What FIFA 16/17 was, bears no relation to what FC is. It's so sad. Expecting any future FC game to "feel" like football is like expecting Mario Kart to become an F1 simulator. What currently exists doesn't support it.
Mods shouldn't enter the conversation - they shouldn't have to exist. It's great that they do, but if the game doesn't already have something - or if something is deleted from it, such as the AI's brains - it can't be added.
I'm starting to feel the same way about sliders. Everyone has different preferences, yes - and (before the last patch totally killed the game IMO) sliders were the key to getting any enjoyment out of the game for some people. So I'm not saying they're useless.
But then again... they ARE useless when the core game is pretty much unenjoyable (like right now) aren't they? I've felt about FC25 from day one how a lot of Career players now feel about it since the last patch - sliders unable to fix anything, i.e. they can't make the AI do basic things all footballers do.
The fundamentals are the problem.
Who cares about making pass speed 10% slower when the ball has no friction and moves like an orb of light? When the contact made with the ball represents nothing about how it then moves?
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.
It's not really the place to discuss it - but look, I was getting nice-feeling matches out of FIFAs as late as 19/20. Going through clips on my YouTube channel, you can find clips like
this FIFA 19 clip where body position made a real difference to shot accuracy - in-fact,
this FIFA 19 goal is probably my favourite FIFA goal of all-time. Or,
this FIFA 20 collection where you can see goalmouth scrambles, deflections, horrible mishits and other non-simplified-physics moments of joy. (Both were dumbed down by patches.)
(21 onwards, there is only one development goal; super-simplification, streamlining the journey from defence to attack and removing all AI.)
However, one game is head-and-shoulders above the others in my opinion, and I can demonstrate why in one clip. 16 (v1.0) is king for me, taken to the next level with Anth's physics mods. The physics/variables taken into consideration with each ball contact is the closest thing to a sim we've ever had:
1) Ball physics are genuine (not forced to deflect to the nearest player) and make sense (and hadn't been sped up yet), 2) players have physical limitations (and the quest for responsiveness doesn't override them), 3) the defensive AI is probably the best it will ever be - they actively blocked your passing options, forced you away from goal and put you under pressure from the midfield onwards (and your AI teammates did the same)... whilst still feeling human.
But... Shot physics didn't have huge variation by default, and AI players/teams didn't really feel distinct from each other. 17 was a huge step forward there - suddenly I'd beat worse teams by big scorelines, whereas in 16 and prior games, every match had similar scores. But then 17 had more simplified physics, and was quite glitchy. The "feel" of the game has never got back to 16 levels IMO.
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.
