FIFA 16 - Wish List

Yesterday, I introduced I'd love to see in FIFA 16, click here. Today, I shared Futhead community Wish List. These are the things players want to see most in FIFA 16's Career Mode.

1. Training

One thing Career Mode has historically lacked is the ability as a manger to develop and impart a team style on the squad that you have at your disposal. FUT achieves this through it’s Chemistry system and Career Mode needs training to do the same.

Player Training - to allow individual skills to be focussed on, eg dribbling, shooting, stamina, etc to provide a modest and temporary boost to those stat groups. This should also improve player weak foot ability, and skill move growth also.
Team training – which over-arches everything allowing you to create a team style. It should take time to develop with events like buying lots of players, or changing training settings constantly having a negative impact.
Match Training – everyone always thinks of training as separate, but it's usually match day when players learn the most. With young players especially you should be able to develop for example a LB, to a LM through a combination of time and experience in that new position.

2. Preseason

Preseason has always been a drab affair when it comes to Career Mode but with clubs now jetting off all around the world to play in prestigious tournaments, against big opposition it really is an untapped resource for Career Mode waiting to be utilised.

Tour Location - really you should be able to choose where your team go on their preseason tour, and even having three different 'offers' would add so much compared to the automated friendlies. The bigger your club is, the more lucrative and glamorous the offers should be.
Substitutes - this one is simple. EA please just allow us to use as many subs as we want in friendly games. It's one of preseason's core characteristics and currently the three sub rule, kills that completely.

3. Licensing

FIFA is probably the best licensed football game in existence, with the new Premier League deal especially yielding some pretty incredible results. But one area where Konami hold the cards is the tournament football arena, where the Europa and Champions League have all the bells and whistles you'd expect to see normally in FIFA.

More Leagues - it's always great when EA add new leagues to the game, because it knocks on and effects many other modes, but Career Mode especially benefits purely through added variation and volume of new players.
Real Tournaments - qualifying for European football in FIFA 15 feela like an achievement of sorts, but there's only so far that experience can go with generically named cups. Konami hold all the cards here, and EA need to wrestle a few free.

4. Transfers

It's the bit of Career Mode we all love the most. You need enough FIFA coins, buying players. And whilst Career Mode has some 'good' features in this area there is so much more to do, and we had countless comments on this topic alone.

Transfer Depth - things like buy-out clauses and sell-on fees are now so common place in real football that FIFA must simply follow suit now to have any chance of keeping up with transfer realism. Marco Reus has the most talked about buy-out clause in world football, and what a story it could make for Career Mode too.
Swap Deals - its all very well being able to offer up one of your players to the CPU, but when Real Madrid come calling with a £45 million offer for Wayne Rooney, I want to make them sweat by asking for £30 million and Varane instead. This trade system must work both ways.
Transfer Variety - after you've played a few different Career Mode saves, an alarming number of repeat transfers begin to show themselves. Without doubt more transfer variety is needed here.

5. Stadium Moves

With EA now offering up more real stadiums than ever before, one might argue whether this feature is even needed. But the joys of Career Mode for me are found mainly by taking a team from the depths of the lower leagues all the way to the top, and this is where stadium moves/expansion is needed most.

New Stadiums - all lower league clubs have generic stadiums, so there really isn't a reason that they can't move to a new generic stadium as your club moves through the leagues. It's just not right for Yeovil to be crowned European Champions in a ground fit for a pub side.
Stadium Expansions - much more difficult this one (especially for licensed stadiums but again for generic arena's surely EA could build a few different variants of the same stadium? Some with an added tier here and there, allowing you to expand instead of move grounds.

6. Scouting

The Global Transfer Network has been in place for two years now, and after a promising start it's lack of development has if anything made transfer decision making more difficult in Career Mode than its ever been.

Scout by Price - you can choose which position, age and type of player you want but what you can't do is add a budget to the mix. So if you have £10mil to spend and you need a LB, perhaps you only really want to spend £3mil max on that position. It would at the very least make scouting results more relevant.
Reveal the OVR - i'm a big supporter of masked player OVR's in Career Mode, but I appreciate that it can make decision making difficult also. Which is why when you do take the time to scout a specific player, that information should be revealed to you. As should 'top' players (like Messi who funnily enough, we already know is pretty handy.
Auto-Scouting - EA made a few tentative steps towards scouts dynamically suggestion players, based on squad weaknesses, but it needs to be better. In FIFA 15 it was a little too contrived and still relied on pre-set Instructions, which more often than not, you just deleted anyway.

7. Sim Matches

Because the match result when you sim is already pre-defined, the smoke and mirrors 'live' updates are exactly that; smoke and mirrors. Which makes dynamic decisions like changing formations, or choosing a substitute basically impossible. But that doesn't mean that Sim matches shouldn't be better within the framework they currently exist.

Stats - once the sim has completed, bar the score, it's almost impossible to find out what happened in the match. Did your team misplace lots of passes, did they get caught on the counter? There's just no way to learn from a simmed result, and more stats would certainly help.
Team Management - the other problem with Sim is that you don't get an opportunity to tweak your team on the fly. This is a fairly simple flow issue, and prior to a sim you should be presented with the same menu as if you were playing for real. That way you can tweak your lineup without changing your default setup.

8. The Best of the Rest

Add in the Practice Arena so you can play with Career Mode squads
Better press conferences with more conversation options and effects
Proper manager customisation so you can create yourself, perhaps using GameFace
More detailed reports about Youth Academy players and who's pushing for the first team.
Ballon d'Or awards to recognise the best players in the world.
Scenario Mode - where you start mid season with a team in the relegation zone for example.
The ability to carry remaining transfer budget across seasons
A better pool of Free Agents at the start of the game
Control over clubs finances, like ticket prices, sponsorship deals, etc.
Proper Reserve teams.

Here are some more comprehensive tips then what I showed. Looking forward to the next wish list.