🏆 FC 26 Season 8 Finale: The Definitive Game Review! 🎮🔚 | FUT in Review #741

[00:00:00] As the month of August starts, so does the last FC 26 podcast. In today's podcast, we will review the game after playing it a whole long year. We'll look back on the highlights, we look back on the nightmares and we look forward to FC 27. My name is Jon and this is FUT in Review.

[00:00:34] Welcome back, FUT in Review, to yet another episode of FUT in Review, episode 741. Luckily, I don't have to do today's show alone. I am joined by, let's say once again, because they love to hear it and it's part of the contract by the two most handsome men in Scotland. Welcome back, Neil. Hi there, thanks for having me back and it's lovely to be back on our pod talking about FUT as well. It's good to be back on. Congratulations on the World Cup pods, they were fantastic.

[00:01:04] Thank you, I appreciate that. Well, that was a hefty grind to be fair. But yeah, we missed you there and I'm glad to have you back on a FUT-related podcast now. Lack of football knowledge was probably enough to keep me off the pods, plus I didn't really watch much of it. I'm into other sports over the summer. Yes, we should do futinreview and let you do that show. Why not? But that might be a part of it, so it's gonna be hard.

[00:01:29] Talk about most handsome men of Scotland. If you're looking at the video show on Spotify and or on YouTube, you can see he's become a little bit smaller. And that's not because he bought a new camera and he has got a new lens. He has added some big muscles, but he's also lost a lot of weight. He's Mr. Yeah, well, should we call him? Ah, Hercules? Let's call him Hercules today. Welcome back, Nathan. How you doing, buddy?

[00:01:55] Thanks for that. No, I'm doing really well. Thanks. I'm excited to be sort of chewing the fat for the next wee while. It's good to be back on Talking Foot, sort of wrapping it up. I think it's a good time to be wrapping 26 up. So yeah, it's gonna be a good one for this. Yeah, you thought it's getting another heat wave in Europe. Let's go outside and just do some cardio or what? Can I go out in the heat? No. And I'm ginger, so if I went out in a heat wave, you'd never see me again. So yeah, that's not happening.

[00:02:23] That is good that you are inside recording podcast, my friend. But it's definitely good to have you guys on. This will be probably now most likely our last FC 26 podcast with all the FC 27 hype building. We've done two shows about FC 27 already. That means it is time to get this year or this season closed. This is our eighth season already of this podcast, guys. Can you believe it?

[00:02:53] That's fantastic. That's such a good accomplishment for everyone involved going in a different side of evolutions from the daily to the twice and three times a week and to still be going when lots of other outlets have kind of closed down and we're still able to keep churning out good content. It's really an impressive thing. So congrats to the whole team. Certainly. You've been a big part of it this year.

[00:03:17] Well, I've been a long, long, long time listener and I've always enjoyed listening to the pods and it's great to be a year into the game. Yeah. And onto the pods for this year. It's been a great achievement personally for myself to hopefully my contributions are put up with.

[00:03:37] I just checked some interesting facts about the podcast. I could see probably somehow that how much episode we made this year, but in total we have made a 837 podcasts so far.

[00:03:52] And this being 741 means there's almost 100 bonus episodes hidden between the eight seasons. Can you? It's been a long journey. I'll talk about long journey. Last bit of housekeeping for this podcast is that because this will be our last FD26 podcast, we will not cover the last two weeks of footies.

[00:04:14] Instead, I'm going to take a little bit of a break. We're all going to take a little bit of a break, but since I have to press the publish button and pay for it getting published, I am not going to push that while I'm on holiday.

[00:04:25] We'll be back first week, September and hopefully get all the information going on FC27 and get everyone prepared for that one in season nine. And in season nine, you will get one show a week every single, I think it was Sunday we'll be releasing more info about that shortly, but we will be making two shows a week.

[00:04:48] So if you are a patron subscriber, you get two shows a week. So check that out. Anyways, all the podcast housekeeping is done now. I want to look back into FC26 and to look back, I want to rate this game before we take a deep dive into some specifics.

[00:05:07] I want you both to give a rating of this game between one being absolutely poor, like one of the other football games that came out this year, but I'm not going to mention it or 10. Absolutely brilliant. Let's start with Nathan one to 10. What is your score for FC26? You don't have to explain everything. We'll get into that later.

[00:05:32] Yeah. So I think I'm probably going to go, I'm sitting between six and six and a half. So I'm going to go for 6.25 just to be really difficult. But there's, there's bits of it that I have enjoyed. I can't say that it's been terrible, but there's other bits that do let it down, which we'll, we'll go into in more detail shortly. Perfect. Neil, I think he scored, Nathan stole your score, didn't he?

[00:05:56] Yeah. Yeah. Without giving the numbers away, we haven't got a similar number in my head. So without doing the six, seven meme, which I don't want to do. I'm going to go, I'm going to 6.5 is probably, it's had good points. The game's had good points, but it's been more let down with broken promises more than anything else. I think, I think they overplayed their hand and we've been bringing the game out and we've gotten to talk with stuff like that.

[00:06:26] So somewhere in the middle. Yeah. These scores, these scores, I'm going to go for a seven out of 10 just because the sun is shining and I want to be a little bit more optimistic than you guys. You might be handsome. I just am optimistic here. Hey guys, to clear that out in more detail, what I've done is I've made some certain topics and I want to discuss those topics with you. And after we discuss those topics, I want to see if you want to adjust your scores, come to think of it.

[00:06:56] And let's start with the first topic, which is gameplay, the meta and play styles. One thing that got introduced this year was the authentic versus competitive gameplay presets. If you're playing foot, that means you're automatically playing competitive. But if you're playing, let's say career mode or seasons, you are playing in authentic. The one is faster, the other one is more often tuned as they are in foot.

[00:07:24] Neil, let's start with you. Have you actually experienced anything outside of the competitive gameplay or has it just come past you? No, mainly because other game modes were set up in the realistic gameplay, which I didn't know how to change after a few months.

[00:07:45] So when you're doing other objectives for the SP, like career mode, manager mode, I was playing games at a much slower tempo and it was far too slow. The competitive is far better than the other one. Do you agree there, Nate? I see you have a different opinion about it. Yeah, no, to be fair, I've only played the competitive one, so I've not actually messed around with the other game modes.

[00:08:13] So I've kind of just stuck to the one and that's all I know for this iteration. It took me three months to realise I could change the other mode. That's how I didn't change it. I didn't know it. Oh, that's too funny. I didn't actually know that you could change that, to be fair, as well. So I've not, I didn't know that. What I did notice, though, where normally when you play foot and where suddenly you go into, let's say, a tournament play like we do on the events in Greed,

[00:08:42] then you're suddenly back to the authentic gameplay. And I quite like the authentic gameplay, to be fair. But I can also see why the other one has been introduced. Because, for example, if you play authentic gameplay and you have an Mbappe in your team, he will just outpace everyone else. There's no catching up with him. While on the competitive gameplay, of course, that is more possible to tune that.

[00:09:09] So I think it's been a good change and it made sure the game didn't break that far. I quite like, I think it was a good addition and they have kept the addition in FC27 as well. Playstyles, formations and mechanics. Neil, is there anyone there, anything formation or gameplay that you think is completely broken or are you very much tired of or shouldn't be in there? Or absolutely love?

[00:09:37] Formations this year have been not bad. There hasn't been one specific broken formation that absolutely everybody uses. We're not far away from that. I mean, viably there's two formations that work, but other formations do seem to work. I've tried a few this year, but it's not a broken issue the same way it has been in previous games.

[00:10:03] So we've had the 4-3-2-1 era last year. We had, I can't remember what we had last year, but I'm sure there was a broken formation last year. This year's been a bit better, hasn't it? More variety. Playstyles, however, were what we told. Playstyles were going to not matter as much, if at all, were what told at the start of the game. With the We've Listened campaign, I think that's where EA let themselves down massively last year.

[00:10:31] And I think it's caused some damage this year for releasing 27, from my point of view. We can tackle that topic right away, though, if you want. You what, sorry? We can tackle that topic right away, if you want. No, I mean, just answering your specific question, really. I mean, playstyles have, let's be honest, up to really have more than mattered. There was a point in this game, before they had to patch it, where if you didn't have a playstyle, if you didn't have a passing playstyle, you couldn't play the player, you couldn't pass a ball.

[00:11:00] Things like that. A finesse shot is broken, but it's broken every year, especially at this stage of the game, when everyone's got 90-odd, 99 shooting and stuff like that. So it's not really an issue now. It did start with low-driven being broken, though. Well, it started with low-driven being broken because people couldn't defend, and then Bruiser was broken because it didn't work, to then Bruiser being the most broken mechanic in the game,

[00:11:29] and it took them months to fix that. So formations, not so much. Playstyles, just, I don't know. I don't know how you tackle it for next year. I think they've created a hole that they can't get out. Naidan? Yes, you can't actually disagree with Neil there at all. Formations, there's so many that have been valuable, so that's been fun. That's one of the few that I've been able to play around the whole year. Playstyles are just manically broken.

[00:12:00] I like what they've said they're going to do for the next one, where it's going to be more stat-based, and then the playstyles will then obviously just improve that. But like we were kind of alluding to earlier, it's, you know, all these promises, will it actually happen? My biggest one, I don't mind Finest being broken, because actually, you don't like conceding them, but there's something nice about a 30-yard ping. But the Bruiser was my biggest one, like once that was so OP, because you had random defenders just beating up your attackers when you were gone, and there was literally no way around them.

[00:12:29] So that was my biggest bugbear. Half of me just go scrap playstyles. Go on to like just your stats. If you've got 99 curve and 99 long shots, you should be broken at Finest shots, you know, the long-range Finest. But I don't know whether that's in, because obviously they've brought in the playstyles lab, which I really like that, because it makes cards that wouldn't normally be viable, like really good. So that's quite good.

[00:12:58] But then you get to this stage of the game where every character now, pretty much you have to put your playstyles on. So you're only using, it's just, you know, same cards, but with different sort of skin on it almost. Yeah, I don't mind the playstyles, and especially when you look at FC27, where they say silver playstyles will matter more compared to the gold ones. I think that was definitely a good change. What I don't like is, I dislike the fact rules are so unimportant.

[00:13:28] At least they feel unimportant. I quite like the fact you have a winger that cuts in sight or a winger that is better when you would go for a cross, for example, stuff like that. The overlapping fullbacks instead of defending fullbacks, et cetera, et cetera. But in the end, you could put any fullback on defensive. It wouldn't even matter. Sure, if you put any fullback that has overlapping, put an overlapping, it would do it a little bit better. But it was all right.

[00:13:55] And I think the biggest issue I had with gameplay this year was more, I don't think this year specifically rewarded general football IQ and tactical buildup. I think it rewarded more high-paced skill moves, cutbacks and dribbles, especially at the start holding our one dribble, right? We all know the Pina area where we started this year. I think that was... Was that because people, because we actually started the game, let's be honest, I think the first three weeks of this year, I was so positive.

[00:14:25] Everybody was on board with it. Well, everybody that was a purist of this game is the best way to put it. Where manual defending really did take apart a skill to learn and play. So I think that's a big part of that. I think the kind of OP dribbling and stuff was the fact that people just didn't know how to defend. And frankly, they don't want to learn to defend. After Christmas, we still, Pina was still the most huge card, right? The price actually went up more.

[00:14:54] And I don't mind gameplay changes, but it felt like they were listening a little bit too much to the community. And with 8 million players, you can't listen to everyone. So whoever screams the loudest gets the biggest vote, I suppose. They shouldn't have listened at all, is what I always said. Yeah. And I think you got like, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't in this situation for them, right? The thing is, we've had goalkeeper movement, nerve to the ground. And if you look at the podcast,

[00:15:23] we've made this year where we started out, I said after one week, next thing they'll do is they'll change the defense, right? And the next problem we'll have is that you can't score from distance. So what they'll do is they'll have to boost the finesse shot. They boost the finesse shot, but the goalkeeper movement was strong. So it still doesn't make any sense. And we could say already, I think in episode 20 this year, what next is going to be is that they will nerf the goalkeeper movement to the ground because finesse shots aren't viable yet, unless you give them all finesse shots plus,

[00:15:53] which you can't do at this stage of the game. So the changes were very much predictable and they are, they were built on emotions and cause and effects. So you change something that means something else will get destroyed and go from there, go from there, go from there. Uh, I think that was very much predictable, um, in their effort to listen to the feedback perhaps. So I don't think it was all badly done or extremely poor timing. I think it was,

[00:16:23] it came from a good, good place to be fair this year. Um, but yeah, I think my big, my big thing for that is that they obviously couldn't, like there's a lot of streamers that were very vocal. Like you said, you have a shelter loudest. Um, but then objectively, why would you take, make, you know, make so much time and effort to create a new game, call it 26, obviously from 25 and then just patch it. So it's straight back to 25. Like you'd be able to just re-release in the same game with, you know,

[00:16:51] a new skin and a few new tweaks rather than, you know, doing that because it effectively kind of went back again and they've done that over the years, haven't they? Like that is one of the, one of the annoyances is that the first patch is almost like a totally different game. And you kind of go back to the, uh, you know, the three ball sort of simulator for a bit, especially once play style pluses came in with the players, you know, the, the love through balls or what in the finesse shots were just, that's, that's what you were getting for a lot of the games or the run down the wank and cut back as well. Yeah.

[00:17:20] And we don't know the answer. And we don't know the answer on that. Unfortunately, unfortunately, I think they probably see the numbers dropping off and that's why they changed it. Um, um, I felt it was changing a little bit too drastically. Um, but in the end, it did make sure that every four weeks we had something to talk about on the podcast. Plus it made sure we had to relearn the game every single four weeks. So, ah, there was something positive about it, but it was two predictable changes. And I think if you look at the FC 77 changes, they have, uh,

[00:17:47] we have talked about in the gameplay deep dive we did last week. Those feel far more nuanced, nuanced. And I think those would go better. And hopefully they, they let it out to dry a little bit before they change everything back. this is exactly what we need to do. Yeah. We need to, we need to let the game breathe and see how it goes. Yeah. If you talk about gameplay, topic one, gameplay, meta and play styles, what rating would you give that Neil? One to 10? No, thinking about it.

[00:18:17] It's difficult because the meta is just, it's not the game. It's a community driven, isn't it? So, I mean, there was a chunk of the meta this year when it was a four, five, one counter simulator where you could park your bus and nobody was going through it. Um, luckily it didn't last forever. Um, because of they did make changes. So yeah, exactly that. But it did, it has been, again, it's been awful AI reliant, eventually. And the, and the thing is, they keep saying they've not touched the AI,

[00:18:46] but they've clearly done something. Um, meta, out of 10. I don't know. I mean, I don't even know what is a meta just now. Are we still in line for wingers? Line for strikers? Is that what we're on? No, so I think that's pretty, that's been pretty versatile as well this year. Um, that's all. It's been a kind of, again, seven, eight. It's been, it's been not bad. If you're going to put that in with formations, the fact that there's been a variety of formations,

[00:19:14] not just the one or two formations that you play every single year, then I'm going to make it a bit higher. I'll probably put it seven or eight. All right. Night? Yeah, I was going to say seven because formation wise, like you say, it's been good. The, um, parts of play styles have been good. Like the, I know it kind of comes into the content side, but creating your own player. So wait, I know there's certain websites that tell you the best rated play styles for positions, but I quite like having my own ones. Like I like having my wings, having tricks.

[00:19:43] So just to try and embarrass folk, like stuff like that. So I think that's actually a plus point. I just, it's just a shame that you get to the last same bit where all the cards have the same, the same play styles. Um, the meta was quite annoying. Like you said, there was the four five one and the four four one one. Um, it was, it was, I tried to use net. I just found it really boring. It was really boring to play against. Um, and then yeah, some of the sort of meta buildup approaches as well, or even just, uh, we, we saw a lot of this sort of control, you see DMS don't move anyone else. Uh, use the,

[00:20:13] you're pressing your second man press to basically defend. It's just, that's just boring for me, to be honest. So I, I couldn't go too much up cause of that, but the gameplay itself, actually, I quite enjoyed. Um, we were having a discussion before we came on air and, uh, I've, I've played like PC and Xbox. It's two different games, but on the PC it was, you know, you can't really grumble about the, the, the gameplay on PC. I thought it was actually really good this year. Xbox is a totally different game. It's not quite up to the level of PC.

[00:20:42] So like all in all, sort of seven is quite a fair score. Fair enough. I'll go 7.5. Again, just want to boost it a little bit higher. Uh, topic number two I've got is to pay to win versus the grind. How fair is ultimate team for free to play players this year? Let me ask you, Neil first, have you put in any money this year? Yeah, plenty. Um, let's just, Nate, have you put in any money?

[00:21:12] Uh, a little bit, 20 quid here or there. nothing, nothing major, not compared to some. Um, but I have to say it's massively paid to win. Massively paid to win. This is, I would, I would go as far as to say this has been the worst year for it. Yeah. And I think like, it's hard because obviously they've got the store packs where they have, like even all the way through, it's been like guarantees. Like you had, it was a team of the year and you had the guaranteed team of the year and, you know, and they've got now, now had the, is it over 90, say 96 plus, whatever it is now.

[00:21:42] And another version of the card as well. So if you've got ridiculous, like spare change, or if you've got, you just don't really care and you can put money into it, your team's going to be miles ahead of somebody. Cause we've seen the pack weight. And normal packs, you know, the rewards from, from actually grinding the game or even grinding the menus is nowhere near just going and spending, it was a 2000 points or 1500 points, wherever they are. Like it's wild. Like this is, you're right. This is the worst pay to win before it was pay to win. Cause you had to open so many packs to get a good card.

[00:22:12] Whereas now you can literally load up a hundred quid or whatever it'd be in the store and you get good cards and pretty much every pack. You'll. Neil did evolution. Is squad building challenges bridging gap or does the in game store push microtransactions? Like you said, harder than ever. It doesn't matter. If I can roll back, if you don't mind, I think the biggest problem this year, one of the biggest issues I took from the game from pre-release and we've

[00:22:40] listened campaign is this slow perk of, cause frankly, never existed to end it. It says, I challenge ended. It says it did exist. It did exist in the first, first. The first, the first promo might have been cards similar to the gold cards. I think the fact Pina could, 86 rated Pina was, I think 86 gold card, whatever. I think was viable until December. Yeah. I generally think it was, it wasn't, it wasn't perfect,

[00:23:10] but it was fine up until around team of the year. And then it's almost like they just spiraled the team of the year and it just went out. It depends. It depends how you define it as power curve. So there was 100 K store packs available a week pre-release on the first day of the pre-release. You could buy a hundred K store pack in the store. Yeah. So there's no, the per curve was solely just a, I mean, vivals and champs rewards this year,

[00:23:39] squad battles rewards were not even nerfed. They were massively nerfed. Massively nerfed. I think that was the biggest issue in this. That is their definition of slowing up work of is that you can't, for free, you can't get up to the curve. If you want to go to the store within two promos, you could buy a guaranteed player of that promo. 29 promos. I've just Googled it.

[00:24:04] 29 promos this year in a 50 week, what cycle. Do the maths and that's what promo every. That won't, that won't come in. That won't take into account team one, two, three and four for lots of them as well. So exactly. It was literally a whole new. 29 promos this year. And apart from the first, I can't remember what promos we had first, right? But the first promo,

[00:24:31] maybe two promos had cards that were almost identical to their gold cards, but they had a dynamic image and it looked good. After that, you had stats ramping up. The thing that they managed to control this year was playstyle pluses. Said in a previous pod, biggest problem they had last year was when they put winter wild cards onto two playstyle pluses so quickly, which then ramped up to three to four really quickly.

[00:25:00] And then five. I don't think we're going to see many five playstyle plus cards this year. We'll be at. We've got a couple, haven't we? We've got a few. I think they've controlled the playstyle aspect of it in that sense. But the power curve for me was just literally saying your rewards are nerfed. So the content was poor, I think. And it's pretty much confirmed for next year.

[00:25:25] I think this year they've put little or they've actually put a lot of effort into making SBCs nearly irrelevant. There's not been any mental big SBCs this year, proper standout SBCs like previous years. Yeah, they were all early on as well. When you think of the likes of the Pogbas and stuff that came, well, he was 86, so he must have been in the first month or two. Yeah, but even at Pogba, I'm talking about the previous years where you had Thunderstruck Eusebio,

[00:25:55] who was in everybody's team. Yeah, the Casario's guard, SBCs. Casario, she had that, not that, the Jairzinho, the baby Jairzinho that everyone got in 23, things like that. Well, we did get the grind, the Icon grind back this year as well, so. Again, the grinds, I hate tokens, and I've not actually had a chance to talk about this in Pogba, I don't know if anybody wants to listen to me rant or not, but I hate the token system, but it's enough to put,

[00:26:24] it's what made me leave the game, I've now come back to it, but the token limit is what kills me. Yeah. And I've lost, last week for instance, because I've, it's my fault, right, but I've went on to Rivals last week to do, and I've got my points, and I've got 600 tokens, and I've left them, but at the top of the screen, massive big button says, claim your rewards now, which you don't want to claim, and then you click it by accident, it claims 600 points, and puts them in the barn straight away. It's BS,

[00:26:54] not a fan of it at all. We called that when they announced it, I'm sure I did it with Shaq and somebody else, can I remember who else on, so apologies if there was someone else on it, but we said that, like, I really like the principle of tokens, and I think they're onto something that could be really good. If they don't limit it, it's perfectly good. The limit's wild. If they put a weekly limo on it, it kills it, but that's the plan. If you've got the time to invest in the grind, you should be rewarded for that. Like, we've always kind of said, like, if you're a better player, you should reap those rewards, so, you know,

[00:27:23] Elite, Div 1, Div 2, whatever, get better rewards, as it should. Also, if you're there to devote the time, because not everybody's going to be at that standard in terms of getting the results from that, so having whatever amount of points, or tokens, or even packs, if they had that back, so there should be a way of rewarding skill, but then rewarding effort, whereas at the moment, you don't need to do any of that. You can just kind of come on, log on, a few games, log out, sorted, and you can still end up with the same as anybody else. I can't think of an SBC this year, John,

[00:27:52] that's been a proper stalwart on my team, that's, like previous years, even last year, I don't think, well, I think this year, Marcelo team of the year was the big one for me, because it cost me 2 million coin in fodder, and he stayed in my team for three or four months, but that's me. Normally, when you get a sign of a good SBC, is that everybody's playing with them, everybody's using them. It's not going to add that. I think it's all fair points, you don't have to convince me,

[00:28:21] I think these are all fair points. I do think they gave in some effort, for example, putting in the icon grind, I always forget how it's called, but where you collect cards, tossing the cards to get the R9 this year, for example, they put it out there. That was good. That was an experiment that he thinks, wasn't it? And it was a kind of relaunch of exchanges that they'd done from a previous game, wasn't it? Yes, and I think that, and combined with the token system,

[00:28:51] is that they tried to give the free-to-play players, something to play for, but still, I agree 100% with rewards, were utterly ridiculous, at least for a good half year, totally useless, to be fair. I didn't even start, I did two or three weekly, something like that. I think I got 13 wins in the first one, 13 in the second, and 12 in the third one, and the rewards were so ridiculously poor, I was like, you know what? I'm not going to spend my weekends doing this.

[00:29:21] Actually, it doesn't make any sense. I'm far better off just getting a league division, getting my wins in. That's a bigger chance of getting something good, and I can take all week to get there. So, and even those rewards were lackluster, to say the league. Before Nate gives his two cents, the rivals up to, March, April was like an 81 times 15, stuff like that. I mean, Well, a little bit better for a league, I think, but, yeah, got some team of the week.

[00:29:51] I'm sure, like, was it division four, division three upwards, was worth the grind, but anything up to that, if you weren't going to push on past that, it almost wasn't worth going up through the, see the divisions, but I'm sure, I'm sure I figured out that div four upwards was kind of, that was acceptable, but not great, like, especially based off previous years, but there's definitely a bit in it where you're like, no, I need to be in this division, but, and up to that,

[00:30:17] there was literally very little between all the preceding divisions up until that point. Like I say, it's either four or three, and then it's like, no, I need to push on because that's worth it. Back to the point, I think content has been fantastic. It's always going to be fantastic. The problem is, the content's fantastic for store, store, store buyers. It's not fantastic for your, free players. Yeah, I think if you would rate this, I would end up giving it a, a little bit lower rating,

[00:30:47] probably 5.5 or five, I think, generally speaking, content was good, but it far out, rewards the, playing player, a lot more, than the, non-playing player. I spoke a hell of a lot there. I think Nate must have something to say about us. No, like, because I kind of focused on the pay to win type, and then the road side of things, but the actual content itself, like, there's so much to do. I, I generally don't think that side of things has been good,

[00:31:17] been bad, sorry. Especially when you've had, like the, it was the world tour, the greats of the game type stuff, where you've got all the different things to do in friendlies. Like, if you're doing that, just do uncapped friendlies, but I think that side of things has been phenomenal. Well, because that's top is no more three. Oh, sorry. I'll keep that. The rush mode, wicked league champions. Right. Well, we'll leave that. So if we're going on pay to win and sort of reward type thing, I've got to go with maybe a two or a three. I think that's, it's, possibly the worst it's been.

[00:31:46] It's definitely the most explicit. It's been, it's the most obvious it's been this year. But then I'm, I'm almost okay with that. Cause at least if you have decided to put something on that, like if you are putting 20 quid on or 10 quid, you know, roughly what you're getting. So that's why it's not a one or a zero, because I'd rather if people were about to spend their own money on it, it'd be a case of, right, I'm doing this so I can get, and say 94 plus rate is promo card, rather that than go for,

[00:32:14] sold pack where you're not guaranteed to get anything over an 84. I think it was, I wouldn't call it pay to win anymore. I would actually, I would call it pay to progress. It's probably the way to put it. I think it's got that bad. But if there was, there was a point up to even as late as, I would even say even as late as the festival football promo, where you weren't really massively upgrading your team unless you were buying a store pack every other week.

[00:32:44] Fair enough. I think that's fair enough. I think that we hit the weakest spot of FC26 here. Talking about topic number three, content, rush mode, wicked league, and rivals. Random question, Neil, you played much Rush this year? I like Rush just to, excuse my French, I like Rush just to ask about him. Eh. I did at the start. I did at the start, and then I did at the start of the token system again, just to make sure I maxed out at that point without using the exchanges.

[00:33:14] A big problem with Rush, and it's something that, again, there's no rewards in it to do anything. To get your Rush rewards for the week, you were playing, having to play upwards of 20, 30 games of Rush, you were getting what, a thousand, two thousand points, and you'd take up to 60,000. Yeah. Points. And also the, just the least. Before the token system came in, the actual Rush rewards itself were dire. Yeah, It was just nothing there. Get up to 60,000. like it was, that side, the rush was, for me,

[00:33:42] Russian moments are the weakest parts of Ultimate Team. Moments? Why does it even exist? Apart from, in a couple of days, I mean, seriously. Yeah, that was it. Actually, moments is a very good way of teaching certain mechanics, and FC. Is that the point of it though? Is that, is that? No, but it is a very good way of teaching you because it shows you different tackle styles. Yeah. Actually, I think moments is like a very good tutorial for new players and recurring players to get back into it.

[00:34:13] Except it's not advertised like that and it's not built for that. But I think it's more, they could do so much more with it. Yeah, if they updated to the, the stars on it, and you'd probably wouldn't go in and use it. Yeah. And I think, especially at the start of the game, the first thing I always do is just go through moments a little bit because it will give you some good packs at the start of the game. Yeah. And it gives you like a refresher. Oh, this is how you take free kick this year because that changed, for example, on FC 27.

[00:34:42] Might be worth checking out corners, et cetera. But that's a different story. I think the biggest thing is, for me, there was plenty, plenty to do. Tournaments, leagues, we had everything this year, right? I think the biggest downfall for players in this game is that you want to do everything. Yeah. Players that do everything get burned out and are complaining that doesn't give reward. Like the thing is, if you catch five fish, they have to taste really good

[00:35:12] all five of them. But if you take, if you just catch one fish, focus on catching that one fish. But tonight, right? I think that fish will taste delicious if you stick to that one fish. So, that's probably a bad analogy for what I'm trying to say here. But what I'm trying to say is that if I look at this and I'm like, oh, rush, I played it through the first week. Yeah, nobody's passing ball. I got to play a whole lot of game. I'm spending three hours to get these rewards. Rewards aren't worth it. That means for me, I don't even like doing it. It's fine. I'm stop touch.

[00:35:41] I'll just don't touch it. I'll play three weekend leagues. Rewards are pretty crap. I got my performance in which I wanted. You know what? That's another weekend safe for me. I'm only going to touch that for a long while. And I'll focus on rivals. That's how I play this game. Yeah. You'll get people that say you shouldn't play for rewards and you don't play for rewards. I solely play for rewards because the point of ultimate team is to improve your team, isn't it? And if you can improve... I'm not playing for rewards. I'm saying play for rewards

[00:36:10] the things you like to do or you think that's worth playing for. I think... I'm not touching squad battles still. So... I think what they've done with game modes in terms of live events and adding Gauntlet in this year, to be honest, has been probably their shining light of the year. It's probably the best thing they've done all year. They've executed it well. We've just moaned about rewards and stuff being nerfed and stuff. Gauntlet did give you good rewards. Let's not say good rewards.

[00:36:39] It gave you rewards. It's just all solely down to pack luck. Where are we getting to talk about 26 pack luck compared to other years is another thing. But I think if you were solely relying on your old methods of playing rivals during the week, champs at the weekend, you were never going to get... You were never going to move forward. The fact that they've put in Gauntlets and live events, it took them a while to get a lot of rewards quickly and up and running because Gauntlet when it first came out

[00:37:09] and I think they quickly realised that if this is solely going to be a reward for winning thing, people would have quickly fell out of the game. I think the fact that they changed it to reward for play and have a win bonus I think was a massive success for them this year. Yeah. And that touches on what we were saying, like rewarding the higher tier players as well because a lot of those players that were in the bonus rewards, they were good cards but they weren't groundbreaking.

[00:37:39] Like the worst thing it did was make you come up against someone and go, oh he's clearly a good player because he's won whatever, like three perfect rounds out of four or whatever. It's like you kind of it's the mental edge but the players themselves weren't, or the cards themselves weren't amazing but I think that side of content has been amazing like we touched on in the previous segment. Like so much to do. The capping of the the capping of the tokens plays into this as well because if you had uncapped tokens you'd probably be more likely to grind a bit more whereas when you've only

[00:38:08] got a thousand like you know yourself like John, you'll be squad battles is the first one to go. Rush was the first one I mean I still do squad battles now and then but I did I was playing it properly. That's it. Exactly, but for people with a bit of time you still have to like prioritize what's your most enjoyment in this game and then obviously tie that in with your token so if people like chance well I know it's chance at a different token system so I've got people just prefer live events, great. People like rivals, great. Like because it's limited you don't have to do everything

[00:38:38] although there's plenty to choose from. Squad battles is your easiest 600 tokens you'll make all week that's why I do it. Yeah, and you can tie it in with other objectives. That's why I can't do it. Well why not get 600 tokens before I sleep it's even better doesn't it? It's better than rivals. The thing is and I think I'll do a separate podcast on FC27 we get a lot of people that say they get burned out by this game but I think you get burned out by every game that starts to feel like a grind if you feel like

[00:39:08] you gotta do things that will always start to burn you out right? I mean Neil you love barbecue I love barbecue but if someone says every single day you gotta make dinner I'm doing the barbecue you get tired of it and someone I think the FOMO is saying I think EA purposely done this and I think they do this in purpose I think they put that FOMO aspect into the game don't they? Yeah but I think that's why I don't get burned out of this game or any game to be fair is because I just say if this is not fun

[00:39:37] I'm not doing it I'm not feeling this I'm not skipping it I don't care about if I miss a reward or something else my team's probably the weakest of our teams don't really care too much would be nicer if it was a little bit stronger but you know it wouldn't convince me to start playing score battles for example so I think that keeps me sane as well to be fair is the structure quick question I'll just ask this one to Nate because we gotta go

[00:40:07] through this a couple more things Nate is a structure of gems where you get rewards with every single win and the structure of rivals where you can actually relocate not from everywhere but you have like a mini rival system on lower divisions has that made an impact is that a good change the champs one's definitely a change every game's meaningful in champs as it should be because it's because it's champs so I'm happy with that rivals like I quite like the whole you can get relegated

[00:40:37] you may not get relegated they didn't do an awful lot with the bonuses you had in rivals because some of them kind of fast tracked you give your rewards and stuff and that seemed to disappear quite quickly rivals to me hasn't been too big a downside I know some people don't like it because it does get really sweaty but as you go up the divisions people want to win so it's going to happen the same with any competitive game you've got so I actually I don't know whether I'm in a minority or not but I don't mind the structure of both champs and regals not quickly do you then Neil do you mind it

[00:41:06] do you think of a good change no I'm exactly the same as Nate I remember in the days there was 40 games in weekend league and even 20 games 15s I do 15 I'm so impatient so I try and do it in one sitting which is probably to my detriment but rivals rivals could be good rivals could be exceptional I'll use that I'll go as far as that rivals could be exceptional if it wasn't a Thursday weekly

[00:41:37] if it was just if you get so many wins up to your how many points is it 24 well I don't know I don't know now it was 30 it was like 15 wins or something at one point it's 16 points and 24 for bonus if you get your 24 points you get your rewards and then boom you start again that's how it should be wins in 7 days though I mean no but what do you get you get your 8 wins really quickly then sit about for a week twiddling your thumbs

[00:42:07] do I not just have it well I didn't but then I'll just boost it up on divisions really early on I think that's yeah but what if you're not interested what if you're just happy to just play games and if you win them you win if you don't and if you don't really care what division you're in why not give you the rewards then I think you're one of those players that played multiple game modes in this full ultimate team yeah I mean I'm sitting in I'm sitting in division 3 just now and I've not

[00:42:37] really played the rivals side of it much mainly because when I do play I just give my tokens away by accident so I think they should that would be the best thing they could do to rivals is get rid of a Thursday reward system and just give you the rewards once you get to your 24 points then you've got to reset and start again that's how I I'd probably get a lot of players playing as well fair enough last topic consists out of two

[00:43:07] smaller topics and I want to get some quick fight answers in this one because else we are running out of time this is all about the evolutions and the market Neil evolutions are people using them creatively to upgrade favorite club players or is everyone just building identical meta squads question sorry go ahead no go go go I would say question two transfer market is in good spot yes or no evolutions are great for people

[00:43:36] like Nate and John who are Johnson supporters for next year I think it gives them a platform to play the game it's great for Wimby for his Redden team it's great for Homer for his Rangers team evolutions are great for that side of things evolutions are great as well in the sense of guys like me who are taking probably meta players but making them more customised meta or the way I like to have players so I wouldn't get rid of evolutions are great so there's my quick answer for

[00:44:06] that it wasn't very quick transfer market dead as a dodo I'm amazed it's even going to be in the game next year it's relevant for what it's relevant for the first month of FIFA this year it's relevant for the first three four weeks trying to build a gold team other than that they don't want a market I've said it in the pod before they're trying to get rid of it they're doing everything they can to get rid of it and they're succeeding frankly I think the market's almost available Nate up to you evolutions in the market my friend yeah so

[00:44:35] evolutions to me started off a great promise it was really cool getting not even like worst team but you know as a United fan I had some really good evos from lower rated players but very convoluted still too many ways to chain too many different evolutions so they've tried to fix that at times as well but I just think evos currently are far too overpowered and they have been probably since Christmas you can chain them up and get ridiculous cards which thing goes hand in hand with your next

[00:45:05] question about the market why would you go to market and buy a promo card at ridiculous price when you can just evo your favourite players anyway so market is a disaster the market is pointless like how many weeks ago it was and we still 83s and 84s were more expensive than 88s and 89s that's wild like should be having an SBC spike like the only thing that's been any sort of value is team of the weeks and team of the seasons just because that mundane requirement for which will go in the next couple weeks you'd imagine

[00:45:34] anyway for the SBCs so they're dead evos good premise a lot of work needed to make them more relevant or not relevant because they're very relevant but more in line with the power curve yeah fair enough I think the only good side about this transfer market this year has been that many many many good players were really cheap you can see it now in footage as well but prior to that as well if you don't go for the unbop page you could get really good players for 20 25 30k

[00:46:04] if they were really good maybe 100k and unless they were extremely good they were like 4 million and they were unaffordable if you skip the unaffordable players I think promos could change your teams a whole lot more than before but I also definitely agree on EVO I think evolutions are still too convoluted for me like if you need another website to see how you have to evolution them at best I think that doesn't make any sense when you

[00:46:34] do that they are becoming too strong which can be kind of cool but then again it ruins the market and I think if you don't follow that trend it sort of puts you out of the game that's my take on that I do still like the fact of evolutions if you have like an evolution player for your own team let's say Feyenoord St. Johnson whatever you get that player in and you grind that out throughout the year and it will be 99 at the end of the year follow the curve that's currently going I think that will

[00:47:04] be very much a good spot but I think the biggest issue with this game and a power curve is still that we should just stop with the insane ratings on cards ratings like overall ratings are probably ratings to make sure that card gets packed or not right the higher it is the lower chance you have to pack it but that also makes sure there's no limit to it like there's no ceiling to cards as well if they just bring out the game and say everyone's max out at 84

[00:47:34] whatever perfect example 88 whatever perfect example of evolutions this year and where it went wrong was the two evil yeah everyone had a everybody had a silver oh I didn't do it but everybody had a silver star 90 plus stats in every department because you could chain them up to do that and EA had to do something here and they don't want you to have the cards and it's clear they don't so that's silver stars

[00:48:03] literally became irrelevant for the full game which had such promise at the start of the game became completely irrelevant because community found a way to break it and they broke it true true if we look at those four topics so the market and the evolutions the content and the well the way we play this game the pay to win versus the grind and the gameplay the meta and the playstyle I have a feeling

[00:48:32] this game wasn't actually that poor as people certainly feel like it was Nate is there something you would like to add to the discussion or something that would make you change the score after going into depth into this you gave a 6.5 right 7.5 yeah 6.25 John get it right no I wouldn't change it I mean you're right I don't think it's as bad as people made out and I don't think a lot of is the game I think it's like Neil said the

[00:49:02] M2 promises the patch well not ruins but changed by the patch it's the lack of menu grind the menu grind hasn't been amazing throughout we're four weeks away from a new cycle and usually by now you can like the full-blown menu grind there's not a lot there SPCs haven't been great so that brings it down but it's the actual gameplay and a lot of the actual content in terms of gameplay and content I think has been actually

[00:49:38] that's what clouds people even they were saying drive you to the store because the market is rubbish that gets in people's heads oh they're just after the money because they're putting stupidly good packs in the store so all in all it's like people going EA being EA we kind of said they were going to kill the market drive you to the store that's what they're doing so next it'll be you can

[00:50:08] buy this for 20 quid and you can get another you can double or triple your token allowance or something like that and if they do that that's what's going to make the whatever goodwill is left with you

[00:50:38] season passes I think season passes are fine it's a good way to get extra like it's a lot of coins it's not a lot of physical money I know it's when you want tokens you

[00:51:08] I asked you the number right before we started so you didn't have much time to think about it would you change your score which was a 6.5 6.5 I gave it I'm reluctant to change 6.5 and it's hard to argue or even add to what Nate just said he's pretty much nailed it

[00:51:38] it's kind of slipped my head now but it was to do with the market store packs have always been strong this year it's how they want to push the game forward I

[00:52:08] especially when you get to the level 20 upwards you get to the end of that season you can get the SP and get packs in it's been good I've enjoyed that side of

[00:52:38] the ball goes out for a throw in then your player can't throw it in you flick it up with the goals we've not had any of that this year so that's a plus game play side has been really good I do think though the cynic in me says they're really pushing you to the store and I think that's going to be exactly the same next year and I'm

[00:53:08] sticking with that score because I think that's the kind of stuff this year SBC haven't been great I think they'll be even worse or poorer next year because of it still perhaps will remain as strong as ever

[00:53:38] I said I I I said probably go back to like a 7.25 a little bit because there's something that's still amazing like distorting is definitely bothering me as and

[00:54:08] the whole like blog post they wrote about new cheating devices and how they will suffice and battle it's still so equivalent to still have cheaters on there they just break the game for you and still one thing that keeps me off from playing PC although I might try this year but the silence of that has been frustrating still for me I've been three quarters of the cycle on PC and I

[00:54:51] part I think cross play should never have to be turned off because of cheaters that's a solution and a problem that shouldn't be there and the fact that it's still good doesn't get addressed once a year when they try to sell copies I think that is just a frustrating part and the silence we

[00:55:21] could just put it in and nobody responded send it to EA send it with the examples put it on the forums message got deleted it's still a bit frustrated for me but the potential was there for the game and I've seen that on the tournament of the events we played we've seen it on the tournaments we hosted we've seen it on matches we played with friends this game actually

[00:55:51] it could be so it is at times really fun to play this game there's nothing fundamentally broken I think in the game itself everything around it makes it a little bit harder but if you play this game in season I think this is actually a really cool game to play if you play this in a controlled environment in food it's actually a really cool thing to play if you put this game out in the wild and

[00:56:21] can abuse every single corner cut any corner without them being too much limited I think that's where EA faulted a little bit too much in this game faulted as well but then again I hated the way SBCs were done because doing 789 SBCs was really doing my head in that has changed for next year as well so even that's a result of the market being terrible because they couldn't he put an incredible player

[00:56:51] for 5 SBCs when you can buy them for 800 coins per player or whatever so I dislike it as

[00:57:21] especially especially when it's against your team of services and you could ban people because of it and you will you have banned people because of it as well it's a little bit it's a weird situation but hey the game itself I think we discussed it all I think for me this has been a pretty cool podcast here we definitely had plenty of moments to discuss plenty of changes throughout the season can't say this season was still in any way shape or form if it wasn't content if it wasn't the gameplay we had or the changes they

[00:57:51] made or the communications they did we had a lot of changes I think if I stick my number at 7.5 still we'll end up like a 6.75 we can be very positive say it's a 7 minus right and I think that's a decent score for this game for this year I'm very much looking forward to FC 27 again when this game started I checked it out I gave this 8 out of 10 in the

[00:58:24] game we've had in years everyone was on board with it and just the people didn't want to defend and couldn't cope in

[00:58:55] the most people skill and that's why I wanted to have the in depth discussion with the certain topics to go through it all that leaves me with saying thank you to you guys of course for joining today I want to thank all the whole team this year for helping us make at least another 100 plus I but before

[00:59:25] I do I want to thank all the listeners and viewers and new fans and people commentating and even my Argentina fans sending me pictures for all the well commitment they give to 30

[00:59:55] already and we're not planning on stopping any time yet and I'm very proud of that and I love everyone for supporting us in that and on that note let leave us with one thing

[01:00:27] give you and you you