Published on by Dave797 34 Comments Updated on

There are many big events to be found across FIFA’s calendar year: you've got Team of the Season, Team of the Year, and the now weekly trials and tribulations of FUT Champions too. However, there’s something else. Something bigger. That doesn't always land on the same day, but when it does it riles the FIFA community like nothing else. The first post launch patch (dun, dun, duuuuun!!!)

Which, just for reference this time around, modified the following within FIFA 18’s gameplay:

• Tuned goalkeeper reactions in certain situations.

• Tuned down the difficulty for Amateur and Semi-Pro difficulties.

• Reduced shot accuracy and slightly increased goalkeeper reaction times in certain in-game situations.

All-in-all that's a pretty innocuous list of gameplay changes on the surface, all of which have had enough community 'noise' behind them to make you think “yeah, nice one EA” but as that patch installed around the world, the reaction was as predictable as my pack luck:

Day One patches are nothing new in video games of course. But when it comes to FIFA, their ability to shift the perception of an entire game is almost unrivaled. That’s no surprise I guess given that FIFA’s core experience revolves around repetition of virtual football matches. Whether you’re in Career Mode, Squad Battles or just playing 1v1 with your mates, each of those differing FIFA modes relies on the consistency of the gameplay fundamentals. The teams and score may change, but the underlying framework does not.



If you’re playing "Uncharted" and one of the levels is a bit rubbish, or the pacing is off, you can always rely on the next one to be a cathedral collapsing, henchmen strangling, tank outrunning riot. But not so with FIFA. If there’s an issue with player positioning, or long shots are finding the net far too routinely, it affects everything. And that’s why these launch patches can cut the games community perception so deep.

Part of the problem, for me, lies in how EA choose to apply the early feedback they receive. Because at the start of every FIFA, hordes of people swarm the servers playing countless matches and in no more than a heartbeat, the first big issue surfaces. That initial source can come from influencers, the forums, Reddit, or social media; it doesn’t really matter. But once that first "issue" seed is sown, the popular narrative bandwagon quickly builds to a fever of “FIX YOUR GAME, EA.”

Sometimes the issues identified are genuine. But more often than not they’re actually based on opinion, rather than fact. And that opinion in the context of an entire FIFA cycle, is coming from a place of mostly inexperience with the latest content. Whether people believe FIFA 18 to be "FIFA 17.5" or whatever you want to call it, that .5 can still contain thousands of code changes, making any kind of informed opinion about what’s good or bad, incredibly difficult to offer up reliably even after an initial sprint of matches.

However, no matter how many times people are advised to “be patient” or to "wait and adjust" these snap judgements are unavoidable. So at that point the focus must shift to EA and how they manage this type of feedback internally, particularly the parts relating to gameplay. If something is genuinely broken within a mode, or a menu then EA should fix it right away, no questions asked. But when it comes to gameplay, I personally think EA need to proceed with great caution because once that patch lands, there's just about no going back.

And for me, in the last two or three years, I'm concerned EA have been way too quick to patch that initial ourpour of opinion. From this year's reaction (and last's), it's clearly beginning to grate on those who were probably quite enjoying themselves before FIFA 18's gameplay was altered to suit feedback they never offered up themselves.

Community feedback is important; imperative, in fact, to game health. But at the end of the day only EA are in charge of FIFA 18’s creative vision and no one else. That position shouldn’t ever be taken for granted or used as a form of superiority. But they are the people that make the game after all. Developers these days are often heralded for "listening" to their communties. But listening doesn't have to always mean acting. Sometimes it's ok for community and developer to stop and let things simmer before taking action. If the early feedback doesn't hold up against EA's own vision for the game, then to a degree, maybe we need to trust that they are right to hold the line.

Because make no mistake, the strides FIFA has taken on the pitch and away from it has been nothing short of spectacular over the last five years. We now have modes we’d never even dreamed of playing. And yet for some reason, after all that success EA seems to sometimes still seem to lack confidence in the quality of their on-pitch performance year to year.

In the run up to launch, EA host countless playtests, gaming shows, betas and demos as a chance to garner that early feedback and apply it to the game before it ships. But after that, the feedback process should go into listen only mode. At least for the first month, so that everyone has the required time to adjust their own playstyle and to really think about what they would like to be changed.

And even then, the team at EA should be well within their rights to openly say “actually guys, we don’t think you’re wrong about this, and here’s why”. Right now, the maturity of the conversation between community and developer feels light years away from that kind of candid interaction, but if mind-sets on both sides were to shift just a little bit, I think we could eventually get there.

As Henry Ford (allegedly) once said as he embarked on the mass production of motor vehicles… “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

And as a community I think that quote is something we all need to think closely about when it comes to providing feedback -- especially in the opening weeks -- and vice versa for EA themselves as the ‘manufacturer’ of the title. Sometimes we don’t know what we want until EA give it to us. But at the very least, we should also be given the time to try out their vision before it changes too soon.