FIFA 18 and 19 suffered from youth players who enforced “promote me to the first team or else I’ll terminate my contract” type ultimatums that frequently led to their release, especially if you were managing a decent side. Keeping your star players happy is usually pretty easy in FIFA as wages and playing time will normally get it done, but it’s the youth and fringe players that hopefully we’ll have to pay special attention to. Taking into account factors such as playing time, wages and performance, player morale could have a huge impact on how you manage your squad. Piggybacking off the new player conversations is a brand-new player-morale system to counterbalance the interaction you have with your squad through the text-message interface. There are a lot of other career mode features that should impact this, and vice-versa, so it remains to be seen how effective this RPG-like system will be at breathing life into things. Hopefully you all will be able to avoid Antonio Conte and Diego Costa-like conversations. Player conversations are also a new feature, and through a text messaging user interface you will be able to text with players and communicate throughout the season. Nothing will upset career mode players more than if their star players all start handing in transfer requests despite sound weekly wages, quality results, and top-flight competition domestically and in the Champions/Europa League. So it’s important that this mode not only offers a huge variety of player emotions but also has sound logic. PES 2013 had a similar feature and became repetitive very quickly. they should breathe life into what’s been a pretty stale player-management system.ĮA has said, “this mode generates, and builds a variation of ever-changing stories” and that’s key to this all. With unique personalities tied to each player - hopefully they vary according to a player’s position on the squad (star player, regular first-team player, fringe starter, etc. This year, important matches will trigger a press conference before and after the match where you can discuss the team’s objectives with your responses having a direct impact on the performance of the match. Fast forward to FIFA 20 and press conferences seem to have undergone a huge face lift, not only cosmetically, but functionally as well by having a measurable impact on your squad.
They would quickly become repetitive and many FIFA career mode players, including myself, skipped over them completely by deleting the e-mail as if it were spam. Coming through as emails with limited options (motivate team/player, unnerve opposing manager/player), these press conferences had little effect on your team, let alone the outcome of a match. Press conferences have been a staple of FIFA for quite some time now.
The moment many of us have been not so patiently waiting for has arrived, career mode updates in FIFA 20! It’s time to dissect EA’s improvements to see if they meet our (my) expectations.