Football Ultimate Team (FUT) is the cash for EA FC 26 as modern sports games have invested so heavily into making their online modes a constant source of income throughout the year, after the initial opening month sales boom of a new release has worn off. As a result, keeping that mode fun and playable is an important consideration for developers, and if they’re listening to fan reception, that means there may currently be some urgent talks around the EA offices about the state of FUT play and how freely goals are going in.
While soccer is a sport often criticized for being too low-scoring, some EA FC 26 players are complaining that the opposite is true in their Ultimate Team matches, where teams are usually scoring high goal counts even in losing efforts. This leads to an online experience that not only feels unrealistic compared to the sport being played but also devalues the excitement of scoring a big goal when it represents such a proportionally small amount of the work required to win the game.
There are several reasons that can help to explain why scoring is up so much in Ultimate Team, including:
- Arcade Play Style: The most notable thing to keep in mind when considering the scoring levels in online play is that EA FC 26 has two different gameplay configurations, Competitive and Realistic. While the latter, available as an offline option, looks to better replicate real-world play, the former has a more arcade-like approach, with faster action and a preference for more direct play. This can lead to more goals as more is going on.
- Exploits: Anytime a new sports game drops, one of the hottest discussions in the opening weeks of play is the identification and mastering of various exploits. These are areas where the game’s coding unintentionally leaves a hole that players can use to find success at high rates, such as the kickoff exploit, which can easily see scores in a match balloon out of control.
- Poor AI: Players generally have felt that the AI in this year’s game is not up to snuff. While this has an impact on your offensive ability when players don’t make the right runs, it is more noticeable in defense when you rely on the AI players more strongly, leading to an offense-first imbalance.
- Developing Metas: It’s still October, which means players’ time with the game is relatively short compared to how much it will be played over the next year. In time, adjustments by players defensively may lower scoring, only for responses to raise it, and so on, in an ebb and flow of finding and closing effective loopholes.
FUT is not going to fall off anytime soon, but happy players do play more, so it will be interesting to see what approach EA takes to satisfying fans upset with the current state of the game.
