6 other RPG mechanics FIFA 18 can add to make me play it

I don’t play any football games. I don’t like football (I’ve never made a concerted effort to, if I’m honest). I do not know how to play it myself or understand the rules, or watch football matches. I do, however, play RPGs, even though everything I just said about football also applies to melee combat, magic, and complicated medieval underwear. I’ve only been to a past times type fayre once when I was a child – and even then I just ate ye olde veggie burger, and listened dutifully to my father describing, at some length, how Welsh archers were the best archers, rather than engaging with the people dressed up and doing a funny voice for my education and entertainment.

Therefore, logically speaking, there must be a way to get someone like me to be interested in playing games about football. Introducing The Journey to FIFA was a good start, because I like to be the master of my character’s destiny, but I think there are a whole slew of RPG elements that can be added to football games that will improve the games without in any way alienating their core player base, at all, zero per cent.

A proper class system

Like squad roles, not like feudalism. My understanding of football is that there are different roles you can choose: goalkeeper, defense, midfield, and attack. These can transfer well to traditional RPG roles, defense being, uh, defense, midfielders the general utility/control classes, and attackers the DPS. Goalkeepers I think of as tanks, not least because from an outside perspective they have a highly specialised role that very few people want to do, and they get disproportionately blamed if the team loses.

Apparently in The Journey you can pick a position, but limited to one of the four DPS builds. To truly create an immersive experience you should be able to choose what Alex Hunter (or whoever, it can be anyone) plays much more specifically, possibly through some training sequence on his first day where the coach is like ‘Okay, let’s see where your skills are!’ and then at the end tells you which position you should play, and then you ignore him and choose a different one like at the start of Skyrim where Emperor Uriel Picard tells you what star sign you are.

More detailed leveling and skill trees

Standard with classes is leveling up and investing in a skill tree via experience points. This is also in The Journey in a loose form, but the special moves need to be way more creative than they are, because they’re mostly based around kicking and in my opinion this doesn’t add anything substantial to the premise of football. I would prefer higher tier abilities like hyping the crowd for a full team performance buff, or a really bad foul that the ref pretends he didn’t see. To maintain balanced play these will use up loads of stamina so you can only proper f*** up someone’s metatarsal once per game, on average (unless you grind training sessions and friendlies to level well ahead of the stage you’re at and get way OP, but then the game is less fun anyway).

A useble inventory

If you use up all your stamina you can drink some Lucozade to get some back, or something. There could be sidequests you can choose to do where if you do a promotional photoshoot for Lucozade you get more bottles in your inventory. Half time oranges could replenish health (although I don’t know how much mileage there is in getting sponsorship deals from Big Fruit, because I’m not sure that’s a thing). Tom tells me that New Star Soccer kind of did this, which confirms to me that it works in context and therefore should be in FIFA 18.

Complex romance options that develop over time

I don’t know why this isn’t already in the games, to be honest, because there seems to be a small satellite economy based around footballers’ private lives, Posh and Becks being the peak example of this (though admittedly the trend reached its cultural zenith in the early noughties, when there was actually an actual TV drama called Footballer’s Wives). The opportunities for taught, torrid romance in football are many and varied: super fans, relatives of your manager, players on your own team, players on opposing teams.

These all have potential for long, drawn out subplots that evolve over the course of both the season and off-season, and could also hilariously spill over into actual matches, in the same way that BioWare love interests get context-specific lines that other characters don’t. If you broke up with a teammate they could get all arsey and not pass to you and stuff. This is a massive trick being missed, because one of the main reasons RPGs are successful is their function as overly complex dating sims. Imagine that with, like, football (though hopefully less accusations of sexual assault).

Option for top down/turn based combat

The option for strategic battle adds a new layer to combat and allows micromanagement of your team position for every single second of every single minute of action. Likewise turn based combat will develop the matches to be more strategic, with each player rolling an initiative score beforehand to determine the order of movement. Everyone would have to wait their turn. I do not anticipate this would disrupt the flow of a game of football.

Ability to craft own football boots

Using different materials and fabrics either bought, given as rewards for completing specific matches, or discovered in the environment (possibly the sofas in the VIP area of a club will provide a kind of plush velour finish, and so on), FIFA 18 should implement a crafting system for players to make their own armour, or ‘boots’, as I believe they’re known. Using combinations of different fabrics will not only give different ability buffs, but also make your boots different attractive colours! This is important as in many cases, on wide shots, I find the colour of boots a key factor when telling players apart.