What is the point of having a game mode based solely on creating your dream fantasy team and applying silly rules that only hinder the end result? FIFA's best mode bar none is the excellent Ultimate Team in which you sell, trade and buy your favourite players, toss them into a team and take on the world. This singular mode has probably sold more copies of the game than all the rest combined, which makes it even more difficult to fathom why EA continue to slowly destroy it from within. The base game within Ultimate Team is too static with chemistry between players being decided by which clubs they play for and what nationality they are aligned to. Players earn loyalty after ten games but other than that, there is no emphasis on actually building a squad that makes it impossible to become engrossed in the story of your players. Managers and coaches add nothing. Players can't learn new positions, and it's an archaic model that only suppresses the brilliance of the mode. It feels like EA deliberately holds back a lot of features to encourage customers to buy those expensively priced packs but it can only be a matter of time before people are no longer prepared to continue spending huge sums of money on packs, especially with the wealth of games coming out over the next year. It's a dangerous game to play so early in the next gen war and EA would do well to overhaul the model before it blows up in their face.
Barry O' Halloran has been a whatculture writer for the last two years and having recently graduated, now plans on writing about games & movies until his hands fall off. Follow him on twitter!
