The StunLock

It seems likely that Rematch‘s success, in part, is down to its ability to draw up some of the feelings that soccer (we’ll be calling it football from now on) gives its players. The fact that Rematch is strictly a football game without cars was always going to be working in favor of the it since the genre of football games is, and has almost always been, one of vacancy: what we lack is a true FIFA competitor. And no, we won’t be referring to it as FC2025 today (or ever)

Rematch, in particular, has the genetic makeup of a football game, but really isn’t trying to invoke anything even close to a football simulator. At most, Rematch’s shooting mechanics and macro-tactics somewhat match Football realism, but the similarities begin and end with whether or not you pass back to your keeper to retain possession. It’s great, but not the FIFA Competitor the world has so badly desired for the last decade.

When envisioning the perfect game to rival FIFA (or FC20, as it’s called these days), a few main ingredients definitely need to be there.

• First and foremost, the game needs to be fun.
• The game needs to aim for realism, but only insofar as it doesn’t impede player agency.
• The game needs to allow the player to control a full team. Preferably, the team should be fully licensed, up to date, and accurately rated. If not licensed, the game should do a lot of work to ensure there is a fully simulated world of leagues, players, economies, and tournaments to ensure immersion and replayability.
• It should have its own Ultimate Team mode that is free to access and non-predatory.
• It should have a single-player career mode for both manager and player careers that are given equal or more development time to the Ultimate Team mode.
• It should be a bi-annually released game at most. Annual releases make poor games.

Let’s go over these points in more detail, one by one.

The game needs to be fun.

Somehow, this isn’t actually a given these days. FIFA, in particular, is a franchise that has completely lost the plot on what makes football enjoyable in the first place.

A FIFA competitor, specifically, would do very well to focus on key aspects of its gameplay: All gameplay, whether offensive, defensive, or goalkeeper-centric, needs to feel responsive and the tactics employed need to actually matter. When a player makes a decision, they shouldn’t have to fight with the controls to make their gameplay work. In current iterations of FIFA, decision making feels more like a gamble that relies on shoddy physics and the RNG of your players not floating into the direction you ask them to move.

The gameplay should include AI that is defensively capable and offensively creative. The AI in FIFA, defensively, chooses to mark loosely 100% of the time. It chooses to take horrid positions in key moments of the game, and it chooses to not be aggressive in situations where a player would absolutely, 110% of the time, choose to be aggressive, either in positioning or prepping for a tackle. Offensively, the AI lacks improvisation. Runs into the box are often late, they are always straight forward instead of back or front post, and they refuse move simply to find open space for other players. A FIFA competitor would do well to make sure offensive AI was programmed to make human judgement in most situations and, occasionally, improvise to do something exceptionally intelligent off the ball. Just by having decent AI, a FIFA competitor could make itself stand out.

The game needs realism (but not too much.)

Yes, player momentum, strength battles, and complicated physics can increase immersion. In FIFA’s case, the realism breaks the immersion and, counter-intuitively, makes the game less realistic at the tail end of things. FIFA has stacked so many variables into its engine that when players move, tackle, dribble, pass, or otherwise play football, they look further from actual footballers than they did in FIFA games from a decade ago or older.

A FIFA competitor would be wise to keep the realistic aspects of the game to AI decision making, ball flight trajectory and deflection, offensive tools available to the player (back-heeling the ball across the field with no momentum shouldn’t be a thing.), and goalkeeper capabilities.

As soon as the realism in a FIFA competitor begins to hamper one’s ability to make reliable decisions and understand the outcome, it needs to scrap the idea altogether or trim it down.

A FIFA competitor must allow full-team control.

Rematch’s gameplay is very, very clever and well designed. But it will never be able to live up to the perfection that is 11-a-side, full-field football between two teams on a regulation sized pitch. The level of complexity in Football increases the more players you add to the pitch, up to 11. Add any more and the game slowly becomes Rugby. Take any away and the game slowly becomes tightly-knit Futsal. Both great games, but neither of them proper Football.

If a player wants to enjoy the thrill of recruiting slow, technically gifted left-backs who can cross well, they will need to play 11-a-side. If they want to have to choose between a speedster to get in behind the lines or a traditional number 9 to hold-up play, they will need to play 11-a-side. Any other version of Football, more or less, begins to resemble an agile dribbler’s game, nothing more.

This is why a FIFA competitor should succeed in ensuring the whole game, even if it includes one-character-control modes, is built around controlling a full 11-a-side team.

In the same way, there needs to be leagues that match the relegation / promotion rules of its country, tournaments like the world-wide Champion’s League variations, and, although less important, international play. This is important for both immersion and replayability An economy, too, to properly simulator the financial aspect of low-league and Premiere Football, would be required.

Ultimate Team / Career Mode

Microtransaction city: Ultimate Team is a lot of fun and terribly addicting. Thus, it rakes in more money than actual sales of FIFA itself every year. A FIFA competitor would be wise to include its own version of Ultimate Team in their game, but in a reworked state such that player’s ownership of even a mid-tier Premier League player would be worth bragging about, while also not based on monetized pack-luck.

Opening packs is fun, but being an addict isn’t. This is a difficult problem to solve, but being a strong FIFA competitor wasn’t ever going to be easy. The easiest approach to this would be to find a balance between in-game rewards and microtransaction benefits that diminish after a reasonable amount of cash is spent.

As for Career Mode, the Footballing enthusiast should already enjoy the base gameplay before trying out Career Mode. In this way, everything in Career Mode should work to supplement the base gameplay with complicated and rewarding economies, player training, youth systems, interviews, and co-worker management (CEO conundrums, coaching disagreements, et cetera.

For this to work, an equal amount of time needs to be given to Career Mode individually as is given to Ultimate Team or online “be the player” modes collectively.

A FIFA competitor should be released bi-annually at most.

There is a hard-to-define amalgamation of sub-par gaming that is creatrf through a large number of key facets to a developer’s vision. These aspects result in poor games. Here are a few are in no particular order at all;

• They spend increasing amounts of development time trying to make the characters in their game as broadly inclusive as possible.
• Their games begin to include purposefully addictive monetization methods other than the purchase of the game itself.
• The development studio becomes publicly traded or becomes privately owned by multiple conglomerates or individuals who all have competing visions for the future of the studio.
• The developers begins releasing at least one game per year.

Releasing one game per year restricts develop vision to a miniature cornucopia filled with half-ideas and pragmatic concessions. These half-ideas, which must be so limited because of their time constraints, result in annual games that work to add to the confines of the previous games without expanding their limitations.

If you think FromSoftware is an example of annual releases succeeding, The StunLock invites you to take a look at Shadow of the Erdtree or Nightreign and then reconsider that defense. The practice is built purely to monetize a studio to the maximum while sacrificing the width of their products to a degree that is simply not worth the money gained for anyone who wants to be known for quality work.

A wise FIFA competitor would release their games sparingly, giving more time to patch their current title, or instead use a model like Riot’s League of Legends to continually update their one title over the course of decades while monetizing through the sale of non-cringe cosmetics (RS3?), commentary packs, ultimate team purchases, or through a (relatively cheap) subscription model for online play.

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Rematch is going to enjoy a good deal of success for at least the next six months, and although it’s nice to see the philosophy of Skate (2007) and modular gameplay become introduced to Football, the world is still holding out in hopes of a FIFA competitor that’s worth playing.

Hopefully, said game will have some, if not all, of the attributes mentioned above.