Tom is an expert in all things Fortnite or the latest RPG release, but is probably spending too much time on the latest EA FC game.
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Ahead of EA Sports FC 27’s early access launch on September 19, I sat down with Gameplay Director Kantcho Doskov and Senior Producer Sam Rivera at Gamescom to discuss the changes this year’s game is making to defending.
For a few years now, a big point of frustration among the FC/FIFA community has been how rewarding the game is for players who rely on AI defending. For the uninitiated, that’s when you let the AI-controlled players on your team perform actions without you pressing a button. Defenders in recent entries would often tackle, jockey, and position themselves correctly without any input from you. This happened to such a degree that letting the AI have control was more successful and rewarding than performing defensive actions yourself. Players want that system to be reversed, with the game actively promoting the use of manual defensive inputs, and punishing an overreliance on using AI as a crutch.
“So defensive AI cannot be relied on like you used to in the past,” Doskov tells me. “You have to actively switch to the defender closest to the ball and either try to intercept the pass or try to tackle the ball. You can’t put your controller down anymore.” That’s a promising sentiment, but it’s something pre-release promotion has said about the last few FC games, without it being the reality in-game.
I raised that point to the gameplay team, and they told me that they have “finally been able to achieve” the right balance in defending. “It’s definitely a more drastic change, and it takes time to craft the entire defensive experience,” Rivera says, suggesting they’ve gone above and beyond the changes made in previous years in an effort to ensure manual defending is rewarding in FC 27.
They went into more detail on what exactly the changes are, and how they’ve altered this year’s gameplay to tweak defending. “We’ve been building this gameplay for many years, and it’s quite complex. What we had to do actually is go to the extreme, which means increasing the tackle range for manual defenders or user-controlled defenders, increasing the interception range, but at the same time decreasing those same ranges for AI players. We really had to exaggerate those differences to make it apparent that, like, even if an AI player runs close to the ball, they are not going to take it. You need to switch to that player.”
EA Sports clearly understands what the issue is and is doing a lot to fix it. Rivera and Doskov are confident that it’s “what the community has been asking for,” and they’re “excited to, once the game is released, just see what the reception is.”
Defending in recent years has been frustrating. You’ll regularly attempt a tackle, only to see the ball bounce back to your opposition. If the changes EA Sports say they’ve made impact the game in the intended way, it might be the best FIFA or FC game since FIFA 17. Rivera told me that he “doesn’t think I’ve ever felt this good defending, which is a big thing,” and I echo that sentiment. If defending truly manages to make manual defending rewarding, it’ll be a big thing that makes long-term fans, myself included, very happy.