With all the problems that have hit Fifa 13 since its release date and a lot of fans saying they’ll now turn to Pro Evo, we take a look at some of the issues fans found wrong with EA’s latest football title.
I’d also like to start off by saying that I do like Fifa 13, when it works. It has a lot of great features and the offline campaign is fun to play with your friends as well as being a great multiplayer game for obvious reasons. It’s a good game. But there are a lot of glitches and mistakes that take it far away from being the great game that it could so easily have been.
Online Server Error
Anybody that has tried to play Fifa online, particularly an Online Pro Clubs match will have seen the server error message that the players’ data cannot be retrieved. It seems to have been sorted in the last few months but to have a game as popular as this and people finding it hard to get online for 6 months is beyond unacceptable.
Poor Passing
Even if you change the passing assistance setting in the options menu, it can still be difficult to get the ball to the player you want and has been for several years. I understand that with several players in the direction you point it can be hard for the game to know which one you want. However, on the other hand, it should be smart enough to have a rough idea and it should definitely know that if you tap pass while holding left that you don’t want to smash it to a guy on the other side of the pitch which is what tends to happen. It ruins the fluidity of matches and leaves you shouting “not him” at your TV.
Ultimate Team Offline
I personally use to love Fifa Ultimate Team. But once they released the magical patch that would fix everything you couldn’t get past the 5 minute mark when trying to play an offline match yet your players would still lose contracts. Now, I don’t mind playing online but I shouldn’t be forced to especially when all I want to do is build up a few cheap coins. This put me off Ultimate Team altogether and I haven’t returned to it since.
Poor Refereeing
Hand balls aren’t turned on online so I’ll let it slide that my opponents have several times got an advantage from accidentally hitting the ball illegally. But there’s no excuse for poor tackles. If you get tackled badly when you have the ball it’s generally a foul but if you’ve just passed the ball and get taken out the referee doesn’t care. The most amazing mistake here is when you round the goalkeeper and he takes you out, being nowhere near the ball. You would easily just tap it in the net but you get brought down and for some reason the referee couldn’t care less. It happens to often and happened to me just last night.
Commentary
This is just a minor thing and on its own wouldn’t stop the game being great but it deserves to be on the list as it’s something that’s not right. During the second half of a match, when a goalkeeper makes a save, Alan Smith will say without fail that he’s played poorly and hopefully that great save has turned his game around. Sometime this is true, but he’ll say it whether it’s 0-0 or 6-0 and whether the keeper is playing well or not. A minor thing, yes.
On Pro Clubs there’s a little more. Nearly every game is apparently a friendly match so it doesn’t matter if you lose or not, or so the commentators seem to think. When it’s not a “friendly” even in League 1 Martin Tyler will say that the team is looking for promotion. It’s more comical than anything but it’s just sloppy from EA.
Pro Skin Colour
Another minor one but it annoys me. The skin colour of your Be A Pro if he has a game face attached becomes orange. It ruins the overall feeling of realism when a guy’s running around looking like a sunburnt lobster. I’ve heard people online say this is the sign that the Pro has been hacked, I’d just like to clarify here that it is definitely to do with a players game face and NOT due to a hacked player.
No XP
Challenges in Fifa 13 are supposed to be worth experience points. However if you complete the challenge, you get confirmation, you get a tick in the challenge box but you don’t see 1xp point of what you’ve just earned. It’s annoying not only because we’re entitled to that xp but because the challenges are such a good idea. It adds something different to try to replicate or alternate real life matches from the week but now most fans don’t both as they get nothing to show for their achievement. You’re supposed to get more xp for the higher difficulty level so it should be more worthwhile if you go for the tougher difficulties but quite frankly, what’s the point other than personal satisfaction? Personal satisfaction won’t help you level up.
Leaving Before 5 Minutes
Everybody who plays Fifa online knows that if you score in the first five minutes then your opponent can leave without getting the loss. This means that most games start with people just passing the ball around and messing about waiting for the clock to tick past five minutes. It’s utterly pointless to be honest and ruins the matches if everybody has to watch the clock until the sixth minute. Why should you be punished for scoring early on and have to find/set-up a whole new game?
Lag
When Fifa 13 lags, it lags really badly. However I must admit that this seems to have picked up as of late. It’s not always perfect but nine games out of ten seem to run smoothly and I just wanted to add the point here as it was pretty bad on release.
Online Pass Missing
I probably wouldn’t have added this if it didn’t happen to a friend of mine last week, a couple of weeks after it happened to myself. It’s rare but when you turn Fifa 13 on you can be hit with a message that your perfectly valid online pass is no longer valid. A few console restarts should fix this but we really shouldn’t have to mess about just to get the game to start up.
Game Load Up Speed
On games like Call of Duty if you want to play a game you can be on the field in just a few minutes. With Fifa you have the checking trophies, confirm autosave, load online pass, press start, choose language and the opening animations. Most games have similar at start-up but Fifa just feels so slow and can take several minutes just to get to the main menu and that comes after the arena where it seems to load/save for no reason. Not many games ask you to choose a language every single time you turn it on these days and it’s just another one of them little things that is just unnecessary.
First Touch Control
One of the new features talked about leading up to the release of Fifa 13 was the new first touch control. However, it seems unless you’re Messi or Ronaldo then even players rated in the 90’s tend to lose the ball more often than not with a very heavy first touch.
Physics System
Fifa 12 introduced a new physics system which saw players reacting to multiple hits rather than the generic animation of simply hitting the ground. This has backfired however as players trip over each other and run into each other falling over from the simplest of touches and it ruins the overall flow of the game. This same issue has been passed down to Fifa 13.
AI
The AI is still rather idiotic despite us being told it’s been tightened up this year. Your team mates drift offside, the goalkeeper makes rash decisions which sometimes lead to penalties outside of your control and players just don’t make runs like their real life counterparts do. You also try to do an innocent tackle and get booked because the player decides to do a completely unnecessary and over-the-top tackle rather than simply poking the ball away like you intended.
Closing
Is it because EA are lazy? Is it because they only want our money as a lot of fans have suggested? More than likely they’re just very busy people but there may be an element of rushing the game, especially since it comes out every year and the last few years it’s been released earlier than 12 months. Most likely they’re trying to coincide with the start of the new season.
Fifa 13 is a good game when you can get in a match that just works but it shouldn’t be this way. It could be so much better if not for some very sloppy mistakes in this year’s release. If they need more time to put the game together then they should put their ego aside for the next release and take an extra six months or so. Some game modes are just unplayable making it frustrating for players and EA should be rather embarrassed. The fact they haven’t released much in the way of patches to fix any of these issues is also unacceptable. Neither have they responded to any problems on the forum despite the phone support saying to post issues there as they’re regularly monitored.
We hope Fifa 14 tightens up on these mistakes as well as several not included here. The EA forum is full of people saying they’ll refuse to buy the next game due to EA’s negligence but we’ll just have to wait and see. We shouldn’t still be complaining about the basics of a game 7 months after its release date. Fifa 14 will be released September 2013.
