we were seeing were positive. Unfortunately, a change that we made late in the development cycle, which was the insertion of the authentic fixture schedule for the first season of a Career Mode, resulted in an issue where the rescheduling of games is creating new match congestion issues. Our team is investigating a fix for this new issue, and also performing another sweep of the system to see if there are any further improvements we can make to improve the algorithms.
- Press Conferences asking questions about things that aren't relevant to the save (asking about relegation when finishing in the top 4, etc)
- As this is a new feature in Career Mode, and due to the large amount of text and options that are present, despite our best efforts during testing to identify and resolve as many of these issues as possible, there are some issues that have been found by our players that we were unable to find during the development cycle. The team is taking in the feedback it is seeing from players and looking to release fixes to these issues in future Title Updates.
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- After a few seasons in Career Mode, the UEFA Europa League and UEFA Champions League competitions are not working correctly
- We have identified what we believe is the root cause of this issue, related to certain teams winning the UEFA Europa League and thus being a seeded team in the subsequent UEFA Champions League. We will be looking to include a fix for this issue in an future Title Update.
- Editing players is resulting in those players having their positions changed
- We have seen the reports from players around this issue and are working on a fix that will be included in a future Title Update.
- Dynamic Potential seems to be resulting in some unrealistic scenarios, where some players in bad form are going up in their ratings, while some players, such as some that are aged 29 or 30, are declining in ratings, despite their performance
- With the introduction of Dynamic Potential, which is now partially driven off the performance of a player in the previous season, the way potential works in Career Mode has changed from previous years.Form is a factor in the growth of players, but it’s not the only factor. Generally speaking, younger players will get better, and ageing players will decline. Form will have an effect on the potential for younger players to improve in that if you performed well in your previous season, you will have higher potential then if you performed poorly. Similarly, your previous seasons performance will affect the rate of decline for ageing players.
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- Ultimate Difficulty seems to be easier than in previous years, are you doing anything to address this?
- Dev Response: We have seen that feedback from players and are investigating what we can do to update this in a future Title Update.
Is it game over for FIFA 20?
Not even close.
All games have their teething problems. Even PES 2020 had to unveil a release schedule stating that their career mode, Master League, would not have the full experience until the update two days after release.
Fallout 76 is one of the most famous examples in recent years, featuring a load of glitches that made the game unplayable.
FIFA will come back from this, and as long as they react quicker, which looks to be the case, than they did last year - where back post crosses and first-time finesse shots killed the game for the first four months, EA can get this game back to where it belongs.