Sports games could learn a thing from FIFA Ultimate Team

7:00 PM on 03.17.2010   |   Joseph Leray

18 comments

At the end of last month, I downloaded the FIFA 10 "Ultimate Team" DLC with the intention of reviewing it for you, the loyal and lovely readers. The reason this is an editorial instead of a review is between me and my landlord -- when she starts providing me with Wi-Fi strong enough to play FIFA 10 lag-free, I'll start writing FIFA reviews.

"Ultimate Team" requires you to be online at all times (presumably so it can phone home to Electronic Arts' servers) -- strike one. And the combination of FIFA 10's shaky netcode and my awful connection makes playing online impossible -- strike two. I can play Borderlands with no problems, for example, provided someone else hosts.

And there's not even that much to say about actually playing with my not-yet-ultimate team, since it uses the same  (really, really good) engine as FIFA 10 . But "Ultimate Team" solves problems in FIFA's visual design that I didn't realize FIFA had until just now.

Since I'm predisposed to pithy one-liners, here's one that will simultaneously explain and belittle "Ultimate Team": it's FIFA 10: the Trading Card Game.

This DLC introduces a new mode, providing players with a starter squad on the wrong end of the awesome scale and tasks them with building their -- wait for it -- ultimate team. This is done by playing games to win coins, which can be spent on randomized card packs, which include everything from new players to contracts to skill bonuses. Besides the fact that this was my first experience with "Ultimate Team" -- the mode made its debut last year in 09 -- I was confused by the fact that "Ultimate Team" is really just FIFA's manager mode in a new skin.

User interface improvements and a few new mechanics aside (and they're fantastic), "Ultimate Team" and the more traditional manager mode have the same endgame: create badass teams. The mechanism is different -- "Ultimate Team" is randomized while Manager mode is exacting and precise -- but both modes reward players in the same ways: a slow, steady sense of progression culminating in the soccer equivalent of having Brad Nicholson and The Godd*mn Batman on your team.

That aspect of the two modes is similar, but ultimately distinct -- incorporating "Ultimate Team"'s randomness into manager mode would make it ... not manager mode any more. And yet there are certain things about "Ultimate Team," particularly in terms of user interface, that really need to be the new standard for FIFA and perhaps sports games in general.

One of the things I dislike about FIFA is how menu-heavy it is. Trying to change a formation or look at a player's header rating is more difficult than it should be -- a few more clicks and you'd be better off playing Dwarf Fortress*. The proverbial thing, though, is that I didn't realize I hated FIFA's menus until I played "Ultimate Team."

"Ultimate Team" lays everything out in front of you on one clean, organized screen. You can change your roster and formation or compare stats in one intuitive motion, leaving room for "Ultimate Team"'s most successful addition: the team chemistry mechanic.

In "Ultimate Team" your squad's chemistry rating is based on how well your players interact with each other, which, in turn is affected by your team's formation. Players that play for the same team, in the same league, or for the same national country will have higher chemistry between them. For example, the ugly English man playing the center-forward position is Wayne Rooney. The icons under his mug indicate, on the left, that he likes the 4-3-1-2 formation and, on the right, that he likes his position. The green line connecting him to Fat Frank Lampard (a fellow Englishman and Premiership player) shows that the two get along pretty well, even if Lampard doesn't really care for the formation or his position in it.

And so on and so forth.

I'm not saying that regular FIFA should take this type of chemistry system wholesale -- you could break the game by only signing Italians, for example, which is why the random card packs work so well in "Ultimate Team" -- but EA Canada should definitely look into cribbing the presentation. There's already a chemistry system at play in Manager and Be A Pro modes, but it's hidden behind the scenes, not to mention that manipulating it, either through roster changes or formation changes, is, like I explained, kind of a pain. I don't understand why EA Canada haven't taken the extra step and presented a visual representation of it that changes in real time to reflect your squad choices.

Electronic Arts' business model has been to release -- let's be honest here -- dumbed-down Wii-specific ports of its sports franchises in an attempt to make things more intuitive and easy to use. That's cool, I guess, but there's also an implicit suggestion that Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners don't mind if their sports games are unintuitive and messy. A suggestion: let whomever designed "Ultimate Team" take a crack at all of EA Sports' visual design. It's clean, it's simple, and it makes managing your team fun instead of a pain in the ass, "simulation" be damned.

There are enough barriers to entry when it comes to really digging into FIFA's manager mode. "Ultimate Team" could do you a solid and remove one of them, should its presentation make its way into FIFA 11.

_{* Just kidding!}