EA is making an effort to improve FIFA’s career mode this year.
As outlined in a blog post over on the EA website, the changes are aimed at making the Career Manager experience more realistic and immersive. To do this, EA are adding both pre and post-match press conferences and Player Conversations, which EA describe as “1-on-1 interaction between the manager and the players within the team through a messaging app-like interface”. The direction that these press conferences take will be directly linked to your game, something which EA says should make them feel “authentic and dynamic”, with their direction “depending highly on the outcome, goals scored, opponent, time of season or stage of competition, and more”. Player Conversations, meanwhile, will force players to “deal with a variety of requests from players as well as happy or disgruntled players that are trying to get their thoughts across”.
Directly linked to these news features is the new player morale system, where player morale will be influenced by a number of different variables “ranging from play time and wage expectations to a player’s performance on the pitch and how well the team is doing”. Manager responses in both Press Conferences and Player Conversations will also have an impact on player morale, and players attributes in upcoming matches will be directly influenced by their morale level.
EA is making these changes to “breathe new life into the Manager Career experience”, explaining that the game will now leverage the “huge amounts of data that playing this mode generates” to “build a variation of ever-changing stories that would surface to our players”. EA is keen to emphasize that these stories will be specific to each player and won’t just be generic ones, with the blog post stating “these are not just general story lines that we put together to mimic authenticity. These are stories built based on player progress which each player will be able to interact with and influence the morale of the team and their standing as the team’s manager”.
Also new in this years career mode is Dynamic Player Potential, where a players potential will evolve based on their performance. For example, if you bring in a young striker and he scores bag loads in his debut season, his potential will increase for the upcoming season. If you’re still managing to get the best out of one of your older players, his attributes will decrease at a slower rate as he edges close to retirement. If a player has had a season to forget, either through playing badly or not playing at all, then their potential will decrease.
If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of customization options for your manager in recent years then you’ll be pleased to hear that the manager creation tool will be much deeper this year, with players having a “wide variety of clothing items and accessories” to customize their manager with, which EA says “will ensure a deep customization experience.” Importantly, you’ll also be able to create a female manager this year, which is a first for the series.
On top of all of this, EA are also making a chunk of quality-of-life changes for Career Mode, all of which are listed in the blog post linked earlier in this article.
I was very critical of the lack of innovation in Career Mode in my review of FIFA 19 last year, so it’s great to hear that EA are finally making an effort to try and improve the mode. We’ll have to wait and see how well EA pulls off these changes, but so far it sounds like it should be a much more immersive and dynamic experience for players.
FIFA 20 launches on Friday 27th September.
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