You can actually change a lot of things with mods. Including ball friction, weight, air density and TONS of things more. The problem is not that. The problem is defence logic and certain things that I am sure they are hardcoded in the game and if they could be changed, it'd be through locale.ini. I don't have any doubt that EA FC has the TOOLS to be a good sim. Is simply that they chose not to be such a thing. You can see even defenders getting out of the way. That's something terrible.
Dunno, IMHO, you gotta mix both the modding of EBX and locale.ini to get something decent, but at this rate I don't know what you could even change to make those games decent.
FIFA 16/17 are the best IMHO, or the ones that need less changes. 18-20/21 are let's say decent, but already too accelerated, more each year. From 22 onwards is just nosense. Players are fucking faster than usain bolt, the ball goes from one side of the pitch to the other... Just horrible. If it wasn't because CB Jockey and the poor defensive reaction of my players at times, I'd say FIFA 17 is just a great game.
I am still looking for a game where I can feel football is well depicted. For example, PES, has players not being reactive enough. PES 21 has a lot of potential, but players feel simply dull and not willing to respond to your command at times. And if you try to make players more reactive, passthroughs will happen, which is something really frustrating. This doesn't mean PES doesn't have it's ups. The dribbling system with the right stick is way more logical and intuitive than the one from FIFA, and the way players are built, with the whole set of dribbling skills instead of having just stars, I feel is way more interesting, along certain other things, yet I like for example that players in FIFA have Vision as a parameter, something that can be used (and I think FIFA does this way) to see how fast your character calculates certain pass, and if you do it before the player has calculated it, then there's more chance of failing that pass, etc.
Dunno, I feel that each game has some really good things, also in the strategies, but the problem is how they move it to the pitch. In the pitch, FIFA is way to arcade in certain things, yet PES ain't much better, for more than PES fans want to convince you from the opposite. Without mods, there's not a single game I can say it convinces me, cause they are made to play 20 min matches maximum, and I want the complexity of real football. I want to play up to 45 minutes and having to think how to pass or break the enemy defence, having slow tempo, having players moving and creating new passing lines, having to actually look actively for those pass lines and moving the ball around. Having tools to sort the pressure, and also pressure being logical, not the players running like mad all the time, etc.
Again, in my experience, the closest things for me have been FIFA 16 and 17, but the fact that my players tend to be so passive in defence, and even let pass the enemy if I am moving another player to position, or don't run back properly to cover if I am pressing the man with the ball, just throw out the experience out of the window for me. You simply have too much to manage in defence because of the manual defence crap.
I can't remember how PES 2013 and previous felt, but if I already felt 2014 too clunky in movement (and not only because of the long animations) like still evolving from the 8 direction movement, I don't think that previous games are much better.
