EA Sports is faced with an impossible balancing act once every year, and FIFA 23 is their latest attempt at tackling this challenge. On the one hand, the game simulates football in an approachable and realistic manner, while on the other, the gameplay is tense and features a significant skill gap.
However, despite the fact that FIFA 23 is yet another utterly compelling dopamine factory that I will without a doubt be playing until the day before the next game comes out like I do every year, it is still very easy to criticize, and it will ultimately be just as divisive as previous entries over the course of the last five years or so have become. The gameplay in FIFA 23 is all about being lightning-fast, arcadey, and on the edge of your seat, with matches being kept short and intense.
In FIFA 23, one of the back-of-the-box incremental improvements is something called Hypermotion 2, which utilizes motion capture and machine learning to generate more realistic animations as you play the game for FIFA 23 buy coins. It's a win for the realism side of the balancing act and looks great in general, eliminating some of the jarring, immersion-breaking (and reality-defying) contortion that was likely to pop up over hundreds and thousands of matches, just as EA Sports said it would. This is a win for the realism side of the balancing act.
The fact that the gameplay is way too fast to ever look truly realistic is, however, an unavoidable issue that cannot be avoided. In attacking, were striking the ball is more intuitive and feels silkier, the much-hated "skating" look that players seem to glide from stride to stride is greatly reduced. However, in defense jockeying, players gallop, full-Gangnam Style, and it's all very slippery.
It is a textbook example of EA's competing ideologies when it comes to FIFA, where it doesn't really matter if the animations are pulled from genuine movements if it looks like they are performed in bullet-time from The Matrix. This is a problem that has been plaguing FIFA since its inception.
This, however, does not imply that the running is entire without merit. acceleRATE is an additional one of the major additions to FIFA 23, and it allows for explosive, controlled, and lengthy sprint acceleration styles. This is a fantastic idea in theory that, when put into practice, results in some really surprising and authentic moments as well.
Playing against tricky players like Raheem Sterling and watching him wriggle away on the edge of the box to bear down on goal – with his trademark run in the game too – so similarly as he's done for England, Man City, and now Chelsea over the years can't help but bring a smile to your face. He's done it for all three of those teams.
On the other hand, the balancing act rears its head in other aspects, as the challenging task of making the system powerful and visible in-game without making it incredibly overpowered rears its head again. Certain explosive players may experience a sudden sensation similar to that of running through molasses, while lumbering guys may build up an unassailable head of steam.
The speed of players also seems to have been sped up significantly in FIFA 23, which is a change that I actually support as a modification. When you watch real football, absolute mismatches in terms of speed are relatively rare and highly dependent on the context. However, when you put a binary number on things like pace, even players who are the most dedicated to realism go now throw their hands up as their rapid attacker is tractor-beamed in by a slower defender. In real football, absolute mismatches in terms of speed are relatively rare and highly dependent on the context.
When it comes to dissonance, nowhere is Career Mode more jarring than when it comes to the contrast between fantasy and reality. Another one of EA Sports' impossible tasks is that diehard players simply become too good at the game after hundreds of hours of practice. Because of this, every clogging AI winger needs to dribble like Maradona in his prime, or else you will win every game 7-0.
When you make things more competitive, every match becomes a tit-for-tat ding-dong, which again breaks the delicate suspension of disbelief that Plymouth Argyle really is scrapping for the Champions League, or whatever headcanon you're RPing (because that's what you're doing even if there aren't any fairies or wizards involved, folks).
It does not help matters that Career Mode appears to be neglected in comparison to the high regard in which its devoted player base holds it. Although there are some new cutscenes, ratings for transfers, and a reworked presentation style, these additions are ultimately irrelevant to the gameplay. However, the presence of obvious bugs, which ruin the experience of playing the match, is what makes it feel like it has been completely sidelined.
One issue that has occurred multiple times for me since the game was released is that substituted players receive a poor match rating, regardless of how well they played; for example, a performance in which two goals were scored results in a score of only four out of ten.
Not only does this have an effect on their overall growth and progression - the point of the game mode is to scout the best wonderkids and grow them into overpowered superstars - but it also seeps into the presentation parts of the game. You start to get questions in press conferences about your free-scoring players falling out of form (they haven't), as well as news stories lamenting their poor performances (which didn't happen), and it quickly snowballs into an unsatisfying experience for you as a coach or manager.
