Hey everybody, welcome back to FUT FM!

FIFA 19’s been out for quite some time now, so this week we wanted to take a look at how the 4231 formation and timed finishing have been affecting the game.

 

 

4 2 3 1 - Is It Too Useful?

 

Undoubtedly, the 4231 is the best all round formation in FIFA 19 for high SR players.

 

I can’t speak for what life is like in the lower divisions of online play, but the top few are dominated by 4231 and its stability.

 

The thing is, attacking is almost always more fun than defending in a sports game. Defending well in FIFA isn’t easy and requires a lot of physical and mental skill. With the 4231 though, you get to alleviate a lot of the defensive pressure you feel because you have 2 CDMs and multiple options for a counter attack. It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure where to place your midfielders to intercept a pass, or if you’re not the best tackler. As long as your custom tactics and instructions are decent, the 4231 helps you out quite a bit.

 

It’s also really easy to put 8 - 10 men behind the ball with the 4231, and a lot of FIFA 19 YouTubers and Twitch streamers have advocated this style of play. Plus, if you play a little defensively and your opponent gets very aggressive offensively, they can overcommit and push your players back even if you’re not set to drop back.

 

Now that’s all fine and dandy, but the 4231 in real life is very limited in attack and often transitions into a 433 variant. This is not the case in FIFA.

 

Due to passing being very assisted, you can efficiently counter attack and score in just 2 - 3 passes when you drop back with the 4231. It makes the formation lethal in attack and extremely dangerous to play against, even if you don’t realize it.

 

Again, I’m not sure what life is like in lower divisions, but a lot of players in D 3 - 1 seem to love this style of play.

 

Both Valerio and I are, quite frankly, tired of this. In real life, dropping back and playing defensively is actually a risky tactic because smaller teams usually do it to bigger teams in the hopes of rescuing a point.

 

But in FIFA, you’re almost always bound to get a few goal scoring chances if you play like this.

 

So is the 4231 to blame? Is it the content creators and pros who are willing to push this agenda? Is it the average player because they don’t want to think for themselves?

 

Well, I wouldn’t “blame” any one group per se. But, I think the solution to this problem isn’t to magically “nerf” the 4231 or to make AI worse at operating as a defensive unit.

 

I think the solution to this problem is to develop more intelligent attacking AI.

 

FIFA 19 attackers tend to run in a straight. or sometimes diagonal line. In PES, as we’ve shown and talked about before, an attacker can change their run on a dime and is constantly looking to insert themselves into space. It feels like FIFA attackers have the objective of getting in the box or around it, but then they don’t know what to do or how to rotate. You can trigger long and short runs but those mechanics produce static movement as well.

 

I think you run the risk of making the game feel too automated if the attacking AI is way more intelligent than a human player. But I also think that FIFA requires a lot more attacking variety if it wants to represent football by creating a dynamic gameplay flow.

 

So What’s The Deal With Timed Finishing?

 

I still enjoy the actual mechanic of timing your shot. As an avid game player, I find it to be a satisfying feeling and it compels to take better shots.

 

Valerio disagrees and thinks it adds an unnecessary step to gameplay (more on that in a sec).

 

However, we both believe that green timed shots are too powerful and accurate. The mechanic feels like a get out of jail free card at times, allowing you to score on impossible turns and angles with scary consistency.

 

Personally, I would like to see timed finishing return in FIFA 20, but I would love to see green timed shots be more realistic. I know a FIFA match has to be “the highlight reel,” of real footie, but it’s too easy to score goals that would be considered the best of all time on a regular basis.

 

Now here’s something interesting Valerio brought up on this episode…

 

When we spoke with the devs at the capture event, they explained how timed finishing was created as something for hardcore players in order to create more of a skill gap. However, hardcore players mastered timed finishing fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things. Meanwhile, the more “casual” players find it harder to score.

 

So does timed finishing work as intended?

 

From first hand experience and keeping tabs on the online community, yes and no.

 

Yes because it’s much harder for a casual player to score on a T100 player. No because it’s made no impact at higher skill levels anyway, it might as well not even “be a thing.”

 

Of course, the online community on Reddit, EA forums, Discord servers, etc. is huge… but it’s still a tiny portion of the overall FIFA player base. Xbox achievements suggest through their sampling that only 37% of players have ever scored a green timed shot.

 

We’d love to learn how timed finishing has affected the game from a data driven POV and we’ll be sure to ask the devs the next time we can interview them on the show.

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