EA Sports FC 26 Devs Talk Player and Community Feedback

During our recent hands-on with EA Sports FC 26, The Best War Games also sat down to speak with a couple of devs.

The Best War Games spoke with EA Sports FC 26 line producer Andreas Wilsdorf and career mode design director Pete O'Donnell about the Switch 2, the improvements to the game mode, and how the studio is approaching community feedback moving forward. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

EA Sports FC 26 on Switch 2

The Best War Games: During the presentation, you said you were very impressed by the Switch 2. I wanted to see if you could elaborate on that?

Wilsdorf: In general, the Switch 2 was really exciting. Being on the platform with FC this year, the performance is what really excites us. It is on parity, basically, with what we see on PS5 and Xbox. Again, it's a handle console, but the first time I played with it, I was really impressed. Then, we also saw it working on the simulation and the times it takes to simulate the season and so on, which was very, very close to what we saw in PlayStation and Xbox devkits. That's really impressive.

EA Sports FC 26's Career Mode

The Best War Games: Okay, let's dig into career mode. It feels like each category has something to be excited about, as there doesn't seem to be one kind of focal point. For each of you, what has been the most exciting or reinvigorating thing that you've been able to do with career mode?

O'Donnell: For me, Manager Live is kind of number one. The reason for that is that we've had our game come out in September, and nothing really changes. It's actually something we can change and update live now. We can look at what's happening in the real world of football, and we can bring different stories to people. On top of snappy game bits, we can do all these different things and give players different opportunities. That is really quite different; it's kind of a sandbox where you make your own story. I think it's going to resonate with old players and let new players test the waters and get rewards for trying new things.

Wilsdorf: For me, it's Manager Market. It's another example of feedback we've seen over the years. We've never done it in the game before, and it changes how you approach tactics, clubs, and the game. It's really exciting to see, and every time we test it, we assume that, 'Oh, this manager ended up there. This is really interesting.'

The Best War Games: Is there any intervention in terms of, like, how crazy the chaos can get? Are there any guardrails?

O'Donnell: A lot of what we do focuses on the quality of the manager, the quality of the team, where they're going, the tactical elements, and there are a lot of checks and balances for all that. But as Andreas said in the presentation, we almost want some little strange things to happen, stuff you wouldn't believe. I want players to tell their friends: 'You'll never believe what happened.' We don't want Guardiola going to a fifth division side, that's just wrong, but we do want interesting things to happen. There's a lot of balance about making it feel just enough so you can tell that story in your head. If you can't think of a reason for what's happening, we've failed.

EA Sports FC 26 Player and Community Feedback

The Best War Games: FC 26 feels like it's responding to long-term feedback, but are there also plans in place for how nimble you can be in responding to instantaneous feedback, like how quickly you can respond to something versus waiting for FC 27?

Wilsdorf: I think what is really important, something we were building on, is bringing improvements during the year. We already had some of this in FC 25 where we had some feedback we implemented and were very open about it being player feedback. We saw one criticism, improved them, and brought them in with a patch, so that was really important. We're going to be continuously improving the game during the year.

O'Donnell: Now we have the ability to update the game live and to change things live. That's only going to get more powerful, and we'll be able to make more changes. Those little things that the community is asking for, if we know it's a small thing we can integrate into the next patch, then we're absolutely committed to deliver that across the whole cycle. We want the game to be as good as our community. There was some frustration of 'we need to fix it so we'll put it in next year' versus 'I want to fix it today and not wait a year.' Now, we don't have to do that, so it's great to be more agile and nimble.

The Best War Games: What does that transparency do for you as developers? What does it do for morale or even the development process?

Wilsdorf: What is great about it is that it lets us show we are really listening. It's not like we're somewhere in a secret room and just hiding away anything that's happening. We are also open to the design councils in different ways about stuff we've heard from the community and players for years, like 'Hey, this is what we're planning, these are the improvements we're bringing, and this is the feedback we're seeing.' At the end of the day, we're players ourselves. I play hundreds of hours of Career Mode every year, and I'm 42. I grew up with FC, from the very first game that ever existed for it, so I want that passion to transfer.

O'Donnell: I'm talking about very small, little points, but sometimes we have an idea in our head we're going ahead with. Then, we get this feedback, and it's like, 'Oh, I didn't realize that.' That can affect our players, but we can make those changes now. We don't want to miss things. It's a massive game, complex with all these systems, so when we hear players or other designers talking about it, we want to listen. If it's an easy or small fix, we can get to it next week, but some things are hard and make a backlog. We're really just going to suck it all in, and with feedback, the idea is to get more ideas, whether it's 10, 1000, or 1000 people talking about a thing.

The Best War Games: What is the conversation like in terms of addressing player and community feedback, while knowing that the World Cup is going to draw many first-time players to the game? How do you balance that idea of addressing community feedback, but also knowing there are going to be people coming to this game for the first time?

Wilsdorf: That has always been an interesting challenge with FC. It's such a massive game, and the community is still growing year by year. We have players who are really hardcore, players who know the modes in and out, and players who are overwhelmed by the experience. What's really great about this year is, on one hand, we completely reworked our tutorials. We didn't even mention the quality of life improvements in the presentation, but to make everything more modern and give you more insight, we reworked the task list we have in the game so that, over multiple weeks, you slowly learn the game and how it's going to work. Manager Live is really great for this because we can turn off features. There are multiple opportunities we see for new players coming in.

[END]

Rating block community and brand ratings Image