That's absolutely brilliant, isn't it?
"You can fix our incompetence and pay us £90 for the pleasure"
I get your point, but if it means we have access to all the physics variables etc. then...
Look, they make one game and try to please ten audiences (FUT, eSports, offline manager career guys, offline player career guys) - but the engine they have
easily has the power to be the best-ever game for any of those audiences. But right now, only PC modders have access to all the variables (and even then, there's lots we don't know).
If all players now have the power to say, for example, "lower the required defending attributes for a defender to position themselves properly from 85+ to 70+" (which is all part of their "key attributes" gameplay change from last year, i.e. any average defender doesn't know how to defend despite being, ya know, a professional footballer)...
...then
oh my God.
Even if it just means, for example, we could increase the fatigue rate in Career Mode - it means that we could lower acceleration (to make players human and not aliens) and not completely break the fatigue system so that you never, ever have to rotate your squad.
But it's such an odd thing to include, that I'm trying not to get excited. It's also such a new idea (not sliders, but a "debug mode") that
who knows how this is going to be implemented.
It could also just be some kind of console that allows you to type commands that only EA can issue. Say a bug is discovered. You can't get a patch through sign-off at Sony and/or Microsoft for weeks. But maybe they issue a "code" in a tweet, for example - "go to debug mode and enter 123XYZ" - and that fixes the issue for offline players, whilst the online players have to wait for the patch.
But what I don't get, is... Sony/MS are very precious about patches and their sign-off processes. What if something you do in this debug mode makes the game crash all the time, which potentially bricks your console depending on the circumstance? That's the whole reason that the patch approval process takes so long, and the reason they don't let you "shortcut" it like this.
I'm guessing that's why they say they've "developed a tool" as opposed to just "we've put a debug mode in" - "tool" makes it sound like something that absolutely 100% can't wreck your game to the point of a crash.
But it's all so new, it's all guesswork.
I just really hope it's as powerful as it could be.