2025 is a big year for EA Sports FC, but when isn’t it?
Having tried so hard to replicate the ever-repeating annual cycle of football, EA Sports FC now has to justify itself on two fronts: not just year-over-year, but as a new franchise with a point to prove.
With the first FC 24, EA Sports exploded with PlayStyles. PlayStyles is one of the biggest fantasy additions to the core gameplay in years, giving players football superpowers and opening up a whole new metagame full of different combinations and strategies.
But while this is a classic ‘behind the box’ feature, it’s also the kind of feature that’s likely to leave more diehard fans puzzled as friends in the pub or family in the living room wonder aloud why Cole Palmer didn’t use his silver trickster playstyle to flick the ball over Cucurella’s head and score a Finesse Shot+ from 40 yards out in the Euro 2024 final.
But while PlayStyles has gone to great lengths to give individual players more personality, it’s also pushed FC 24 in another ‘unrealistic’ direction: moving away from what’s supposed to be a team sport and towards the individual. This ultimately serves to highlight the flaws in how the game presents the full game of 11v11 football. The unstoppable force of Quick Step+ and Technical Dribbling seems to be slamming Ronaldinhos into the immovable object that is Virgil van Dijk, until a lag spike or a lapse in concentration decides the winner.
Balancing exciting end-to-end skill with realism is the core competition of EA Sports FC 25, but it’s not as simple as going back to the basics of gaming.
“We’re a simulation, but we’re a game,” explains Sam Rivera, senior producer at EA Sports FC. “We always have to balance making it a full simulation while also being more adaptable to the six-minute halves of a game.
“Sometimes you have to make decisions that prioritize what’s not a real simulation, but generally speaking, the majority of the game is a simulation. It varies on a case-by-case basis, but our goal is not to get away from the simulation, but to keep it as close to football as possible. But again, it’s a game where we have to make compromises.”
Watch on YouTube
One of the key systems that aims to get FC 25’s realism right is what EA calls “FC IQ”, a rework of the underlying tactical engine with new, modern player roles and positions. Now, instead of vaguely asking your strikers to “go behind”, you’ll be able to plan your team’s attacking and defensive frameworks more carefully, developing a more cohesive and intelligent style, using the activity map to build combinations on the pitch, (hopefully) running forward as fast as possible and hoping someone gets in the right spot to cut back.
FC IQ is particularly noteworthy because not only does it bring a much-needed freshness to a long-neglected gameplay experience, it does so across all modes in FC 25.
In previous versions, Career Mode and Pro Clubs felt more and more flat each year, with each mode falling further behind Ultimate Team in ranks, lacking new features, bugs persisting between game years, and a dull presentation that made it seem like they were destined to be phased out completely. But FC 25 seems to have a new emphasis on the overall product, with a more holistic progression and new reasons to choose each mode.
“A few years ago, it was very easy to add features to a game, and if something was missing, you’d say, ‘Oh, that’s missing,’ and just add it. Now it’s a lot harder,” Rivera says.
“With the annual rotation, it’s a lot harder because there’s already a lot of functionality in the game. So now you have to really understand what the gaps are, what the opportunities are, and invest in them. So there’s been a big push over the last couple of years to identify those opportunities, create a strategy, and make it happen. I think that’s the natural path for the franchise, and you’re starting to see a lot of investment coming into the game.
“Every year we try to make a better game. We have a high-level team that’s been developing the technology for the next two, three, four years. We take feedback from the community along with expectations that we want to meet each year. The team grows bigger each year, and the game grows. When you put all of that together, you can make more impactful features. We’re going to make a lot of things for the game every year, but I think this year the features are quite different. We wanted to make more features across the game, not just the good stuff in Career More or UT.”
Watch on YouTube
But one theory that won’t go away is that EA Sports has more incentive to improve Career Mode and Pro Clubs, as well as its lucrative Ultimate Team, in the face of potential competition. As eFootball’s shell continues to peel off EA’s near-exclusive license, rumors are heating up that more serious testing is being done by the likes of the Cristiano Ronaldo-backed UFL (which just delayed its launch from September to December 2024) and massive publisher 2K (which is hoping to build on its success with NBA 2K).
Interestingly, these rumours also portray the potential future challenger as both a brave newcomer (despite the eight- or nine-figure budget being talked about) and a footballing giant, capable of taking down EA in a single cycle with unrivalled gameplay. But given EA’s nearly 30-year head start and the difficulties it had developing a fluid match engine from scratch, there’s some confidence that FC can stave off the ‘new manager bounce’ that others are looking for.
“We welcome competition. It’s good to have competition,” Rivera says. “But the key here is that we want to provide value. What you enjoy, what you like: the more the better. Every year we offer new experiences, more features, more options.
“What I can tell you is the formula for a good football simulation game. We know it, we have it, and there’s a very large community that enjoys it. We know that the game has to be responsive, it has to have good visuals, it has to have enough depth and variety in the mechanics. We know that the fundamentals of football have to work well, that you have to be able to control the ball while running, and that everything has to work well.
“It doesn’t happen in one year, two years, or five years. So we know that it’s there, and we know that we have to continue to invest in the core gameplay experience while we create new experiences, and make sure that every mode adds value. So that’s what we’re focused on.”
But even with this leap in quality, it’s still difficult to beat the competition if the community is willing to move elsewhere.
For a number of reasons, EA Sports FC has seen its community cohesion weaken in recent years. Players have protested negative matches with hostile celebrations, opponents have intentionally denied other players progress, and the game has generally been seen as overly competitive.
So, crucially, this is another cornerstone of the experience that FC 25 aims to improve. Firstly, it gives players a more robust career mode where they can relax, taking the pressure off that the rewards and store pack-centric Ultimate Team is the only place to play. But it also gives players a space to relax and enjoy the game away from the over-competitive, daily reward grind, with a new game type (not a game mode) called Rush, which offers a more casual, community-focused, and cozy environment.
“The first step is literally working with the community team to understand what players want,” Rivera says of the steps EA is taking to foster a more positive community. “The second step is balancing the experience to provide enough value, enough options, enough resources to keep them coming back. It’s not a simple process, it’s a combination of several things.
“And often the community will say, ‘This is what you want,’ but they don’t really know what that means. So it takes experience to know, ‘This is not what you want.'”
Watch on YouTube
EA is keen to highlight that Rush doesn’t share the same technical foundation as its previous (now shelved) five-a-side mode, VOLTA, so as not to undermine the effort that went into designing a smaller-scale game played on smaller pitches. Again, it’s implemented in all game modes, with cool new cards in Ultimate Team, your entire Youth Squad in Career Mode, and three friends in Pro Clubs.
Finally, EA is working to address the perceived indifference when it comes to responding to player feedback by forming a new, dedicated internal team to actively evaluate and address changes within a game’s lifecycle, not just between product release years.
“We’ve had a live team for years, but more recently we’ve formed another team that plays the game as end users and provides a lot of feedback during our regular production cycles,” Rivera explains. “That group is made up of people who play the game a lot and know a lot about it. We always want more feedback, not just when the game goes live.
“Probably the most important part is to come up with the right solution to the problem. We often hear things like, ‘The pass is too strong’, ‘The pass is thoughtless’, but when you actually look at the game, the problem is not the pass, the interception is too weak.
“After the creators and designers loaded the testbed, reproduced the cases, and identified what needed to be verified with the engineers and animators, we had a solution. If the solution was just to adjust a variable, it could be done without a patch. If the solution required code changes or new animations, they would need to be included with the patch.”
As five legendary Italian strikers, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Ruud van Nistelrooy, have said: ‘Goals are like ketchup, you work hard and nothing comes until you get them all at once.’ In FC 25, that can be seen in the gameplay features as well, especially since EA has described this season’s Career Mode update as “the biggest update in 10 years.”
As with real-world football, the never-ending conversation is always about ‘what’s next’, and plans for EA Sports FC already stretch into the 2030s.
“I don’t think it’s something that happens randomly. We know where we want to go long-term. We want to create the most authentic simulation in terms of gameplay,” Rivera says.
“There’s still a lot to look at. We want the game to be very responsive, we want the game to provide as much of an experience as possible. We have a long-term strategy for the next five years, and where we want to invest is in the overall delivery of the game, not just in features, but in terms of the live service, the consoles that we support, and the regions that we support. So we have a plan, and we build features around that five-year, in some cases 10-year strategy.”
EA Sports FC 25 is set to launch on September 27th for PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Switch. For a more in-depth look at the game, read our hands-on preview.
