Note: These impressions are based on my early experiences with EA Sports FC 25. So far, the focus has been on core gameplay in Career and Rush modes, but I’ll explore how the changes impact Ultimate Team and other online modes after spending more time with them.
Every year, I start with the same overly optimistic questions: What has actually changed in FIFA—sorry, EA Sports FC—this time around? Is it really new, or just the same old experience with a fresh coat of paint? There’s always a laundry list of flashy new marketing terms designed to grab attention: Hypermotion V, FC IQ, BallTouch, Rush, etc (okay one of those is made up). Yet, even with all the buzzwords, there’s often a lingering feeling that these changes are merely surface-level, just enough to warrant a new bullet point on the box without truly changing up the gameplay in an innovative way.
Well, so far the changes made to FC 25 make it feel like the latter scenario: a series of incremental improvements and adjustments that do add to the fun through their novelty if nothing else, but they’re hardly enough to usher in a sweeping revolution of any kind.
As someone who prefers the depth of Career Mode (I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing out multiple season-long campaigns over the years) over the microtransaction-driven Ultimate Team, I was pleased to see that FC 25 finally gives it the attention it deserves and brings some meaningful updates. One of the biggest improvements this year is simply in the ways you can customize the experience. There’s more flexibility in how you set up your career—board expectations, for instance, can now be set to lenient, sparing you the frustration of being sacked for not spending every penny of your transfer budget. The ability to customize training plans and match tactics to a greater degree, deciding how hard your players train and which roles suit them best, is a welcome step towards giving us more control over our players’ development, particularly when it comes to
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