If you allow me to torture an analogy trying to make perfect FIFA The game must have felt a bit like Guardiola’s old Barcelona team trying to beat Mourinho’s 2009-10 Champions League winners Inter. You can seem to do anything, but for all the brash beauty and idealism of the best offensive team in the world, nothing destroys it more than the stubborn force of reality.
FIFA 23 Another crack at the impossible balancing act presented to EA Sports every 12 months, with an accessible, realistic football simulation on the one hand, intense gameplay and extreme skill gaps on the other.
So while FIFA 23 is another very compelling dopamine factory, I’ll no doubt play it until the day before the next game, like every year, it’s still vulnerable to criticism and will end up like the previous ones Entries are as split as the past 5 years have become.
FIFA 23 is about lightning-fast, arcade, self-made gameplay, and short, intense matches.
One of the out-of-the-box incremental improvements in FIFA 23 is what they call Hypermotion 2, which uses motion capture and machine learning to create more realistic animations as you play. It’s a win for the realism aspect of the balancing act, looks great overall, and removes some of the jarring, immersive (and reality-defying) distortions that can be present in hundreds or thousands of games, just like EA Sports say yes.
However, the elephant in the room is that the gameplay is too fast and it looks too real. The obnoxious “skating” look, where players seem to slide from one pace to the next, is greatly reduced on offense, hitting is more intuitive and feels silkier, but on defense, jockey players gallop, totally Gangnam style, It’s all very slippery.
This is a textbook example of EA’s dueling ideology in FIFA, and if the animation looks like it’s executed in bullet time in The Matrix, it doesn’t really matter if the animation is drawn from the real action.
That doesn’t mean running is bad, though. Another major addition to FIFA 23 is the AcceleRATE burst, controllability and long sprint acceleration style – a great idea in theory, but also brings some truly surprising and authentic moments in practice .
Play against a crafty player like Raheem Sterling and watch him writhe and shoot from the edge of the box – he also has his signature run in the game – as he has for England over the years , Manchester City and what Chelsea are doing now can’t help but put a smile on your face.
In other areas, however, the act of balancing reappears as the daunting task of making the system robust and visible in-game, but not massively overwhelming the rear. Some explosive players suddenly feel like they’re running in molasses, while the lumbering dudes build up impeccable steam heads.
Player speed also feels like it’s condensed a lot in FIFA 23, and I actually agree it’s a change. Absolute mismatches in speed are relatively rare and very context-dependent when you’re watching a real football game, but when you put a binary number on something like speed, even the most focused on realism of players also raise their hands as their fast attackers get shot by slower defenders tractors.
The dissonance between fantasy and realism is most apparent in career mode. Another impossible task for EA Sports is that stubborn players get too good in hundreds of hours of practice, so every blocking AI winger needs to dribble like a top Maradona or you’ll end up with 7-0 to win every game.
Taking things to a competitive level and then turning every game into a tit-for-tat jingle again shatters doubts that Plymouth Argyle are really scrapping for the Champions League or whatever headlines you’re RPing The subtle pause (because that’s what you’re doing, even without fairies and wizards involved, folks).
It doesn’t help that career mode feels unwelcome compared to the respect it has from its dedicated player base. There are new cutscenes, transfer ratings, and an improved presentation style, but they’re ultimately redundant for gameplay. What makes it feel really sidelined is that there are glaring bugs that ruin the game experience.
Since posting, I’ve come across multiple saves, and no matter how well they play, the bench has a terrible game rating, like a 4.0 out of 10 for a two-goal score.
Not only does this affect their overall growth and progression – finding the best prodigies and developing them into powerful superstars is the focus of the game mode – but it also permeates the showcase portion of the game. You start getting questions in press conferences about your free-scoring players being out of shape (which they didn’t), and press reports complaining about their poor performance (which didn’t happen), and that quickly snowballs into unsatisfactory experience.
It’s surprising that such a thing wasn’t addressed prior to release, and is easily interpreted as a sign of under-resourced career mode. This must also be the only explanation for the new “as a real manager” option is also in its state. Customizable managers have been popular for a few years, and in FIFA 23 you can bring a face-scanned manager like Jurgen Klopp to a new club, or play him in charge of Liverpool, instead of Your creation and kick him out – manager like in previous games.
However, FIFA 23 has more manager licenses than scanned, meaning you can play some “real managers” cobbled together by character creators. While you might say it’s a secondary feature, it’s touted as a showcase for FIFA 23’s career mode, it’s hard to say that this performance from “Mickel Arteta” matches the quality of the AAA game earned last year Hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
FIFA 23 is the final game in the FIFA series and EA has cut ties with world football’s governing body to pursue a licensing relationship on its own. Some questions have been raised about the tantalizing prospect of delaying the launch of EA Sports FC, and you have to wonder if one of the possible things is an overhaul of non-face-scan players, managers and roles.
Even some seemingly older scans are starting to stand out – Oliver Giroud’s quiff is so huge he looks like he’s wearing a Marie Antoinette wig.
In contrast, Ultimate Team is more dynamic and engaging than ever, further refining the live service skills EA has learned from the game’s most popular Battle Pass, Weekly Challenges and other hooks.
Barriers to playing with top players and special cards are all but gone, tons of friendly game modes give you permanent access to borrowed players and icons, single player objectives can give you bags, special cards and lots of coins, and because more flexibility Team building and less player maintenance.
The lower-stakes game mode makes things less intense, but the inconsistencies that lead to open play still have you shaking your head in despair, and then you inevitably jump back into another open-eyed conflict where you can almost feel the melanin From your stress-grey hair.
The convincing intensity can’t help but remind me of all the stories of people overusing and overspending on gamer packs. While it’s rhetoric to get people to break purchases by asking for different button inputs in the store, you have to consider why it needs these checks and balances if it doesn’t have a truly addictive element?
But keeping everything on the pitch, FIFA 23 is still very engaging, very frustrating, very realistic and very silly. Its replayability is endless, but like real football, the search for the perfect blueprint continues.
Test it on the PS5 Ultimate Edition code provided by the publisher, including 4600 FIFA Points.