Is FIFA 15 Dead on PC?

Here on Buttonsmashers Blog I’m what you may considered to be the expert on sports titles. Now do not take this to mean that I’m actually good at all sports games, heck I’m average at best at the ones I do play the most. What I am however is one that plays most sports games and I happen to understand most of the sports that the games are based on. As such it is no wonder that I’ve been playing FIFA 15 since launch.

At first I started with my brother’s copy and built a very formidable Italian league team, then after getting my own copy of the game I set out to rebuild my French team that I used in FIFA 14. So far I’ve come pretty close to the team I had before and I’ve managed to build a few other great teams, but something is just not right with my experience with this year’s version of FIFA and I’m not sure if it’s EA Sports’ fault completely.

The way I play my sports games they require a few simple things to make them be worth my time in the long run. Yes I’ll spend 6 months playing just because my favorite team and their new kits and stuff are in there, and yes I’ll enjoy the single player experience as long as there is a mode that is engaging enough to keep my attention, but sometimes that alone is not enough. This year’s FIFA on PC is lacking in a few things, and that bothers me a lot. The version of the game on PC has the modes and mechanics of the PS4 and Xbox One versions, but that does not guarantee a successful experience as I’ve come to realize. The game for one is lacking in any in game way to save replays. This is a feature that has always been in FIFA games and it’s sad to see it gone. I do understand however why this is though. The reason being that the current gen consoles have built in DVRs and so they can capture replays anytime the player so desires. On the PC this is also possible with newer AMD and Nvidia Graphics cards, but the results are a bit spotty when compared to the consoles. For example I use an AMD GPU and so my card uses Raptr’s DVR software to capture my replays. This is sometimes ok, but due to updates for Raptr and EA somehow having some weird miss match going on, the game sometimes crashes when Raptr is on. So who is to blame for this issue? I wanna say Raptr, but this issue doesn’t happen with my other games so It’s probably 95% EA’s fault.

 FIFA 15 also has a lack of an online presence

Ok so you’re probably in shock right now, saying things like; “damn Q it’s just the replays. At least you get a working version of the game”, and that’s true I do, but my version lacks a bit more than replays. Next on my list of issues is the way the game looks and runs. I remember having the demo before release and running it on an older GPU and it ran pretty good with a capture software enabled/disabled. I got about 30 fps while recording and smooth 60 fps when not. The graphics were also smoother than the final product. There were also less jagged edges in demo, but in the final product the game has so many more jagged edges. This was actually quite a shock to me because as I mentioned before I first played the demo on an older GPU. So to have my newer faster card perform so poorly with the game was not a very welcomed experience.

FIFA 15 also suffers from a lack of an online presence in the FUT mode, which is considered to be the most popular mode in the game, this is strange. I’ve only managed to play about 3-4 online matches, split between my brother’s and my copy of the game and this is not for a lack of trying. As for why there is such an absence in the online FUT arena, I cannot say. It could be a technical issue because the EA servers for the companion app on my phone are almost always down, and the game also suffers from some glitches when playing cup tournaments in FUT, or there could just be less people buying and playing the PC version of the game than the year before. What I can say however is that EA needs to address all these issues with the game. Each and every one of them. If they have to drop the price of the title on PC to get more people to buy it, do that. Maybe an ad or two can also help. They also need to fix the bugs associated with game capture and somehow get the graphics and fluidity as good as they had it in the demo.

Other than those grips I had, there are not really much other issues that I had with the game.

if you’d like to hear more about my thoughts about this topic, then I suggest you listen to the Buttonsmashers podcast.