EA SPORTS FC™ 26 | The Pitch Notes - Gameplay Responsiveness Update

FC Feedback Report

Hey everyone, as part of the new FC Feedback Hub we’ll be keeping you close to our development process with detailed reports, making sure you know what feedback we’re working on.

For our first update, we wanted to focus on something we know is important to you: Gameplay Responsiveness.

We’ve heard your feedback, and our teams have been working on making EA SPORTS FC 26 our most responsive title yet. 

In this article, we’ll cover what we’re doing to address your feedback around online responsiveness, and the new additions to FC 26 intended to improve overall gameplay performance.

Let’s dive in.

Understanding Delay

Delay refers to the link between a player's action, like pressing a button or moving a stick, and the corresponding response in the game. 

Delay can stem from various sources, including online connection quality issues, elevated ping due to distance from an FC Game Data Center, complexities in the input processing and animation systems, or even delays in displays.

We know that delay disrupts the seamless connection between the player and the game, making the experience feel unresponsive and frustrating. And let’s face it, when a game doesn’t feel responsive, it’s simply not fun. 

Addressing your concerns about delay has been a top priority for us as we head into EA SPORTS FC 26 launch. 

What We’ve Been Testing

Our Gameplay Responsiveness testing goes back to 2019, where we ran a number of in-depth tests on infrastructure and player connections, and created tools to help us better understand what you were experiencing. 

Heading into FC 26, we set our focus on testing directly with FC Design Council members, FC Pro Players, members of our community, and members of our internal teams.

• For example, members of our development team met directly with FC players in Europe to test gameplay responsiveness on their own personal setups. We tested at their houses and team headquarters in Spain and the UK for extensive online modes research in FC 25. You can see what this looked like below.

• We’ve also been testing responsiveness with members of our Design Council remotely, collecting connection quality data from players all around the world.
• And while all of this has been happening, we’ve been running regular tests with a dedicated internal team of core players across our QV and development teams to feedback on responsiveness problems.

What We Learned

FC players are really good at detecting even the smallest delay issues. Delays of even 1 frame can result in a noticeably unresponsive experience.

When diving into the details, we’ve noticed players experience delay in significantly different ways.

What you refer to as delay can be experienced in both Offline and Online play, in most cases.

When playing with good connection quality, or in offline play, these are the main reasons that can create a sense of gameplay unresponsiveness:

• Animation Selection
  • Variability to create authenticity
  • Contexts with limited coverage
  • Animation system bugs
• Time between button press and when the simulation processes the input.

In poor connection quality conditions, there are many more variables that could create unresponsive Gameplay. The most common ones include:

Ethernet vs WiFi

• Currently more than half of FC players play online through WiFi.
• WiFi often introduces serious inconsistencies in connection quality, such as Jitter and Packet loss, which could result in delayed actions in Gameplay.
• Even WiFi with strong signal strength and high quality signal can create inconsistencies. We recommend always using an ethernet cable when possible for a generally much smoother connection.

High Ping

• Ping measures the time it takes for game data to travel between your console or PC to the EA SPORTS FC™ Game Data Center and back. Lower ping usually means faster data transfer and a more responsive gameplay experience.
• Your ping can vary based on your internet provider and your physical location, and it is not based strictly on your physical distance from an FC Game Data Center.
• A close physical distance to our FC Game Data Centers cannot guarantee a low ping experience by default, because factors such as how your internet service provider physically routes traffic can impact your ping.

We are always monitoring the performance of our FC Game Data Centers. Working with providers, ISPs and our internal teams to provide the best experience we can to our players around the world.

Internet Bandwidth

• With a low bandwidth internet connection, other activities using the same network can negatively influence game performance. From automatic video uploads from a console to streaming content from other devices, there are many factors that could introduce delay.

To learn more about your Connection Quality and how it may be influencing your gameplay experience when playing online in EA SPORTS FC, you can check out our Connection Quality Report.

• The Connection Quality Report is a tool intended to help you better understand the quality of your connection using data from applicable EA SPORTS FC online matches that you’ve played.

How your display FC can also massively impact overall game responsiveness.

TV or Monitor Settings

• A TV outside of Game Mode can introduce anywhere from 20 to over 100ms of delay to the gameplay experience, making it feel like you’re playing in a poor connection environment.
• We always recommend using Game Mode if available on your TV, or use a gaming monitor.
• High quality cables can also help reduce how long it takes visual signal to be processed, and third party devices like external capture cards can also add noticeable delay.
• In broad terms, the speed at which your screen can display the game is critical to the feeling of responsiveness or unresponsiveness. If your display has a noticeable delay or can’t maintain a consistent response time, you may feel a delay no matter what your  other conditions are.

Different Player Motivations

Another important learning is that FC players enjoy both a more responsive and consistent experience, but also a more tactical, composed and authentic experience. We’ve tried to balance a single gameplay experience for both types of motivations in the past, but based on your feedback we’ve decided to tailor the experience separately.   

In FC 26, we are creating two types of Gameplay, Competitive and Authentic.

• Competitive Gameplay is tuned for consistent responsiveness, mainly focused on online modes like Ultimate Team and Clubs.
• Authentic Gameplay is tuned for higher realism and true-to-life match tempo/speed in offline modes, like Career Mode.

For both gameplay types, and with your feedback in mind, we’re improving our Fundamentals with the objective to make them more responsive and consistent in FC 26.

What’s New For FC 26 Responsiveness

As you may have noticed in the FC 26 reveal trailer, we’ve focused on new gameplay fundamentals to improve responsiveness at all levels. We wanted to make sure we directly addressed your feedback and the things we’ve learned through testing to deliver the most impactful changes.

Animation variability meant to create authenticity

• FC strives to visually reflect the real world game, and to make this possible our Gameplay engine was designed to use realistic animations. 
  • Realistic motion capture/volumetric animations are all unique by nature. In FC, many factors like ball distance from the player, movement input angle, and player speed will dictate what animation is chosen and how it plays in the game. This combination of factors ensure Gameplay variety, depth and authenticity. 
• In summary, in our gameplay engine, there is variety, and no play is the same. This is to create a seamless, and authentic experience.
• We are continuing to work on finding the right balance between gameplay animation depth and variety, and consistent expected behaviors, that are always responsive to player input.
• More details on how we are addressing these problems will be part of the Gameplay Pitch Notes, for example:
  • Animation transitions and branching have been reevaluated and re-tuned across most areas of gameplay to improve consistency and responsiveness. 

Increased Animation Coverage

• Animations play an important role for a football game to be authentic. Every year we add new animations to refresh the experience, create variety, and to fill any coverage gaps.
• Some contexts may have had limited animation coverage in the past. This caused our system to use a longer animation or delay starting an animation  while attempting to position the player in a way that would accommodate the best possible animation.   We’ve focused on improving the coverage for scenarios where it's reasonable to expect a responsive action.
• To clarify, we have strict game performance checks that ensure the game runs smoothly regardless of the amount of animations that exist in the database.
• This year we have added hundreds of new animations meant to enable players to perform actions faster than ever. 

Addressed Animation System Bugs

In some cases, the systems that decide what animations should play can experience bugs. These are arguably the most complicated systems in a Gameplay engine, since they need to solve every combination of player requests with the available animations, while keeping high quality visuals.  

For example:

• Expecting the player to get to the ball as early as possible to prevent the opponent getting to it first, but the player taking an inefficient or curved path to the ball that introduces just enough delay for the opponent to win the ball.
• Expecting an immediate right foot shot to prevent getting tackled, but the player decides to use their left foot instead, delaying the shot for a couple of frames. 

With a focus on Fundamentals, this year we’ve fixed dozens of problems related to the Animation System and its responsiveness.

Time between button press and when our simulation processes the input

We looked closely at every stage of the input processing system and identified a few opportunities to improve our input latency.  

We were able to improve input latency by one frame in some cases of first time passes and shot requests. Combined with the animation improvements mentioned above, these scenarios are more likely to play out as first time passes or shots in FC 26, as opposed to taking a touch that feels unresponsive. 

We’ve improved our input systems with the aim of ensuring that all inputs are processed immediately.

We also improved the responsiveness of the on screen player switch indicator visual feedback, giving the user more immediate feedback on which player they are controlling and allowing for more responsive reactions to the play.

We’ll share more about these updates in more detail in our upcoming FC 26 Gameplay Deep Dive, which will be live on July 22. Stay tuned!

What’s Next

In the lead up to FC 26 launch, we’re continuing to meet with members of our Design Council to help us find additional cases related to gameplay responsiveness.

This will remain a priority for our teams to make FC feel more responsive than ever, based on your feedback.

Be sure to keep an eye out for more details on FC 26 across our upcoming Deep Dives.

Community Feedback

Your feedback is extremely helpful for our teams as we continue to prioritize making FC feel responsive and rewarding overall. We want to hear from you.

As part of FC Feedback, we’ve created a new discussion thread in our game-feedback channel in our official EA SPORTS FC Discord server. Our team will be monitoring this discussion, and will be passing along relevant feedback directly to our Dev teams to review. Join the discussion now.

You can also continue providing feedback through our FC Player Feedback Portal in a more structured format to send your feedback directly to our Devs. Learn more here.

Pre-order EA SPORTS FC™ 26 now for PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2.

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