Plans for FIFA 22. (Patreon)

DISCLAIMER: I highly recommend you read this on Google Docs instead of Patreon. It's faster, more optimized, and most importantly, there is a Table of Contents, so you can easily get to the parts you want to read (because it's a very long document). Link here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQy89gRIxbF5PHeh5tn7eC414gArbm0flSTF8Uy1IJqLeCuyE_uwFiwUz4xTumZ8P_ivqt1wRQNLB4z/pub

Hey guys,

This is a HUGE patreon post. The biggest of the year. Here I will unveil my (and the legendary gnklein92's) incredibly detailed plans for the FIFA 22 cycle.

The post is ~35,000 words long, but don’t be scared, I will summarize the main points at the top. Although, I do recommend you at least skim through some of the rest of it, as it’s very interesting. Please use the links in the first page of the document to easily get to certain sections that may interest you, if you don’t want to read everything!

And I know the post took a while, but it’s so worth it. It helped me organize my thoughts into proper writing, helped me research so many things and discover new features for the mod, bugs to fix, improvements to make, etc. I also reached out to some people and got the ball rolling for many things I had forgotten about! I probably gained more modding knowledge in the past 2 weeks than the 6 months before that. And don’t worry, work on the mod is well underway. I am a few days away from releasing a very basic lite version, and hopefully, there will be an alpha of the full mod this week too!

Before we get into it - if you are still unsure about buying FIFA 22 at all, or what platform to buy it on, then watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66RGQU_ZfJs

So here are the basics:

Will you be modding FIFA 22? If so, will there be a FIFA 22 Realism Mod?

Yes & Yes!

When will the first FIFA 22 Realism Mod be released?

My base estimate for the first complete Realism Mod is ~1 month from now, although that may be slightly optimistic. Of course, no promises. There may be unexpected hurdles that delay it longer or discoveries that speed it up.

That may sound like a long time, but it’s really not. The FIFA 21 mod was released in March. And, alphas will be out within a week, then betas, so you will get a chance to play with the mod much sooner if you want to become a patron.

Plus, I will be releasing a “Realism Mod Lite” in the next few days, which includes licenses for unlicensed teams and a few other fixes! More info later on in this post!

Why is the first release so fast (compared to ~5 months in FIFA 21)?

The main reason is the FIFA Editor Tool. First of all, it's much more complete than it was a year ago. There are so many more features that have been added that will speed up modding, including lots of stuff relating to transferring stuff from FIFA 21. Whereas for FIFA 21, more basic stuff had to be added (search bar, ability to save projects, mods, etc.).

In FIFA 20, we were still using Frosty Editor, which was great but limited in some aspects, so it was much harder to export & format content from the FIFA 20 mod to the FIFA 21 one. We don’t have that issue this year.

I'll elaborate more on the quicker initial release later on.

Can I use FIFA 21 mods in FIFA 22?

No, you can’t use FIFA 21 mods in FIFA 22. You will have to wait for the FIFA 22 Realism Mod! That doesn’t mean we (mod creators) can’t transfer actual mod content over though.

What about the mod branding? What's the logo? Who's the cover star?

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about this recently! Well, here you go:

Sick, right? Huge shoutout to Rosevelt for designing another masterpiece! I think Mancini is a great pick after his recent success, plus he has the "look" for the cover star, and he works with the color scheme really well.

How will the FIFA 22 Realism Mod be different from the FIFA 21 one?

I recommend you read the whole post to find out in more detail, but we made the changes based on four pillars.

• Additional & Improved content.
• Simpler and easier to use.
• More stability. (fewer bugs)
• Faster releases.

But every mod, even addons, has an incredible amount of changes planned, it’s hard to express. If you don’t want to read the whole post, open the Google Doc (if that’s not already where you are reading this), and go to a specific section in the Table of Contents.

But a huge new feature is a new assignment system, completely replacing Lua scripts. It automatically applies when using mods, so there is no external effort required. It also means we can add a lot more features, like being able to start a career with a real manager!

Will the mod be free?

The full Realism Mod (not the lite version) will follow the same release plan as the FIFA 20 and 21 mod. Once (and only once) the mod is ready, it will be released, but $2+ patrons will get 7-day early access.

What about the 2006/2007 Mod?

Long story short, it didn’t happen in FIFA 21, but I think there's a decent chance of it happening in FIFA 22 (no promises). I’ll talk about it later in this post in great detail.

Why did you never add the 2021/2022 kits and transfers to the FIFA 21 Realism Mod?

As you guys know, all versions (including the latest, 1.4) of the FIFA 21 Realism Mod don't have the new transfers or kits. I've received a lot of complaints and questions about this, so let me explain my reasoning:

The main reason is time, effort & resources. Let's start with transfers. To do one transfer, there are several values that have to be edited. TeamId in teamplayerlinks, then adding an entry in previousteams, and then editing default_teamsheets to change the teamsheet. This can easily take 5 minutes to do for 1 transfer, and there are thousands that would have to be done. And for loans, it's even more complicated. Plus, if you mess up one value, that means the game could crash and it can take hours to fix.

There is no software to automate this either, so I would have to do them manually or spend close to $1000 to have a program developed to help automate it, but that would take ~2 weeks, and it would still take a minute or two per transfer.

And for kits, each kit would have to be made. I'd want the mod to be as complete as possible, so I'd want new kits for all the top 5 league teams, and then maybe kits for another 20 big teams outside those leagues. That would cost about $4000. Do another few leagues kits? $6000, maybe. Few more? $8000. You get the idea. Then add kit numbers, balls, trophies, etc and that's another $1000. Plus we would have to edit hotspots and teamkit settings, which could easily take weeks. That's a lot of money that I'd prefer not to be spending as I want to save as much as possible for the FIFA 22 mod and tool.

But the main factor here is personal time & effort. I released 1.3 on August 20th, so only after that point would I be able to work on a 2021/2022 mod. That leaves almost exactly 1 month until the FIFA 22 release. I was unsure I would even have time to complete it before it was released, and if I did, it would have been like a maximum of a week before release. And the work would become nearly useless after FIFA 22 was released as most people would switch to the new game. It would also be incredibly boring, tedious and unenjoyable work for gnklein92 and I. I work on this mod a lot, and at that point, I hadn't had a proper break in a long time. gnklein92 also works on the mod tirelessly, and the last thing we needed was more work. So I spent less time modding and tried to enjoy the last few weeks of my summer a bit more (and playing FIFA with the mod too!). And even then, I still spent a lot of time on 1.4 and preparing the FIFA 22 mod, which I’ll now discuss in more detail.

To start, almost every decision we have made is based on your feedback. Over two months ago, we put out a survey (open to everyone) about the mod. It contained over 100 questions on many topics, from basic personal questions to thoughts about the FIFA 21 mod and what we should do for the FIFA 22 mod.

Over 2,000 people answered, with an average response time of over 12 minutes. This was truly humbling. The fact so many people of all different sorts (patrons, non-patrons, played with the mod for 3 days, played with the mod for 3 years) took that much time to answer a quiz was simply amazing. If you are one of those people, thank you, truly, from the bottom of our hearts.

What did we do well in the FIFA 21 mod?

The average "overall rating" of the FIFA 21 Realism Mod was 8.6. To put that in perspective, the same question got a 7.7 average rating in an October 2020 survey about the FIFA 20 mod. 96.6% of people gave the mod a rating of 7 or above. This honestly means a lot and shows that not only that you guys love the mod, but that the FIFA 21 mod was the best yet. I think that trend will continue!

A few interesting statistics are that the most common age group of mod users is 18-24, and over half are in Europe. Most mod users were introduced to the mod this year for the first time, which is great to hear!

FIFA Editor Tool for FIFA 22

We mod FIFA 21 with FIFA Editor Tool, and although I'm not the developer of the software, I still manage the project. Between research, testing, suggestions, managing socials, communication, etc, it takes quite some time, but it's totally worth it because it's the most advanced editor of a Frostbite game ever made.

We were able to view and extract textures from FIFA 22 about 4 hours after we could preload the game before it was even playable. Then, about 3 hours after we could play the game, we could make basic texture mods. From that point on, work had started on the mod. The EBX (hard to explain, basically the foundation for Frostbite, contains lots of info. Kind of like a complicated XML) format changed, but we figured it out enough to make a basic edit in about a week, then about a week later, we had full EBX writing. A few days later and we had mesh importation. So even with hurdles along the way, we figured out everything really quickly. Thanks to the amazing developer that I'm privileged to work with, I'm really confident that the tool will continue to innovate this year (more detail later in this post).

FIFA Editing Toolsuite 1.0.9 has been released, which includes FIFA 22 support, so that’s good news!

Realism Mod Lite

Since the main mod will take at least a month, I want to release a smaller, "lite" mod (of which many of you have asked for). It would include licenses for all the unlicensed teams, and fixes for the youth player skinny arms and missing numbers bugs. It will be free to everyone, with no early access, and called the Realism Mod Lite.

More Detailed Timelines for the main mod

Luckily, most of the content from the FIFA 21 mod should be able to be carried over to the FIFA 22 version. But, the tool will make this process so much faster. We have many more batch import/export options to transfer work from the current mod.

For instance, we were able to:

• Import all banners in ~5 minutes instead of almost 2 weeks.
• Import all flags in ~5 minutes instead of weeks.
• Import all logos in ~5 minutes instead of 4 days

I'll show more examples of this later in the post.

Details about specific mods.

Based on the 2000 survey answers, we created 4 pillars to base all changes on. They are

• Additional & Improved content. The vast majority of people seemed to love the FIFA 21 mod, so we shouldn't go crazy and fundamentally change every mod, but instead, continue in the same direction while making lots of necessary changes and improvements across the board.
• Simpler and easier to use. Some aspects of the mod are harder to understand and use, so try to make everything more straightforward and "plug and play" while leaving customization to more advanced users.
• More stability. Make sure everything is more stable. Fewer bugs, crashes, etc.
• Faster releases. Simple as that, optimize certain things to make the process of creating the mod faster.

Boots and Gloves Mod

I think the FIFA 21 Boots & Gloves mod was great; it was over 5x bigger than the FIFA 20 version, so significant improvement there. We added/edited more boots & gloves than ever before and introduced a new ankle tape type. Lastly, we also edited the minipics (the 2D preview pics you see in Edit Player before selecting them).

For the FIFA 22 Boots & Gloves mod, I have some huge changes planned. First of all, we will have full control over the project. Last year, I just used AdioszPL's project file, and every time he updated it, I just added some files to it and re-exported it. That led to some issues, like incorrect assignment when he switched IDs. This year, we will fully control the project file, import each boot manually and document each one, just like with faces. This has a few benefits like:

- We can select exactly which boots we want in the mod. We may pass on some that aren't used by many players or are a slightly different variation of another boot

- We can select exactly which boots are replaced. We won't replace boots that a lot of players wear, etc

- We can use more boots than just the ones AdioszPL makes. I am in contact with two other bootmakers to use some of their boots in the mod. This means more variety and custom requests!

- Because we know exactly which boot IDs we are editing, we can pay more attention to boots in general, I will make sure to keep the playerboots in the database updated more accurately and frequently, so all boots are displayed.

We will do the same with GK gloves.

In fact, we've even started on this as I've had my good friend ruben36 document all boots in the FIFA 21 mod!

Here are a few more things to look forward to:

• Better minipics. I will make sure they are all the same style and ideally blend in with the default FIFA ones. I may work with a talented 3D artist to create a template for them.
• More consistent boot selections. In FIFA 21, there was the issue (well, just kind of how it worked) where sometimes some boots would disappear. I’ve identified the cause of this (the playerboots table also gets stored in the assets file) and will hopefully implement a solution!
• Suggestions. There will be a boots and gloves channel in the discord server to suggest boots & gloves to make!

And lastly, the main goal of this year's Boots/Gloves mod is to replicate the real footwear players use. Last year we introduced a Lua script to assign the real boots players wear to your squad file/career, and those changes were applied in the official Realism Mod squad files. However, this was pretty limited and only had entries for ~1000 players, plus it also had many ID issues. This year, we will make sure it's frequently updated, have the correct IDs, and ideally expand it to include at least 5x more players, covering the top 5 leagues, plus a few smaller ones. This is made possible because I’ve partnered with the great guys at FootballBootsDB, who gave us their database so we can assign these boots with much more ease. We will also open up a channel in the discord server to let the community contribute! Also, we won’t use the Lua system anymore, opting for an approach that FIFA automatically applies for you (more details in the New Faces section).

The first release of the mod should include a healthy amount of boots, gloves, and accessories and a lot of assignments for players. But in each release, we will add more and more!

Camera Mod

Last year, 6ons1 made the camera mod with no interference from me. His work was fantastic, but there was only so much that could be edited. It seems like in FIFA 22, EA has improved the camera tracking slightly, which is good to see. However, it can still be improved, and not only the gameplay camera. This year, I will be working with 6ons1 as well as independently to make the camera mod even better. This includes better tracking, angles, and even some never-before-seen features, as I'm getting some tools developed to be able to edit new files. This will let us do some crazy stuff, like edit individual cameras, camera settings for different stadiums, and even edit gameplay cutscenes! Yep, that's right! Stuff like replays, pre-match, half time and post-match scenes, and much more! All of this will be based on community suggestions and feedback. This will drastically change the game, and I'm so excited about it!

These files use a FIFA-specific format, and I had a tool developed during FIFA 20 to convert them to be editable, but it had issues. However, there has been big progress on the tool and FIFA Editor Tool will pick up the project and complete it. We have tons more info so I’m 99.99% certain we will be able to figure it out, especially since FIFA included the plain XML versions in FIFA 22, so we have plenty of source files.

For the first release of the mod, it will probably only be a basic camera mod similar to last time. But I'm hoping sometime in early 2022 (maybe sooner!) we will be able to get all the new stuff added! This has the potential to make FIFA feel like a whole new game!

Face Updates Mod

The FIFA 21 Face Updates mod was 20% bigger than the FIFA 20 one, but I feel like that understates the improvement. I felt that I didn't give enough focus to face updates in the FIFA 20 and early FIFA 21 cycle, mainly because there weren't many face makers with the quality to make them, but that changed in March when I started working with the legendary Keparik for face updates. He's one of the best facemakers (if not the best) in the community, and he has made a ton of face updates in the past few months. Because of his work, and some efforts from a couple of other facemakers, we added 40 new face updates after 1.0, and improved 38 existing ones. Even though it's not like there were hundreds of more face updates in the 21 mod compared to 20, so many were improved.

We will continue on this path in the FIFA 22 Realism Mod, as I'm hoping to add 75+ new face updates throughout the cycle and improve another 75+ existing face updates. Overall, all facemakers are always getting better, so the quality will continue to go up. Soon, I will audit every face update that was in the FIFA 21 mod for the FIFA 22 mod by comparing them to the FIFA 22 face. This will help find face updates that should be removed and ones that need to be improved.

There will also be some FIFA 21 New Faces converted to FIFA 22 New Faces. Obviously, there are a lot of new faces in the new game, lots of which the mod added before. So we will compare the mod version vs the EA version, and sometimes the mod version will be better, so some of those will become face updates.

Work has already begun on the Face Updates mod in many ways; at the start of the FIFA 21 cycle, I created a spreadsheet for the New & Manager faces mod, to better document everything. For whatever reason, I never did that for Face Updates, but I've now done that, which gave me a lot more info on what needed to be done for the FIFA 21 Realism Mod. I've also kept having faces, including face updates made in recent weeks for the FIFA 22 Mod.

A few face updates that have been made recently are Coutinho, Danny Ings, Michail Antonio, Jorginho, Lorenzo Pellegrini, Fabiański, Fernandinho, Harry Kane, and plenty of others! Below is a preview.

Another way we are improving pretty much all face updates is by creating high-quality specmasks and normals. Specmasks make faces look better under certain lighting conditions, and normals add depth and detail to the face. However, for a decent portion of the face updates (and new faces, manager faces, etc.) in the FIFA 21 mod, they are pretty low quality. That's why we are generating new, high-quality ones, which will drastically increase the quality of all faces.

In terms of face update selection, I will be more broad and more face updates will be added to lower-rated players if they are popular enough! Maybe a popular EFL League One, or Indian Super League player could get one! We will also open an individual face update suggestion channel in the discord server for suggesting new face updates and improvements to existing ones. Overall, we want to look for more community feedback and suggestions.

Something the Realism Mod - nor any other mod - has ever edited is eye colors, but we may do that this year, updating eye colors for tons of players, whether they have a proper face update or not!

Lastly, I will be more active in checking face variants, like what version to use of faces. Messi with a beard, or clean-shaven? Haaland with long or short hair? Etc etc. I will hope to do an audit at least every 3-4 months.

The first release of the mod should contain all eligible face updates (ie, not ones where EA updated the face to make it better than the mod), which will probably be 200-250. Every update, we will continue to add and improve more.

Gameplay Mod

So, this is a big one. First, let's talk about the FIFA 21 Gameplay mod. To start, the average user rating of the gameplay mod was 4 out of 5. I think that's pretty good. However, that doesn't sum up the gameplay mod. Gameplay is quite subjective, so everyone thinks something different, but my general thoughts are that the gameplay mod for FIFA 21 absolutely made the gameplay better, but also introduced a couple of issues, and didn't really improve the gameplay as much as it could have, especially compared to the FIFA 20 mod.

However, that all changes for the FIFA 22 Gameplay mod. I think this is going to be the biggest area of improvement in the mod.

First of all, let me say that out of all the mods, gameplay is the far most difficult one to create. That's because gameplay is so complicated and in-depth, and placebo takes a huge effect. It’s ridiculously difficult to test. There are so many factors that impact gameplay. There are the obvious ones like difficulty, sliders, etc, but then there's also stuff like player ratings, opposition tactics, referee, and even visual things like stadium, weather condition, etc, as that can impact how you see and react to the game. Gameplay is mainly about trial and error, but it's difficult to do. For the core Realism mod, it's easier. If there is a value about simulation that's set at 50, I can set it to 0, or 100 and do a couple of sims, see if that changes anything. And in some cases for gameplay the same is applicable. If I think these values control player speeds, set them to 0, and see if players can still run. Sure. But then there are values like Tackle_StandingStunSuccess_SpeedFactor_Best. The name doesn't exactly make it clear what it does, and setting it to an extreme value is hard to test because this value is probably only used for a very specific tackle type under very specific circumstances, not ones you can reproduce easily.

Luckily, I have some great mod testers who make this easier, but even then, FIFA is so complex. I can upload two identical gameplay mods, tell everyone to test both, and people will report that the 2nd one feels slower, players tackle more often, and shots had more curve, even though there is no difference. That's not a fault of their own, there are just so many variables involved.

That being said, I have created some new methods of testing that will be used for the FIFA 22 gameplay mod. I've also been working on detailed documentation of the gameplay files, going over what every individual file, and value does. This isn't complete, but it provides a ton of useful info for creating the gameplay mod. And while I develop the FIFA 22 gameplay mod, I will continue to add to it for the future.

And while some of the stuff I said above sounds negative, it's not that big of an issue. There are SO many positive things I can say!

I'm really happy with the FIFA 22 gameplay. I presume some of you will disagree, but here are my basic thoughts. First, it's far from perfect; there are still bugs and things that need to be better. But I think the new ball physics are a big improvement, the goalkeepers feel a lot better, and most importantly, they did stuff we couldn't mod in FIFA 21. The AI now tackle more; they cross more, they take more long shots, etc (although all still need adjusting). So, now mods can come in and fix up the rest! Plus, EA added a ton more new files related to run styles, defence, goalkeeping, gestures, positioning, AI, set pieces, and so much more.

For the FIFA 22 gameplay mod, I will dedicate a lot more time to creating the best experience possible, focusing on the realism and fun elements. Last year I didn't have enough time to work on it as I would have liked, and that showed. But this year, since the FIFA 22 mod will be easier to create generally, I will be spending maybe 10x more time on the gameplay. There are a ton of gameplay files we didn't explore in the FIFA 21 mod, plus the new gameplay files added in FIFA 22, there is a ton of stuff we can do. The FIFA 21 gameplay mod edited ~45 gameplay files. I presume the FIFA 22 mod will be close to 500, maybe more. That's how serious I am about this.

It’s worth saying that FIFA’s Live Tuning tool may cause a few difficulties in gameplay modding, sometimes potentially overwriting gameplay edits and stuff, but so far I have no major concerns about this and if anything comes up, I’m confident we can find a way around it.

I will also hopefully be collaborating with 6ons1 on some gameplay elements, which is great considering he has made excellent gameplay mods in the past.

FIFA Editor Tool will make gameplay modding even easier than last year, too. More functions to edit the gameplay files have (copy property name, mass edit array) and will continue to be added (view original EBX file, view changes, better FloatCurve editor, etc), paving the way for faster and easier edits.

FIFA did encrypt the locale.ini this year, a file that can be modified to make very basic gameplay edits (less than 1% of gameplay’s modding possibilities). However, the legendary Aranaktu managed to create a script to decrypt and re-encrypt it! This will be implemented into the FIFA Editor Tool soon along with a whole new locale.ini system.

I want to test more locale.ini edits this year, but so far it seems like they don’t have the same effect they did before (not really bad news, might actually be good) so the mod locale.ini’s might actually be in the Graphics mod, at least to start.

In the FIFA 20 gameplay mod, I also edited some effects to make rain and mud feel & look heavier. Those were never added to the FIFA 21 mod, but they should be back in FIFA 22!

Another thing I want to do differently in the FIFA 22 mod is to continuously update the gameplay. In both the FIFA 20 & 21, after the initial gameplay mod was added, there were only a couple more gameplay tweaks. This year, we will strongly listen to community feedback and continue to improve and innovate the gameplay mod throughout the FIFA 22 cycle!

Here are some things to look forward to in the FIFA 22 gameplay mod:

• Overall Realism. I want to increase the realism of every aspect, but most importantly passing, shooting, dribbling and defence. I want every pass to feel just right, the speed, the curve, the spin, etc. I want every shot to feel like it’s real. We want to make dribbling fun, but also fair and realistic, maybe trying to remove some of the power of certain skills. Defence wise I want to make it less frustrating, and more rewarding.
• Smarter AI. One of my biggest issues with FIFA’s different difficulties has been that at times it feels like they just increased how technically good the AI were, and not how smart they are. Like, their shots have more power, but when they take those shots aren’t much better after you reach a certain difficulty. So, I want to try to create a balance where the harder difficulty you play on, the better the AI are technically, but most importantly, mentally. They should have a better vision of passes, they should be smarter about when and how to shoot. Defensively they should be aggressive yet disciplined, being smart about when to take action.
• More variation. I think everyone agrees that after a while the gameplay gets a bit stale, so we want to try to improve that. We want to increase the chances of low probability animations, like skill passes, bicycle kicks, scoop passes, etc. Not to make them super often, but you might see an outside the foot cross once or twice, rather than never. But we also want to make the AI have more variation too. You’ll see them doing more skill moves or interesting animations, you’ll see them make passes you never saw before, take more types of shots, defend in different ways, etc. I think this will make gameplay feel more refreshing.
• More reliant on attributes. This is another big change, I want to make attributes mean more. Players with high stamina will fatigue slower, players with low stamina will fatigue a lot quicker. The defensive attributes will mean more, the Virgil van Dijks of the world will really stand out. Attacking attributes too, hopefully, you’ll see players like De Bryune or Bruno Fernandes make some crazy passes. Work rates will mean much more too, which will make players like Milner or Arturo Vidal a lot more useful!
• Better player mistakes. We want to make player mistakes a lot more realistic. Fewer cases of players making super generic and basic mistakes, and more of them making more interesting mistakes under specific situations, like when under pressure. This will make pressing even more efficient. Mistakes will be more common generally, although not to a frustrating amount. Most will be small though, but you’ll notice cases of players’ touches being off a bit more, or not always perfectly making that through ball.
• Midfielders trackback. I discovered some values that should hopefully fix (at least, as much as we can, far more than the FIFA 21 mod) midfielders tracking back. It should also make CDMs feel like CDMs, instead of a slightly deeper CM.
• New player rating system. I started paying attention to player ratings in the late FIFA 21 cycle and noticed that they aren’t always as accurate as they could be, and specific actions could be worth more to help non-goal scoring players. I plan to redesign the algorithm to be more fair and balanced!
• New player reactions system. This was a feature in the FIFA 20 mod but never made it to the FIFA 21 version. We want to make player reactions more passionate and common. There are also some new gesture files I’ll look into. This should make games feel more intense and exciting.
• Custom run styles for more players. EA added some files in FIFA 22 to control run styles. We can customize run styles themselves now, to control weights of certain body parts, but we can also assign them to specific players. I’ll have to experiment with how many can be assigned, but this is a huge feature that I want to make big use of.
• Perks redesign. Perks are a new thing in player career, but some are definitely OP, and some could probably be changed to be more effective. I’ll talk about this later on, but I’m looking for a lot of community ideas on what to do with these. Generally though, the impact will probably be decreased, but not fully removed.
• Decrease to attribute boosts. There are some mysterious pre-match boosts players get that I want to investigate, I’m not sure if they are from XP, morale, or what, but I want to test them more, and greatly decrease or completely remove them.
• New goalie physics. Next-gen got some better goal net physics which I think we can (at least sort of) implement onto the PC version. Perhaps we can also customize shapes and depths and then assign them to certain competitions. There’s a lot of potential. I still have to figure out some of the quirks of these files though, so no promises.
• More injuries. I usually bump my injury frequency slider to at least 70 to achieve a realistic amount of injuries, so hopefully, I can reduce the need for sliders and get a balanced but realistic amount of injuries. We also have more control over the severity of injuries and how they happen, plus we can make injury-prone players get injured more frequently than ones who aren’t.
• Subs have more impact. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always felt subs haven’t had the impact they should. I found some values that determine the speeds of fatigued vs non-fatigued players, and I think I’ll be able to make the difference bigger so subs can completely change a game, just like real life.
• So much more. Like an incredible amount. Hundreds of things. I’ll try to improve everything that I can!

I’ve also identified the cause of two gameplay issues, one where driven passes weren’t working, and one where sometimes low-rated players would be unintentionally bad at marking, I’ve made sure both won’t happen in the FIFA 22 mod!

There are also some advanced AI files that were added in FIFA 21 that I never got to explore. Not sure what format they are, but I will investigate and try to figure them out, which should hopefully lead to more customization on how the AI plays!

Lastly, changes to realistic ratings and a brand new realistic tactics feature (more info on both later) will combine to improve gameplay a lot more. Tactics especially will make playing against teams feel like how it is in real life. No more Millwall playing like prime Barcelona.

Overall, I think we can really overhaul gameplay. I think we can make the gameplay super realistic and super fun. I think we can customize elements you didn't know existed. Truly, I promise I will try to make the gameplay the best it can possibly be. We can absolutely turn this game into the best FIFA gameplay ever. There is so much potential.

The first release of the mod should include a somewhat basic gameplay mod, but as mentioned above, we will continue to improve it in future versions. Don’t expect too many of the features I mentioned above to be in the initial release which will be focused more on generally improving the gameplay and changing what EA should have.

Graphics Mod

The graphics mod has another one that had a profound improvement from FIFA 20 to FIFA 21, in fact, it was 75% bigger! And I don't think that even does it justice. Here are some of the improvements we made from the FIFA 20 mod to the FIFA 21 one.

• More kit updates, national teams, real GK kits, unlicensed teams, etc. (400 ➜ 513)
• Better quality kits. In FIFA 20, we used multiple kit makers, none of which were super high quality. This led to not much consistency between kits, and issues like missing/wrong details, crests being too big, and normals/coeffs not being edited. In FIFA 21, we had two kit makers, but mainly one that is super high quality. Coeffs, normals and TAAs were always edited, alongside better textures, which led to kits being MUCH better.
• More & much higher quality banner updates (700 ➜ 811)
• More & higher quality flag updates (50 ➜ 2470)
• More & higher quality adboards (50 ➜ 59)
• More team logo (25 ➜ 113) and competition logo (30 ➜ 54) updates
• More and higher quality AdSponsors (10 ➜ 15)
• More tournament texture updates (35 ➜ 43)
• More new/updated trophies (3 ➜ 33)
• Hotspot updates for every updated kit. Hotspots control things like the position of numbers and names on the kit. In the FIFA 20 mod, we didn't update these files for most kits, leading to many issues.

And we also added stuff never seen in the FIFA 20 mod, like

• Real kit updates (to add sponsors, fix incorrect or missing details, etc)
• 3 Tifo Updates
• Updated pedestals, backboards, sponsor boards, plinths
• 17 Kit Name Fonts
• 24 News Background Updates
• 1 Video Update
• 6 Player Seat Updates

In general, we focused on the small details so much more, stuff that 99% of users may never notice, but the 1% that do will appreciate.

The graphics mod will be pretty similar in the FIFA 22 mod, but with a good amount of new content. But of course, it will still contain all the kits for unlicensed teams, real GK kits, national team kit updates, real club/competition logos, trophies, adboards, banners, etc.

Here are some of the major things that will change:

• Higher quality kits. This year, we are only using one kit maker, the fantastic javad1375_pv! This means kits will be more consistent, and his skills have improved over the past 12 months, so that will directly translate into better kit quality! We are also putting the kit logo on the kit textures less, instead opting for putting it on the kit via hotspots, which makes the crest look more 3D and sewn on.
• More & better quality banners and flags. I think we really improved banners and flags in the FIFA 21 mod. They are one of my favourite aspects of the mod! This year, we will add realistic banners and flags for all the new teams added in FIFA 22, plus some existing ones that didn't get them in the FIFA 21 mod. In addition, we will look to improve the quality of many mod banners and flags throughout the mod cycle! Sheyk90 has updated some of his La Liga ones which I’ve implemented into the FIFA 22 mod. There are also a lot that don’t match the FIFA format which led to weird results in-game, so we will be redoing most of them! I’m working with the amazing Southwest87 (follow him!) who is creating some incredibly beautiful and realistic banners! He previously made some banners for the mod, but he has updated those to match the FIFA format exactly leading to so much more Realism! We will also open a channel on discord to recommend improvements to said graphics, such as adding specific ones, or removing/updating out-of-date ones (talking about an old manager/board/player, etc). EA also added two new "Square Flag" textures per team, so we will make beautiful and realistic versions for each team of those! You can see an image below comparing the quality of two FIFA 21 banners with two FIFA 22 ones.

• Real scarfs! Before FIFA 22, the game pulled scarf textures from the banner texture, but this year they have their own separate textures, 4 per team! This is a big improvement, as we can have dedicated scarf textures based on real-life scarfs for the teams! We will make sure all teams have real scarf textures. This will include some stunning designs!

• Better quality logos! We have a lot of logo updates in the FIFA 21 mod, but many became outdated as the cycle went on, and some are very low quality. This year, we have had my good friend and great graphic designer Southwest87 redo many of them! This leads to beautiful quality logos for many competitions!

• More balls! In the FIFA 21 Realism Mod, we added 9 new balls, and I want to double that in the FIFA 22 mod at least. I have started cataloging numerous balls in the game, and I have noticed a few are missing. I want to concentrate more on this aspect of the game, and I will make sure all competitions in the game have authentic ball(s).
• More kit numbers/names! We really expanded this area in the FIFA 21 mod, adding many new kit numbers and names, which had never been done before. We will continue this trend into the FIFA 22 mod, with even more kit numbers/names! Last year we only added them for top teams like Barcelona, Manchester United, etc., but we will try to add it to more teams outside of the major ones.
• Better quality minifaces! In the FIFA 20 & 21 Mod, we updated a ton of minifaces, which was a great feature, although both suffered from a common issue, being that many minifaces were quite low quality compared to the default FIFA version. We will hope to solve this issue in the FIFA 22 mod by focusing more on minifaces. We will independently verify every miniface to make sure it's an improvement to the default one, and not import them all without checking. In the FIFA 22 player career revamp, EA also started using manager minifaces! Many are pretty outdated/low quality, so we will also try to improve those! I’ll be working with new graphic designers and using new tools like waifu2x to try to make sure the quality is excellent. We will also open a miniface suggestion channel in the Discord server!
• Bigger focus on smaller details! In the FIFA 21 Mod we already really focused on smaller details, and I want to go even deeper in the FIFA 22 Mod. This includes looking at every kit in the game to find and fix issues related to the actual kit textures (shirt, shorts, and socks), for stuff including patterns, sponsors, etc., but also crest, number and name placements & colours. We will also look at sleeve badges for all kits, including team & league-specific ones. I've started this process already and already fixed many! But we won't do this just for kits, though. We will do this for balls, trophies, adboards, competition branding, team/league logos, etc., verifying that all details are correct. We will also hopefully be expanding on the real player seat updates in the FIFA 21 mod with more stadium-related updates, which I'll get into more below. We will also try to edit more legacy files, increasing some resolutions to try to be as high quality as possible. Finally, we want more community feedback on small details, so we will look into ways of getting that! You can see below an example of how much we want to focus on the little things.

And those are just the guaranteed changes! There are a ton of features we want to look into and potentially implement. Here are some:

• Real Armbands. Real armbands for many competitions are missing in FIFA, so I will hopefully be adding them for as many as I can! I will also look to verify existing ones to make sure they are all perfectly correct.
• Better Crowd. For years now, the crowd in FIFA has been the same, largely consisting of the same faces wearing the same outfits, etc. This year, I hope to change that, most likely as part of the main graphics mod (another option is doing it as addon mods). We could overhaul the current crowd textures by increasing the resolution to make them look better, then add brand new faces, and even edit outfits to be less generic (for instance, maybe add Nike/Adidas T-shirts instead of plain ones)
• Better NPCs. Similar to above, the non-crowd "NPCs" in FIFA have been similar for years. These NPCs include ballboys, flagbearers, cameramen, photographers, stewards, etc. Same as above, we would increase the resolution, change the faces and edit the outfits. For certain ones like stewards, we could add their real outfits and create "Addons" for certain leagues specific outfits. NPCs also include assistant managers that are near the technical area during games. We will be adding some assistant manager faces for another thing I'll talk about later, so we could create addon mods to add certain assistant manager faces replacing the default ones, like Alfred Schreuder, Juanma Lilo or Pepijn Lijnders.
• Revamped Adboard/Adsponsor System. I will talk more about this in the core Realism Mod section, but basically, I want to introduce a huge new adboard system, adding real adboards and sponsors to every team in FIFA 22. This is unprecedented, and it will be a ton of work, but totally worth it. In terms of the Graphics side of this, there will be even more focus on adboards; they will be much more accurate and high quality. There will be a ton more adsponsor updates and even some new animated adboards, something that has never been done in the Realism Mod (aside from the Euro 2020 Mod)!
• Revamped Stadiums. This is something I really want to do. There are many stadiums in FIFA 22 that are outdated. Some textures aren't what they are in real life, or various colours around the stadium. I would like to fix all these issues and try to make all the stadiums as accurate as possible. It's also possible we might be able to edit stadium meshes at some point, which would let us fix even more issues! There are also some lighting colors we could improve. We will also get community feedback on what stadium issues there are!
• Better Props. You probably don't notice them super often, but props are all over the game. Plants in the transfer negotiation system, water bottles in the press conferences, etc. These are small details, but some are very generic, so we will look to make them more realistic, i.e. using a real water brand.
• More news background updates. In 1.3 of the FIFA 21 mod, we updated several news backgrounds. This was a small change but I think it was refreshing, as I don't think the old ones had been changed since the 3D news system was introduced in FIFA 17 or 18. I hope to expand this in the FIFA 22 mod by modifying the 2D ones as well, perhaps even creating specific addons for specific teams.
• Adding kits. I have created a new system for assigning various content to the game. This method will let us "add" kits to teams, like adding 3rd or 4th kits to teams that don't have them. However, they won’t have mini kits (unless we use the Live Editor or figure out legacy duplication in FET), so I’m not too sure if it’s worth it. Please let me know your thoughts!
• Adding content. There is a decent chance we will figure out legacy duplication during the FIFA 22 cycle, which means we could add minifaces for players/managers without them, and stuff like that. It's even possible we could figure out resource duplication which means we could add many new graphics, such as tournament-specific graphics!
• New Kits System. As I said earlier, there are two methods of putting the club crest on a kit. You can either map it directly onto the texture or use a separate texture and assign it via a hotspot. Using a hotspot means the crest is more 3D, so that’s what FIFA does, and what we will do more of. However, this has the downside of the crowd not having the crest on their kits. So we may improve some kits (particularly big clubs) by doing it both ways. Use hotspots, but under where the hotspot would be, put the crest on the texture. You won’t notice it on the player kits, but the crowd will now have crests on their kits!
• More tifos. In the FIFA 21 mod, we introduced a couple of new tifos, however, in the FIFA 22 mod, I really want to improve this area of the mod. I will be working with different modders with vast tifo experience to try to add and improve tifos for various teams & players, which really brings the atmosphere of games to life! Perhaps we can also add tifos for new teams and players! I'm quite excited about what we will be able to bring to this area!
• Better trophy minipics. In default FIFA, the 2D images of trophies shown in various instances, such as the Standings hub, are very low resolution. The FIFA 21 Mod contained trophy minipic updates for trophies it gave 3D updates to, but in the FIFA 22 mod, we will try to expand that to all trophies!

We have already made a lot of progress on the graphics mod! We have already made super high-quality kits for the 4 unlicensed teams (Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio and Roma). Plus, we have completed all of the EFL League One, EFL League Two and Portugal Liga Bwin GK Kits! See some examples below! I think real GK kits are a really underrated aspect of the mod, they make playing in less popular leagues much less bland.

Talking about kits, EA moved the teamkits table back to the squad file this year, making it much easier for you to use your own kit mods alongside the Realism Mod. We also have a new way of applying mod teamkit changes which we will utilize in some ways to increase the ease of use.

However, we have done far more than kits! As mentioned above, Southwest87 has done some graphics for the FIFA 22 mod specifically already. This includes updating tons of logos to be higher quality and to match the variant they use in real life. Small touches but super nice!

He also has made the aforementioned realistic scarfs for the Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Liga Portugal Bwin, La Liga and Serie A already! And another modder I'm working with has made realistic scarfs for the leagues in Argentina, Belgium, CONMEBOL, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, USA, and some rest of world teams.

Lastly, we have updated several badges to their real-life variant!

I’ve also had maqwell create a new Champions League intro video to keep things fresh! I won’t spoil it by showing you here, but it’s pretty awesome, and it’s shorter for those of you who complained about the length in the FIFA 21 mod!

I’ve made many boring changes to the internal side of things too, including doing proper documentation for kits and banners, which are made, which aren’t, which need improving, etc, which will help speed up everything!

In terms of timelines for the graphics mod, the first release should include:

• Realistic banners and flags (minus square flags) for every team minus maybe 15-30
• Real Scarfs for the Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A, Bundesliga, La Liga, and Portugal Liga BWIN as well as the Argentina, CONMEBOL, Belgium, Denmark, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, Turkey and United States leagues, plus the lower leagues of Germany and Spain. Likely another ~5-10 leagues or more will be added.
• Real kits, logos, and everything else for unlicensed teams
• Real GK kits for EFL League One, EFL League Two, Liga NOS and probably Germany 3. Liga and Jupiler Pro League. I wouldn't be surprised if another couple leagues’ real GK kits make it in.
• A few other random kit updates (add sponsors, fix details, etc), for example, Inter’s kits, adding their missing sponsor
• A few new kit name/number fonts
• Real 2D Adboards for all competitions with them, some teams too
• Some real Adsponsors
• Replaced generic animated adboards with real ones
• Real tournament textures for all tournaments
• Real trophies for all (maybe missing a couple) competitions missing them
• Real trophy minipics for all updated trophies
• Some miniface updates
• Some other random stuff

And here are some timelines for other features:

• All real GK kits should be completed by late 2021/early 2022.
• Pretty much all teams (minus ~5 probably) should have real banners and flags by late 2021.
• All teams (minus a few) should have real square flags and scarfs by Spring 2022.
• The full adboard redesign should be done by Spring 2022, but it's flexible, so every release more and more will be included until it's complete.
• All real balls should be completed by early 2022.
• We will try to add more miniface updates in every update but we will work on the majority of them around early 2022.
• By late 2021/early 2022, we should have implemented most real kit name/number fonts!

Starting early 2022 we will begin looking into some of the new potential features like "Better Crowd" or "Stadium Revamp", but some may start much later, or not happen at all.

Manager Faces Mod

The FIFA 21 Manager Faces Mod was 30% bigger than the FIFA 20 mod version, but I think we really improved it, maybe more than the margin shows.

Even though the amount of new managers faces is similar in the FIFA 20 and FIFA 21 mods, that doesn't really tell the full story. We went from adding manager faces like Alex Neil, Sol Campbell and Alan Pardew to Roberto De Zerbi, Mircea Lucescu and Rúben Amorim. The quality of manager faces also drastically increased, as you can see below.

We also made big leaps on manager face updates, going from very few in the FIFA 20 mod to countless, super high-quality ones in the FIFA 21 mod like Antonio Conte, Diego Simeone, Jürgen Klopp, Mikel Arteta, etc.

I think manager faces are a really great feature of the mod. Maybe you don't notice them all the time, but it's really nice going into transfer negotiations with a real manager, or seeing them in-game, in news stories, etc. Plus, you can play as them, and it’s much easier to do so in the FIFA 22 Realism Mod, as I’ll show later in this post! And in FIFA 22, they are more important than ever because of the player career revamp, with many cutscenes that include the managers.

For that reason, I think we will add at least 20-30 new manager faces in the FIFA 22 mod, bringing the total count to well over 100, and I will try to update a good amount too. I will also look to include lesser-known manager faces, maybe some from lower leagues, outside Europe, or not in the big leagues. If the manager is good/popular enough, we will add them, regardless of the club they manage! I will try to take more community feedback in this area too!

And as I mentioned for Face Updates, we will be improving specmasks/normals of many faces, trying to make the quality as good as possible. Luckily, most manager faces already have super high-quality specmasks/normals, but there are some that will be improved! Same thing with eye colors, we will try to implement them in the manager faces mod as well!

We will also be including the Unemployed Manager Faces addon mod inside the main Manager Faces mod, which I will talk more about in the addons section.

We will also use a new assignment system for the manager faces, which will apply automatically, removing the need for Lua scripts! More info about this in the New Faces section! We will also be able to automatically update managers’ skin tones and body types this way, much easier than before.

Work on the FIFA 22 manager faces mod is already underway with countless manager faces being made for the new mod specifically, such as Thomas Frank, Lionel Scaloni, Gerardo Seoane, Adi Hütter, Maurício Barbieri, Maurizio Sarri, Graham Potter, Pascal Jansen, Roberto De Zerbi, Arne Slot, Mark van Bommel, Peter Bosz, Luciano Spalletti and Massimiliano Allegri!

In terms of timelines, the first release should include all manager faces from the FIFA 21 mod (except for the ones that got sacked or redesigned), including updates, as well as some new ones like the ones listed above. We will probably also have time to include some other manager faces in the first release, such as Ange Postecoglou, Vincenzo Italiano, etc. And then from there, we will continue to add/update more manager faces in every release.

New Faces Mod

The new faces mod is the biggest (size-wise) part of the mod, but it's also the community's favourite, according to the survey, just beating the changes to career mode. The mod grew 60% size-wise from FIFA 20 to 21, and I'm pretty happy with that. We expanded the number of new faces added from ~775 to ~1050, adding high-quality faces for players like Ilaix Moriba, Darwin Núñez, Kamal Deen Sulemana, Nuno Mendes, Jamal Musiala, Yunus Musah, Yusuf Demir, Rayan Cherki, Florian Wirtz, Wesley Fofana, Burak Yılmaz, Abdallah Sima, Sven Botman, Diogo Leite, etc.

But maybe a bigger thing was the improvement to existing FIFA 20 new faces. In 1.0 we improved probably ~100 faces, and after 1.0, we improved another ~175 faces! These included players like Raphinha, William Saliba, Charles De Ketelaere, Emile Smith Rowe, Unai Simón, Eduardo Camavinga, Alfredo Morelos, Ronald Araújo, Neco Williams, Pedri, Jules Koundé and Billy Gilmour.

Just like the other face mods, I don't think there are any radical changes necessary for the FIFA 22 mod. We will mainly just keep adding and improving content.

If you don't know how the new faces mod works, we can't technically "add" new content to the game, so we replace existing players’ faces, mainly unknown players with low potentials. And for that reason, it's hard to add substantially more faces than we have added now. For instance, if we wanted to add a total of 1600 faces, roughly 500 more than we have now, that means we would have to replace players with 80 potential, not something we want to do.

However, I think that we will probably add another 250-350 new faces this year, even if the total count only grows 100-200, for these two reasons:

• EA added a good amount of new faces (although I'm slightly disappointed, I felt they could have added more) that the mod had, so that means we can free up some IDs as someone like Ansu Fati will no longer need to be in the new faces mod because EA added his face (although we will compare the EA vs mod version to see if it should become a face update).
• EA added more faces generally, including lower potential players, and also some new volta faces, so there are more IDs to replace

We are also improving player face and ID selection. I've started going through all the faces already, noting down which need improvements in different areas, and while doing this I came across a decent amount of players that probably didn't deserve a face in the mod. Some were youth players who haven't really done anything, some were players that just weren't very good anymore, and some just don't play at all. When creating the FIFA 21 Realism Mod, I did remove many faces from the FIFA 20 version, but this year I will be more strict and set the threshold higher for getting a face in the mod. This will mean that the popularity of each player in the face mod will be higher.

That being said, we will also loosen some other guidelines on faces in the mod. We want to focus on player popularity more, which goes hand in hand with the goal of focusing more on smaller leagues. For instance, there were some Leeds players last year that didn't have great FIFA ratings but were underrated and very popular. Because of their low ratings and potentials, we didn't add faces for them, but this year we would (just an example, EA added their faces in FIFA 22).

And this carries over to all leagues too. You will see more faces for the EFL Championship, Turkish Super Lig, Argentine Primera División, etc. We will also improve the face suggestion channel so it's easier to suggest faces, and we will take feedback more seriously on which faces to add!

We will also be doing something similar for the IDs we replace. This year especially, we got a lot of negative feedback regarding the faces we replaced, so this year we want to reduce that. Compared to the FIFA 20 mod, we were better with ID replacing in the FIFA 21 mod as we tried to avoid all active Premier League players, but we will take that a step further in the FIFA 22 mod. This year, we will individually check every player before we replace their face. We will take into account their quality (underrated? overrated?), the league they play in, club, how often they play, age, and most importantly, their popularity. This means that popular faces will rarely be replaced, leading to you barely noticing the missing faces! And we will also create a suggestions channel for faces that are replaced that should be restored.

We will be making some other changes to the new faces mod to increase its quality, such as

• Improving more existing faces. Last year we focused on this a lot, this year I'll focus on it even more. Every facemaker has improved their abilities a ton in the past year, and I will be working with them to improve many of the existing faces in the mod. I will also be working with many new facemakers like Jão Facemaker and KennoFacemaker. Throughout the FIFA cycle, I presume we will improve 250-350 faces, maybe even more!
• Real Eye Colors. As I mentioned in the Face Updates section, perhaps we will assign real eye colors to players in the New Faces mod, at least big ones, to increase Realism even more!
• Better specmasks and normals. Like I mentioned in the Face Updates and Manager Faces section, a big thing we are doing this year is improving specmasks and normals for all faces with low-quality ones (or without them entirely). Compared to Face Updates and Manager faces, the New Faces mod has a lot of faces with low-quality specmasks/normals, so you will notice a nice improvement in a large number of faces with this change! You can see below an example of before and after. It’s not a huge difference in the menu, but in-game it will be more drastic.

• New Assignment System. This is a major change! In the FIFA 20 and 21 mods, we used Lua scripts for faces, and we will still use them for certain aspects of the mod, in the FIFA 22 mod they will no longer be needed! Using files already in the game, I have written some code to automatically apply various things. This will apply to existing careers, new careers, in kick-off, volta, even FUT (you can’t be banned or anything, don’t worry)! These also don’t edit the database values themselves, so they are only applied when using the mods, which will reduce issues and increase ease of use! We will use this for many other aspects of the mod like New Faces, Manager Faces, Tattoos, as well as boots. It can automatically apply edits to skin tone and body type too!

Overall, I think these are not super major (aside from the assignment one), but very good changes that fulfill the face-related things that you guys wanted, more faces, more smaller league faces, higher quality faces, and less replacing faces of important players (according to the survey).

Thanks to a great idea from my friend Houss3m, I’ll also be sharing my ID list with facemakers who will hopefully use the mod IDs for their own faces, so other facemakers' faces will be much more compatible with the Realism Mod! Hopefully, they will use the new assignment system too which will increase compatibility even further.

Progress-wise, we have already done a lot! Countless faces have been made for the FIFA 22 mod, such as Wout Weghorst, Jérémie Boga, Diogo Gonçalves, Karim Adeyemi, José Sá, Amine Gouiri, Nico González, Matty Cash, Albert Sambi Lokonga, Christos Tzolis, Konrad de la Fuente,  Mohamed Simakan, Lucas Ocampos, Conor Gallagher, Abel Ruiz, Gavi, Donyell Malen, Samuele Ricci, Alessio Cragno, Mykola Shaparenko, Youssoufa Moukoko, Mikkel Damsgaard, Ricardo Pepi, Matías Palacios, Dušan Vlahović, Toni Martínez, Matteo Pessina, Gonzalo Montiel, Matteo Politano, Ben White, Thiago Almada, and tons of others! We have also been improving the specmasks/normals, and that process is around 60% done!

In terms of timelines, the new faces mod should be complete at the initial release, including 1000+ faces, which means all eligible ones from the FIFA 21 mod (meaning not players which EA added, or don't deserve a face), and many new ones. This expedited timeline is made possible by new FIFA Editor Tool features, including the ability to import a whole face in 3 clicks. Last year it took 30. Last year I was able to import ~75 faces a day, and this year I expect that number to be at least 200-300, because of the new Face Import feature. Probably doesn’t sound exciting to you guys, but to me, it’s literal magic.

Of course, in subsequent updates of the mod, we will continue to add and improve faces!

New Menu Mod

For me, the menu mod is a very interesting mod. In the FIFA 20 mod, the menu mod completely redesigned the main screen of the Menu and Manager & Player Career Mode menu. In the FIFA 21 version, due to time constraints and other reasons, we made no changes to the main menu, only made minor tweaks to the Manager Career Mode menu (adding a few new features and other changes), and made bigger changes to the Player Career Mode, but not as big as the FIFA 20 mod.

However, something I heard a few times in the survey answers was that you guys wanted the full menu to redesign back. So, here's what I'll be doing for the FIFA 22 mod:

For the initial release, the New Menu mod will include some changes to the main menu, not any major redesign, but I will try to make it easier to navigate, and especially easier to create/load career modes. I will also make some minor tweaks and add a few features to both manager career mode and player career mode menus.

For Manager Career Mode, those features will be Edit Kit Number and View Other Team Sheets, and maybe more, but no promises. For player career, it will be similar stuff to what I added in the FIFA 21 mod. Transfer history, view other team sheets, etc.

Something that won't be making a return in the FIFA 22 mod is Edit Transfers. This was a big feature in the FIFA 20 and 21 mod, but I think it's best to retire it. This is a change in the direction of the "More Stability" goal I talked about earlier. Yes, it was a good feature, however, due to how EA implemented the main menu version, it had bugs when used in career mode. If you transferred a player to/from your team, the game would crash. Sometimes the game would crash regardless what transfer you made, and whatever transfers you made in career mode were carried over to the squad file, which would cause corruption and crashes in careers started with said squad file. You can always use the Cheat Table or Live Editor to transfer players (although also not 100% stable either I think). And hey, if there is enough demand for it, maybe I will add it again as an optional mod.

That being said, in future updates of the mod I may introduce an optional "Menu Overhaul" mod that redesigns the menu similar to the FIFA 20 mod. I would include this in the main New Menu mod, but it will have some minor side effects (like the FIFA 20 version) so I think it should be optional this time. I could also edit some more menus, like the pause menu, sim menu, etc.

I also want to try to edit some more menu flows. This includes better autosave locations and stuff like not exiting Edit Player when saving a change.

Referee Faces Mod

The FIFA 20 and FIFA 21 referee faces mods were very similar, with the FIFA 21 mod adding just 1 more referee face. I want to expand on that this year, luckily EA made the job easier for me.

In FIFA 22, EA added many "real generic" faces. This means they have an ID, a dedicated head model, texture, etc, but the face is just of someone random. They assigned these to referees, so all referees' faces look good and not generic, but there are still no authentic faces, like Anthony Taylor or Mike Dean, so we still have work to do.

For the FIFA 22 mod, I want to improve a lot of the existing referee faces, as most of the current ones are pretty low quality. We will also be implementing the same specmask/normal improvements, real eye colors and ID replacing changes as the New Faces mod. Once we improve a good amount of existing new referee faces that were in the FIFA 21 mod, we will try to add more. These will be for the big 5 leagues, but we also want to expand our selection and try to add at least 1 real referee face for ~10 leagues outside the big ones. In total, I think we will add a total of ~20 referee faces, doubling the current count. We will also try to improve at least half (so ~10) existing ones.

The initial mod release will include a referee faces mod with all the FIFA 21 mod's referee faces, and potentially a couple of new/improved ones. And then throughout the cycle, we will continue to add and improve more.

And I’ve also made the new assignment system work for referee faces too, which is really cool as there was no way to assign them via Lua scripts last year at all. But now they will automatically apply to your existing careers.

I think these changes are good as I'm a big fan of referee faces. I think they really make the mod feel complete and add a level of realism no other mod comes close to!

Regen Faces Mod

So, this is a topic of widespread debate. Some people love them, some people hate them. From the survey, I heard your feedback on the regen faces, it was the #1 answer to "Which features didn't you like". I think it's worth noting that this is a totally optional mod, and you can disable it by simply unchecking it in the Mod Manager.

Not much changed between the FIFA 20 to 21 Regen Faces Mod, although I would say the FIFA 20 version may have been slightly better as we were more careful and diligent in our face matching system. However, we want to make the FIFA 22 version far better than both. The two biggest complaints of the mod were that they didn't match the in-game face well and that their styles were inconsistent. We will address both of these.

First of all, EA added over 700 new regen faces and edited all of them. This means that if we just imported all the faces from the FIFA 21 mod, they would all be matching the wrong ones, so we will have to redo this mod completely. I think of that as a positive thing, though. Redoing the mod from scratch means we will implement the following changes:

• Better matches to in-game face. Instances where the new minipic and in the in-game face have different hairstyles, colors, facial hair, etc. will be very rare.
• More variation of regen faces. Since EA added 700 regen faces, that means that there will be more possible regen faces in the mod. It will be much rarer to find two of the same regen faces.
• Fewer duplicates. In the FIFA 21 mod, we drastically decreased the number of duplicates from the FIFA 20 mod, but there were still a few, so this year we will try to completely eliminate them via similar picture detection software.
• More consistency & continual updates. The incredible Chilled Moose makes the regen faces in the mod, and throughout the years, she has changed the style of her regen faces, but she has seemed to have settled on a particular style. This means that going forward, as she continues to create more, we will constantly update the mod, removing old ones and adding the new ones so that the style is consistent throughout the mod.
• Better age realism. Another critique of the mod is that some of the faces look quite old. This isn't inherently unrealistic, as regens do age and their miniface stays the same, however, there were a few that looked ~50. I think the number of these was reduced from FIFA 20, but in the FIFA 22 mod, there will be none.
• Better quality & long-term planning. Generally, when FIFA gets a big upgrade, the resolution of the images increases. When FIFA switched from Ignite to Frostbite, most textures doubled (faces went from 512x512 to 1024x1024. While next-gen is not a different engine, it is a graphical upgrade, and I think that many images will be larger, including minifaces. Therefore for the FIFA 22 Regen Faces mod, I will import all minifaces as the largest possible size. If it works in-game without issues, I will keep it that way to maximize quality. If it doesn't, I will batch resize them all but keep the original size versions for the next year(s) mods, where hopefully the PC version will get next-gen.

Work has already begun on the mod, we have started to organize all the new regen faces for the redo. Soon, we will start matching and importing them. I will look for help from the community with this progress.

Timelines-wise, I'm still not sure if the regen faces mod will be in the initial release of the mod. It's one of the most time-consuming mods to create, but overall one of the lowest priorities. There is a chance it may be added in a subsequent release, but I hope to have time to add it to the first one.

Tattoos Mod

The tattoos section of the mod is one of my favourites! I think seeing hundreds of players with real tattoos really makes the game come to life! Plus, it's one of the mods with a huge potential improvement this year!

EA really improved the tattoos aspect of FIFA this year, first of all, adding 28 real arm tattoos and 15 real leg tattoos, which I'll get into in a second. But the thing that excites me more is that they added many more tattoo slots. This means we can add 32 more tattoos compared to the FIFA 21 mod, and the number of total players with tattoos will increase by an additional ~28 (plus that 32) since almost all the ones that EA added were already in the mod, so we can add different/new tattoos in the slots they took up. But that’s not all! In addition to adding 50+ new tattoos, we have even more great changes planned!

• Higher quality tattoos. Our tattoo makers, such as the fantastic Mamareza, continue to get better, and we will improve many tattoos throughout the cycle, plus the new ones will be of higher quality. We will also look for another person to make tattoos to speed up the process and create more improvements! I have a facemaker in mind that I'll (try to) be working with to try to make some tattoos!
• Better player selection. Same as the faces. We will try to select more relevant, quality, and popular players. We will review every tattoo in the mod to make sure they deserve their tattoo (we also factor in tattoo size, quality and visibility). We will look for more community feedback and suggestions in this area too.
• Leg Tattoos. This was a thing we got a couple of suggestions for in the survey, which I hadn't considered before. But it's a fantastic idea! EA obviously added a decent amount in FIFA 22 already, but there are still lots missing! So we will try to add many leg tattoos to take the mod to the next level. I will also attempt to try to see if I can manage to add more tattoos per ID, which if possible would be huge!
• Manager Tattoos. This is another area of innovation, where no mod has ventured before. In fact, it should be impossible, but because of our new assignment system, we can do it! There aren’t that many managers with tattoos, but we will try to have one made for Jorge Sampaoli. Do you know any other managers with tattoos? Let me know!
• More verification. When creating the mod, we will verify every tattoo. We will look for ones that need to be improved, but also comparing them to the real-life player, spotting missing details or tattoos. We will also stay tuned to players getting new tattoos in real life throughout the year, and also have suggestion channels so the community can let us know when it happens!
• Better skin tone matching. In the FIFA 20 mod, there were a few tattoos that didn't match the skin tone of the player's face (usually due to a new face/face update). We fixed most of the issues in the FIFA 21 mod, but there were still a few. This year we will constantly be checking all tattoos in-game and make sure to fix every single skin tone mix match, even if the difference is small. We will also look to the community to help report these issues.

And... updates updates updates. The majority of the tattoos EA added are missing details, like faces, words, or whole pieces of tattoos (due to licensing reasons I presume). So, in the mod, we will update almost all to fix these missing details!

A large part of the tattoos mod is already done, we can carry over tattoos from the FIFA 21 mod, and we have been making tattoo updates already. We have made updates for Firmino, Milinkovic-Savic, Sancho, Ramos, Immobile. Reus, Hazard, Kroos, Aubameyang, Sterling, Verratti, Depay and many others! Plus, we have made various non-update tattoos since the last release of the FIFA 21 mod, such as Insigine and  Stones' leg tattoos, plus Leon Bailey, Iñigo Martinez, Kurzawa, Simon Kjær, Mitrovic, Ben White, Wout Weghorst, Jose Fonte, Bradaric and Callum Wilson's arm tattoos. See some below!

For the initial release of the mod, the tattoos mod should be pretty completed, with 196 new tattoos and ~20 updates. In future updates, we will update & improve more FIFA and mod tattoos, plus changing some player selection!

Turfs Mod

The turfs mod is a fascinating section of the mod. Arguably, the FIFA 20 turf mod was better - at least turf color-wise - because we had more control about how to change the colour. Sadly, EA changed how some things worked, and we had limitations on how much we could change.

However, I'm still very happy with the result. 6ons1 did a great job on many of the textures, and I think my LUT (which controls the turf color) was also very good.

However, from the survey results and general feedback throughout the year, many people still complained the turf looked a bit dull and needed to be greener. I agree that in some instances, the turf could be greener, but generally, I think some people think the turf is greener in real life than it really is.

I do agree with the dull point to some extent, as in some cases the turf does look a bit 2D. So, we will look to improve this area specifically in the FIFA 22 mod!

First of all, 6ons1 has made some great changes to his turf mod and updated it for FIFA 22, which we will hopefully implement in the FIFA 22 Realism Mod.

But I will continue to work with 6ons1 and independently to try to make it look even better and 3D. I will contact others, and I will do a lot of research and testing, trying to find ways to make the turf look the best possible, by being a bit more green, and feeling a lot more 3D. I think you will really see something special with the FIFA 22 turf mod!

Overall, we will edit more files, trying to make the turf look the best it can, and also stand out more during different conditions.

I also will investigate other ways of making the turf better, such as trying to get the Turf options into the career mode settings window, not just kick-off. This is part of a larger project I'll discuss in more detail later in this post. I might also try to edit stadium glares to be more realistic generally, and that could affect turf color too!

6ons1 also removed the ball bounce marker in his turf mod, is this something you guys would be interested in, as an addon? Let me know!

Lastly, in terms of changes, we also want to add more unique mowpatterns. Mowpatterns are basically the "pattern" of the field. There is even one for an American football field! In the FIFA 21 mod, we just replaced all mowpatterns with one, but this year we want to edit each individually to make them look better (more depth and detail), to preserve the base pattern. This will give more individually to certain stadiums, and better replicate certain footballing cultures.

The turf addon will be in the first release of the mod, but we will continue to work on improving it after that!

Realism Mod

Isn't everything we just talked about the Realism Mod? Yes... but here I mean the core Realism Mod. The mod that makes simulation, transfers, player growth, etc realistic.

This mod is my proudest creation. It's what I spend the most time on, and what I think improves the game the most. There are so many little details that really make the game feel like real life. And we massively improved this mod in FIFA 21, with the introduction of using real data. This was a first for any FIFA mod, and for me, it completely transformed so many things. We used real data for many parts of simulation, transfers, player wages, player values, training, general settings, release clauses and finance. This drastically improved the realism of those aspects, but we also did a complete redo of every algorithm and much more testing. It took a whole month of work at the start of the FIFA 21 cycle, but this time and effort made the mod so much better, and I want to build on that for the FIFA 22 mod. Honestly, there are so many exciting things, I don't know where to start!

Well, first let's discuss existing features. I'm currently creating the mod, and I will tweak every algorithm with minor changes, but first I will discuss big improvements, then complete overhauls.

• Avatar Files. These control the layout of various customization screens, like create player, edit manager, etc. We have various changes for them planned, but we will edit them all from scratch. For all of them, we will decrease the maximum birth year from 2020 to 2006, as letting people create 1-year-old players can only lead to stability issues. In the career mode files, we will remove the ability to edit player’s stats, as it doesn’t work, which will lead to less confusion. We will remove various face sections for edit player, like chin, mouth, etc as they can’t be edited for real players. In player career, we will do more testing and make sure everything works and is more stable than in previous mods.
• General Settings. Many areas of this section were overlooked in past years, so I want to test more and see if I can find more useful values. I've already identified a few things that do have an impact in-game, and I've improved for the FIFA 22 mod, such as news, emails, press conferences, and more.
• GTN Scouting. For me, this is one of the most overlooked sections of FIFA. I think finding and signing new players you've never heard of is one of the most rewarding things to do in the game! And I want to make some improvements to the algorithm in the FIFA 22 mod. I will conduct more testing, and try to get scouting in FIFA to feel like Football Manager. I think this will be a really nice change!
• Player Values. This was one of the biggest improvements in the FIFA 21 mod, we completely redesigned the system and focused on all player's values, not just high OVR ones. This led to a greater balance and very few instances of unrealistic values. However, it still wasn't perfect and I will be aiming to make many improvements here and there, based on research I will carry out, and more real data. I will also look for more suggestions from the community, looking for specific patterns. I will also try to shift the algorithm away from using Potential minus Overall, and instead start using age. This may be the biggest change. The issue with using Potential minus Overall, otherwise known as future potential points (so, the amount the player still has to grow) is that it has flaws (quite rare though) for older players, and for young players with really high potential.  Because of dynamic potential and generally how player growth works, some old players can still have potential left. Normally this is only a point or two, but there are cases where this may be 3, 4, 5, etc. So, you will get say, a 30-year-old 80 overall CB, but with 83 potential. Because of this +3 potential, he will get a 30% potential increase (this isn't just 10x the potential, it’s specific for every potential gap) in the FIFA 21 mod, even though he will never (or at least, the chance is incredibly slim) fulfill that potential. And then there is a much rarer issue to do with player growth. Let's take Joško Gvardiol for instance, he's 75 with 87 potential. In the FIFA 21 mod, that 75 overall means a starting OVR value base of 6 million euros, and then the +12 potential means a 300% increase on that, so his base value would be 24 million euros (before other factors like age, position, team, etc are applied). However, when he grows one OVR, to 76, his base value will now be 6.8 million euros, but naturally, that potential multiplier will go down because he only has +11 potential, so now it's just 250%. This means his value will now only be 23.8 million euros, even though he's a better player than before. I've made sure the algorithm tries to counter this, so that issue is quite rare and will never be too major (like the example was only a 200k value loss, and only temporary. Once he grows to 77, his value will be 29 million). I could probably try to edit the algorithm more to prevent this further, but that will lead to other issues and won't fix the root cause. That's why I want to decrease the effect of potential and increase the effect of age. I won't nerf potential completely, of course, it will still be a very important factor, just a lot less. So the multiplier for potential decreases, but the multiplier for younger ages increases. So with our Gvardiol example, his base value will still be 24 million euros, but instead of the 300% potential modifier, it will be something like a 250% age modifier, and only a 50% potential modifier (this is excluding the existing small age modifier the previous example had in the FIFA 21 mod, just excluding that for simplicity, but in the FIFA 22 mod it will be taken account for). This means that when he grows 1 OVR, that OVR value will again be 6.8 million euros, but this time instead of the other modifiers going from 300% to 250%, it will only be a small decrease of the 50% potential modifier. Maybe it will go down to 45%, so a total of 295% instead of 300%. This means the player value will now be 26.9 million euros, an increase, instead of a decrease. You may be thinking "well, potential should be more important", but I would disagree. In the real world, potential doesn't exist, there are no predetermined ratings players will have in the future. Yes, things can affect how good they could be, like attitude, skill set, team, etc, but at the end of the day, there's no way of knowing, so it can't impact player values in real life. For instance, take Tom Davies, a 23-year-old CM with 75 overall and 79 potential, and Zubimendi, a 22-year-old CM with 75 overall and 85 potential. Yes, Davies is 7 months older, but that's not really a big difference. In the FIFA 21 mod, Davies would have a base value (before counting in position, club, etc) of 10.8 million euros, and Zubimendi would be worth 19.6 million. Almost a 10 million difference using the FIFA 21 algorithm, yet on Transfermarkt the difference is 2 million euros (18 and 20 million respectively)! So using the algorithm for the FIFA 22 mod, the values would be about 17.3 million for Davies, and 19.8 for Zubimendi, making it almost exactly like real life! That will be the main change that will really improve player values, but we will also look into a few others, such as player/team "reputation", to try to mimic popularity's impact on values like real life. And, we will look into balancing overall base values, so there are no huge value boosts when growing/declining 1 rating. I think that these tweaks will really polish player values as a whole!
• Player Wages. Player wages were also one of the biggest improvements in the FIFA 21 mod, as we completely overhauled how they worked, something that was never done in any other mod. We drastically increased the effect of different leagues’ effects on player wages, using real values. This really improved the system in my opinion, as before there were so many unrealistic modifiers for leagues, and the gap between the top leagues and the rest was way too small (even the gap between the Prem and the rest of the 4 big leagues). However, it still wasn't perfect, and there are many things I want to improve in the FIFA 22 mod. First, I want to balance everything a bit more. Work on the base overall values to smooth them out, tinker with the age and position modifiers, and change some of the league modifiers based on the changes of the past year, plus there were a couple of leagues I left out when doing the real data last year, and I can always be a bit more thorough, so I may completely redo the real data for player wages, which won't affect too many values, but they will all become slightly more realistic, and I'm sure some will see a bigger difference. But the more significant thing I want to look into is two files I didn't edit in the FIFA 21 mod, that control player wage modifiers (separated by league) for prestige (how "big" a club is) and profitability (how tight the owner's pockets are). Editing these values (again using real data) will perfect player wages. We will be able to accurately simulate the difference in wages between the best and worst teams and the richest and poorest. I think this is a really significant improvement!
• Player Growth. This is one of the hardest parts of the mod to get right. Real data is somewhat available but hard to implement accurately. I think we got it right in the FIFA 21 mod, but there were still areas for improvements, so I will be looking to fine-tune it in the FIFA 22 mod. I also want to try to stop growth when a player is over the curve. How player growth works in FIFA is basically there are values for ages, and then the corresponding percentage of their potential their overall should be. So, for STs, at 20 the player should be 88% of their potential. So a player with 90 potential should be 79 at 22. However, some players are extremely good at a young age, some might call them "generational talents". For example, Haaland is a 20 ST with 93 potential. According to the algorithm, he should be 82 overall at this age, but he's actually 88. So, we call this type of situation "over the curve" growth. Continuing this example, in default FIFA Haaland will reach his potential very fast, in 2-3 seasons max. The FIFA 21 mod improves this slightly, but I really want to fix this in the FIFA 22 mod, not to become normal, where he will grow incredibly slowly until he reaches his peak at 29, but where it's much more slow, maybe reaching it at 26 or so. This will really make the game more "fair", because I really get annoyed seeing a 95 Mbappe, 93 Donnaruma, 92 Foden, etc in the first few years of career mode. I also want to revisit dynamic potential and do a lot more testing with it, to try to get it to a perfect balance, where it's not overpowered but it can still be very effective in the right circumstances. There was also an issue in last year's mod with dynamic potential decreases, sometimes they could be larger than expected. I figured out the cause for this recently, so it will be fixed for the FIFA 22 mod. Finally, I want to edit some more files and values relating to XP, which I will also mention in the training section!
• Finance. We redesigned finance in FIFA 21 using real data, with some great changes, but I want to go even further this year and use real data to add realistic values for ticket sales revenue, specific for each league. I’ll use data from FM22, but since most leagues allow people back at games, I’ll get price data from club websites too! I also want to add more realistic values for how much money you keep from transfer sales, based on how stingy your board is, and how much budget & prize money is carried over! These will be parts of my efforts to make transfer budgets from the 2nd season and onwards more realistic, something I will do more testing with.
• Pre-Season tournaments. Aside from the big graphical improvements to pre-season tournaments, we want to make a couple of changes to the backend side of things. Use real data for the money prizes for each tournament! In the FIFA 21 mod, we just generally decreased all prizes, but using real data, we will be able to make each tournament stand out. You will have to pay attention when selecting a tournament, especially for clubs with a smaller budget! We also want to make changes to the club selection side of things, to mimic the real-life tournaments. For instance, the biggest pre-season tournaments will have bigger & richer teams, and more European ones!
• Simulation. I know I've said this a lot - but simulation was improved so much in the FIFA 21 mod. Real data was used for countless values, from general things to amounts of cards, injuries, etc, as well as the attribute percentages for goals, assists, cards, injuries, etc. But we also experimented and tested so much more, and it took me a whole month, but I think we really reached a great balance. However, that doesn't mean we can't make it even better! First of all, EA added some cool new stuff to the simulation algorithm, like chances for being subbed on in player career, chances of penalties, and other player career-related stuff! Using real data we will be able to tweak those new values to reach a better level of realism. But, I also want to expand the use of real data for other parts of this algorithm. For many values, the real data we used was the past 3 seasons from the Top 5 Leagues, this is a lot of data but we could get more. This year, I will try to get real data from more leagues, maybe 15-20 total, to make sure we get the whole picture for these values. I don't think there will be major changes, but it will be good to refine everything further. We will also do more testing and tweak things throughout related to everything else!
• Language Strings. If you don’t know, language strings contain the names of many things in every language, like clubs and leagues. As well as many other texts, like press conference questions/answers, text you see on the menus, etc. The only texts that aren’t stored in there are player names I think. In the FIFA 21 mod, we improved translations a lot compared to the FIFA 20 mod, and we also had a special software developed to make edits to them, which helped a lot. This year, we will integrate that software into the FIFA Editor Tool, making some improvements to the UI, UX and speed. This will make the process even faster. We will also focus more on translations and have suggestion channels to fix the wording of translations when needed. There were also a few issues of translating when not necessary in the FIFA 21 mod, like we translated team names to Russian even though EA doesn't do that, which led to localization inconsistency, so we will fix that this year!

And we also have plans for a few major overhauls of mods. I'm really excited about these!

• Player Retirement. I'm really happy with the player retirement concept currently in the mod, from a user experience, it's great. It's so cool to see players still playing at 36, 37, 38 etc and very rarely in their mid-forties! Also great not always having Buffon, Zlatan, etc, retiring the first season. However, player retirement was one of the few areas where we didn't use much real data, mainly because it was too hard to find. Luckily, for the FIFA 22 mod, I've found a great place to get data about retiring players (TransferMarkt), and we should hopefully be able to use it to create accurate simulations of what types of players retire, when. The system FIFA uses to determine this is basic but also pretty complex at the same time, so it will take some effort to implement, but it will lead to a complete overhaul of player retirement, which should improve the game for the better!
• Youth Academy. The youth academy system in the FIFA 21 mod had two complaints from users. A) the players were too low rated, B) it was too hard to find high potential players. In the FIFA 22 mod I will "fix" A), but I disagree that there's an issue with B). The mod makes chances of getting great players harder, but with 5* 5* scouts and 6 months of youth scouting, I got ~150 players, with lots of players with 85+ potential. Out of that sample size, the average potential was 73. Maybe that sounds low, but it's really not. It's another case of rosy retrospection, where people tend to remember more good than bad about the past. If we look at all the players in Barca B or Chelsea U23's from the 2016/17 season (5 years ago), and then look at all their potentials on FIFA now, the average is 74 for Barca, and 73 for Chelsea. Go back further? Ajax's U21's 10 years ago now have the average potential of 70. Yes, these academies have produced some great players, but for every Mason Mount or Reece James, there are 10 Kyle Jameson's. In fact, I think the mod is too generous in many ways, and you can find too many star players with 5* scouts, so I want to create a better balance for the FIFA 22 mod. For 4*, 5* scouts, the average potential won't decrease much if any (maybe slightly for 4* as I want to increase the difference between the levels), but I will decrease the number of *really bad* players found (like, 40 potential bad), while also decreasing the number of top players found (86+ potential), so some of those 40 potential players you find will now be 50 or 60, and some of those 86+ (not a ton, but a realistic amount) will now be lower eighties (of course, dynamic potential can change this). I also found some new scouting values so I will be able to fine-tune this more! In addition, SparringDK helped me find a weird EA bug, where player types (safe hands, defensive-minded) were inaccurately being assigned to positions, so that’s been fixed for the mod! For lower star scouts I also want to find a better balance, so you can still find good players for your level, while also occasionally finding a really great player (not a Mbappe, but a league two club should be able to find a ~80 potential player now and then). But, to help fix complaint A), we will be introducing a complete overhaul of the youth system, doing something no mod has done before, which will solve many issues. First, I think the current youth system is pretty unrealistic. Mainly, because after doing youth scouting for a couple of months you will assemble a 16-person youth academy squad full of 14-18-year-olds (in the FIFA 21 mod it's 15-17). But... teams already have youth academies in the game full of the real youth players. They are in the first team. Barcelona has Iñaki Peña, Álex Balde, Kays Ruiz-Atil, etc, Manchester United has Hannibal Mejbri, Shola Shoretire, Teden Mengi, etc. All these players are in the U23/B teams, but still in FIFA. Plus the mod will add more (I'll explain more later). Therefore, it's not that realistic that you can form another youth academy within a couple of months full of good prospects that are at most a year or two away from promotion. So, for the FIFA 22 mod, we will change the age range to 13-16. This will really make the youth academy more realistic, as it will act as one level below the B team (which is basically already in FIFA). But this has so many other perks. The low overalls will now make more sense. Having a 13 or 14-year-old being 30 overall isn't unrealistic. It will also reduce how overpowered the youth academy is, even with the mod. Since a player has to be at least 16 to be promoted to the first team, you won't be able to constantly replenish your academy with more talent. This isn't a simple change either, we will have to add new parts to algorithms for values, growth, etc, but I think it will be worth it. We also want to improve other factors, like making attribute reveals of reported players more accurate. EA also improved the scouting algorithm to use exact positions instead of types ("Safe Hands", "Defensive Minded", etc). So we will try to make attributes for positions more realistic, so you will get fewer instances of a CB with a winger's stats. We will also be able to redesign some specific things because of this change, like height/weight for YA players. This was one of my favourite things about YA in last year's mod as we used a really complex but cool system to use real data for heights/weights, and we will do that again this year but now with more precision! I will also test more and look to edit some values I never touched in older versions of the mod, to increase realism even further. Lastly, we will also fix the "glitched YA player" issue, which was actually a squad file issue so I'll talk about that in more detail later. For some of you these changes might seem extreme, but trust me, I've played with a basic version of these changes and it feels fine. You still get a few really great players with 5* 5* scouts each season, but forces you to use the transfer market more which I think is great, as it ties into the changes to transfers, negotiations and GTN scouting. If you guys want it, I can also include an addon mod that uses a YA system more similar to the FIFA 21 mod's version, as the new system may make Youth Academy only careers a bit harder (although more realistic). But let me know what you think about this, this is an area where I really want community feedback from!
• Training. Training is a really interesting aspect of FIFA with a ton of potential, but I never got to spend much time on it for the FIFA 21 mod. I mean, before FIFA 21 it was extremely basic and boring, but when they introduced the new training system last FIFA, they really did flesh it out in tons of different ways. Last year the mod did make development plans a lot more realistic and more like FM and some more minor tweaks. A change we got a lot of feedback on is the time it takes for players to change positions, lots of people weren't huge fans of the major increase to said time. However, I think the changes are realistic. In default FIFA, changing a player's position could take 2 weeks. There are time periods where you could go 2 weeks without a game, I think it's highly unrealistic to think a player could become natural in a whole new position in half a month, let alone if they don't play any games. So, we tried to replicate Football Manager - a game with consultation from scouts, players, managers, coaches, and other professionals - where changing positions can take up to a season. In fact, we were a bit lenient as in FM changing positions can sometimes take multiple years. But, we want to completely transform training in the FIFA 22 mod. In terms of development plans, we want to continue to make tweaks here and there, but the main change is we want to actually add plans. So we can add more roles for training. I'd like to add many from Football Manager like Enganche or Mezzala. We also want to make many changes to the actual training system, such as changing the effects of training on sharpness, energy (hopefully we can decrease the energy decreases so you can do training every day without issue) and morale. We want to make sharpness have a less drastic impact on gameplay like I said before, and we will also try to make sharpness harder to lose, so you will get fewer players with 10 sharpness, etc. We will also change what attributes are expected by what drills, to try to make those more accurate based on what actually happens in the drill. I will also try to change the effect of grades on the training results. I'm in two minds about this, do I make grades a bigger deal, or make them not matter at all? This is something I don't really know about, so please leave a comment with your thoughts (I'll do a Twitter post later too I imagine). Making grades more important has some realism elements, as it kinda replicates how some players train harder (and therefore get more out of training) than others and will develop more because of that. At the same time though, most people just play each drill once and then simulate the rest, so decreasing the impact would be nicer for some people as they wouldn't have to worry so much about getting an A on every drill. So, please let me know about that! I will also try to edit some values that tie in with player growth and relate to XP a lot. This should improve training and player growth at the same time! I could also edit some fundamentals, like how many drills you can do per day. One of the biggest things I want to look into are the drills themselves, I could edit the actual drill files to bring new types of drills. Maybe 11v11, 5v5, etc, or new training drills relating to passing, shooting, defending, etc that coaches actually use in real life! It may also be possible to add completely new drills! This would be a game-changing feature never done before, so I will try as hard as I can to get it working!
• Transfers. Transfers are certainly the hardest part of the core Realism Mod. Mainly, because there are so many files that control them, 31 to be exact (not including player values, release clauses, etc). Player retirement has 1. Youth Scouting? 3. Training? ~10. But it's not just the amount of files. Many are long with lots of values and poorly documented (EA devs usually add many comments to most algorithms, but many transfer files have none/few). That being said, I think the transfers section of the mod in FIFA 21 was pretty good, certainly a big improvement over the FIFA 20 version. Still, it was far from perfect, so we want to focus on it in the FIFA 22 mod. First, we will use real data, something we didn't really do in the FIFA 21 mod. We have already documented the transfer nation movements using Transfermarkt data (thanks to the legendary gnklein92). So, we know that out of all Southern European players (nationality, not region of club), 36% transferred to Southern European clubs, 31% to Eastern European clubs, less than 1% to North American clubs, etc. This will easily be implemented into FIFA and will increase the realism so much, something no other mod has ever done. Hopefully, we will collect more data after the Winter transfer window so we can update these values to be slightly more accurate as time goes on. But we will use real data for many other things too. How many transfers does a club make in a window? This is a big thing I want to redesign for the FIFA 22 mod, to create a better balance. We can set custom transfer activity values for 5 league brackets, so using real data we will figure out which leagues make the most and least transfers and from there assemble brackets and set values that should reflect real-life much better. But we will also use real data for how many transfers of each age group, overall, potential, age, etc. We greatly want to customize this section too, to try to get more transfers of young players, and generally more realism on what players are transferred. This will be part of a larger effort to fix the default FIFA issue of teams stacking up on one position. The biggest complaint of the FIFA 21 mod transfer system is that not enough big-money moves happened, which I agree with. I will be solving this issue for the FIFA 22 mod as well, trying to find a good balance. On a similar topic, I want to replicate teams "overpaying" for players (ie, paying more than the players’ value), which I think can be done, and will really improve the whole system. We will also be trying to perfect the system overall by editing, researching and testing more. In the FIFA 21 mod, we only edited 17 out of 31 files, and that number will drastically increase this year. We will also be editing more of the files we already edited, testing every possible value in order to achieve the perfect balance in the transfer system. I truly believe it's possible, and I think we will achieve it, fixing one of FIFA's biggest issues. Lastly, there were also a lot of (justified) complaints about the negotiation system in the FIFA 21 mod, something we also want to redesign in the new mod. We will try to create a negotiation system where the AI is a hard bargainer, but you can still reduce their demands (or get more money from them) by a decent amount, if you're smart enough, just like Football Manager. The negotiation files are pretty complex, but I will do tons of testing to try to make sure it's as good as possible.

We also want to add so many new features to the core Realism Mod. Here are some:

• Objectives Redesign. Objectives have always been an interesting one for me. FIFA actually has a pretty advanced algorithm for manager objectives, and they added some more functions this year, so there's a ton of potential. In past years I never really had time to dive into these files too much, although I did a few basic edits in the FIFA 20 mod. This year, I want to do a major redesign of the manager objectives system. I want to make existing objectives much more realistic, and based on the mod's changes. Default FIFA's youth academy objectives are already way too hard, and with the mod's changes to the youth academy, they are even harder. So, this year we will make the youth academy objectives much easier (not easy, but not impossible) to achieve. Same for popularity and profitability objectives, we will adjust them based on the mod's changes to reputation and finance. We will also edit objectives to be more realistically generally, based on things that would actually be asked of you in real life (some inspiration will be taken from Football Manager). We will also change the points you get for achieving/not achieving certain objectives, which will mean your manager rating will become so much more realistic. FIFA also has many objectives that are just broken, as in they aren't tracked, so we will remove those. We will also be able to add completely new objectives! I will have to explore this area more, but it's definitely doable and once I've researched more I will look for community feedback based on what they would like to see, plus real-life objectives for managers. I should also mention we will change what expectations are for certain clubs, by editing various values in the squad file. I'll probably mention this briefly in the squad files section, but I'll discuss it here too. Based on real data from Football Manager and various real-life sources, we will set custom importance values for each objective type for each club. This will take a while and will only be for top clubs at the start, but we will increase Barcelona's importance on youth development, but we will also edit values based on current events. We will also increase Barcelona's importance on financial objectives too, considering they are in a bit of crisis currently. We won't go overboard with these changes, but we will make sure they are realistic, balanced, but noticeable. These will greatly increase the realism of objective assignment. There will still be very tough youth academy objectives (although less impossible than before), but only for the clubs that really prioritize youth development. Same for the other objective types. We also want to experiment with player career objectives, something I've never done before. No promises in this area, but I will try my best to use community feedback to increase the realism of player career objectives.
• Expanded Youth Academy/Regen Name Pool. This was an incredibly popular feature in the FIFA 20 mod but never made it into the FIFA 21 mod due to time constraints and the fact EA expanded the name pools quite a bit, increasing the number of first names by 70%, and last names by over 140%. This is a great improvement, but there are still only ~6000 first names and ~9000 last names. This is a lot, but in the FIFA 20 mod, we added ~25k to both the first and last names pool (each). We want to do something similar this year! It will be one of the first priorities in the core Realism Mod after the initial release. The method in which we added the names in the FIFA 20 mod was pretty bad in terms of complexity to carry over to future mods, so we will redo all of the added names, using more & larger sources, to get even more names added, and we will do it in a way where it's very easy to carry over to the FIFA 23 mod. In terms of improvements, we will make one big one. The name pools are separated by countries, and most are contained in two files, one for first names, one for last names. However, some select countries like Spain or Brazil use one file that has set full names. So unlike other countries, say England, where it will randomly take one English name from the first name pool, say Kyle, and one from the last name pool, say Henderson, and combine them into Kyle Henderson, it will instead find a random row which contains both a first name and last name value and read that instead. This means that there are a lot fewer possible names, and instead of first names for nation x last names for nation, it's just the total count of entries. In the FIFA 20 mod, we handled these countries by getting the first names and last names separately from the data source like usual, doing all the work in Excel, and then pasting all the first names in, pasting all the last names in, and randomizing it so each first name got a random last name. However, this resulted in some unrealistic names. So, for the FIFA 22 mod, we will get the data as first and last names together, and after doing all the excel work we will add them together. This means that all the names for these countries will be names someone actually has in real life, and there will also be a much larger name pool for those countries than the FIFA 20 mod, as we will only remove duplicates for first name + last name combos together, rather than individually which means that first/last names were removed even if the other name was different. So, overall, we should re-add this feature in even more detail, in a way that sets it up for the future.
• Competition Details. EA has various files that control settings for competitions. These include more complex things like structure, qualification, etc, but also more simple details, which we will customize in the FIFA 22 mod. These settings include prize money, tiebreakers, what stadiums matches will be played in, celebration level, match importance, fan cards, allow extra sub in extra time, and card rules like how many cards are needed for a ban, and how long the ban should last. We will customize every competition’s setting so they use realistic values, so the rules & info will be the same as real life, etc. We did this for the FIFA 20 mod briefly, but it was only for a few competitions and got overwritten in a later mod update. So having a complete set will be a first for any mod. We will also make some improvements over the way we did it in the FIFA 20 mod, such as treating prize money as prize money + TV money, since there isn't a separate TV money value, and documenting the changes better so we can carry them over to future mods! We may also get a specific editor for these files which will speed up the process.
• Real Weather Probabilities. We introduced realistic weather probabilities in the FIFA 20 mod, but they never made it to the FIFA 21 mod, but we will bring them back this year, better than ever! gnklein92 will compile real weather data from various real weather sources, and I will directly translate that into FIFA. This will be more thorough than the FIFA 20 mod, as we will redo everything to be more accurate and up to date, as well as adding realistic weather for all countries (a total of 30) instead of just 12
• Player Career Changes. EA obviously revamped player career in FIFA 22, with some really great changes. However, like EA tend to do, they made it very arcade-ish, rather than realistic. So, we have a lot of work to do in the mod. Many of the changes that will greatly improve the mode aren't in the core Realism Mod but stuff I already mentioned. Real pre-season tournaments will be big because pre-season is a big thing in player career mode. Real manager names, faces, and minifaces will be big because of all the new cutscenes. The menu revamp will be big to add new features. But haven spoken to many in the community, the biggest issues are A) XP is gained too fast, you can get to level 25 in a few seasons and reach your peak at like 23. B) It's way too easy to become a starter, it can take like a month to become a starter at Man City even when being 70 OVR C) Some perks are way too overpowered, and some can barely be noticed. To fix A), we will drastically decrease the rate XP is gained, so it can take a very long time to grow and reach your peak (in some cases maybe you'll never get to Level 25). I will also be changing how training works in regards to XP, regarding different drills, grades, and simulating vs playing drills. I want to know your thoughts on this area though. Regarding B), I will make it much harder to become a starter (or even bench player) just like in real life, so a random 19-year-old 72 overall player won't get much game time at a big club. I will also try to decrease the overall you start at because starting at 70 OVR doesn't really make much sense, considering that's better than 70% of players in FIFA, and ruins the realism if you want to start at a 3 star or below club. For C), I plan on making tons of changes to perks, editing attribute boots and what conditions trigger them. For perks, especially, but really all aspects of player career, I'm looking for tons of community feedback, so please let me know your thoughts in the comments! But generally, we want to make player career much harder, and increase realism. However, there are more minor things we want to edit too. For instance, we changed the chances of scenarios a player would be subbed onto using real data, so now it's most likely a throw-in, then free kick, etc. We can also edit the scenarios themselves so that the ball isn’t always spawned on the halfway line during free kicks. There are many other values around player career we will likely edit, like the chance of transfer request being accepted, etc, as well as expanding the customization screens as I talked about above. Oh, and I'll save one of the biggest things for last. Tattoos in player career. Yes, that's possible, and it will be in the FIFA 22 mod. You won't be able to edit the tattoo inside a career, but basically, we can edit the presets you see when selecting "Create a Pro" so we will make many of them have tattoos. Since we replace the Volta slots with real player tattoos, the tattoos will be of real players, but many are pretty generic so I will select them wisely, and you won't really notice anything, other than that your player has tattoos! That is something no mod will have ever done before. I could create addon mods that change the IDs of the tattoos for the presets so you could have even more options!

• Editing more files. In the FIFA 21 mod we edited slightly more files than the FIFA 20 mod, but this year we really want to increase that number. As I previously talked about, we will modify a lot more files regarding transfers, training, finance, objectives, player career, player growth, player wages etc. But we will also edit some files relating to in-game commentary stories and warm-up scenes, to make them much more realistic. I will edit a file relating to injuries (more info below), as well lots more regarding youth players, create a club, player recovery, and maybe even some relating to commentary, concurrent matches, news scenes, etc! Overall, I think we will edit another ~50 files, doubling the amount of the FIFA 21 mod!
• Editing more stuff in the DB and InitFS. Outside of the main data files, there are two other files that contain hundreds of other files, you can think of them as archives like a ZIP or a RAR. We will be editing files such as:

Adboards and sponsors: Details a tiny bit later.

Stadiums. Building on the texture and color edits I talked about earlier, we will also edit tons of settings to be more realistic based on the real-life stadium. These include values like goal net style, goal net colour, available weathers and times, police-type, mow pattern, and whether to enable pitch tarps, Mexican wave, center adboard, 360 replay, inflatables, tifo, goal net ads, etc. These will make stadiums much more realistic and aim to make each stadium feel even more different.

Big Match-Ups. We will add many more games to this table. I'm not exactly what this controls, but perhaps news stories, commentary, atmosphere, etc.

Match Intensity. This file controls intensity during various times of the match. I'm not sure if it's actually used, but I'll make the values more realistic nonetheless!

Create Player Presets. These control the presets for when you create a player, manager, or virtual pro for player career mode. By editing these we will be able to assign tattoos in player career mode as I talked about earlier (only at the start though), unlock additional hairstyles for players and managers (only at the start again) and many new combinations of outfits, hairstyles, body types, etc! There are some pretty huge changes we will make in this area!

Crowd Region. This table controls which crowds use which skin tones (which are assigned in the stadiums table). Using real data we will try to make this even more realistic, making each stadium stand out even more!

FIFA Game Settings. This file controls the default settings of FIFA. Editing it will make the user have to create a new profile on the first launch, so I will only edit it if necessary, which will probably be in an addon mod if it happens. This could be used to automatically set a default camera with custom settings, change the default sliders, turf settings, rules, etc, to save the user time. It could also do some backend work with audio settings to allow for custom soundtracks which I will mention later.

SLC. I talked about non-playable characters earlier, and this table contains some more info for them. We can try to customize them, even more, using real data to be the most realistic!

Boots, GK Gloves, Balls, Manager Outfits. We edited these files in the FIFA 20 & FIFA 21 mods too, but this year we will edit them more carefully and frequently to ensure everything is always unlocked. We will also try to remove more of the glitched manager outfits. There was also an issue in the FIFA 21 mod (well, it wasn't an issue with the mod, just how FIFA works) where sometimes not all the unlocked boots are displayed. I figured out what caused that and I will work on a way to fix it!

FIFA Game. This file contains various rendering settings for FIFA. Editing some allows slightly better graphic quality! I'll talk more about this later when I mention the High LOD addon.

Product. Has some interesting gameplay & match times settings!

• Press conferences, emails, news, player conversations and morale redesign. I think everyone can agree that after a couple of months of FIFA 20, the press conferences’ questions & answers got pretty stale, and same for emails and player conversations. We want to change that in the FIFA 22 mod. In previous mods we just made some generic changes to press conferences and player conversations, reducing their impacts on morale. For the initial version of the 22 mod, we will probably do that too, but later on, we will edit every file individually, changing the impact of morale on every answer specifically. Doing this will also let us distinguish between press conference and player conversation answers, as the latter should have a much more drastic impact on morale. Answering a reporter "Yeah, we didn’t play well that game" shouldn’t have a negligible impact on morale. Individually telling a player "I want you out of this club" should. We will also fix many typos, and even edit questions/answers to be more realistic and make more sense. Lastly, we will also edit triggers for various questions or player conversations to fix issues and be much more realistic. We will look to Football Manager for inspiration for lots of that. Those changes will also apply to news articles and emails, refreshing the whole FIFA experience. I also have a tool that makes it much easier to edit these files, so it may even be possible to add new emails, news stories, player conversations or press conference questions/answers, which would be huge! All of that ties into morale too, which I plan to redesign to make much more challenging to maintain a squad harmony, but still realistic.
• Realistic Injuries. This is one of the things I am most excited about! I will completely redesign the injury system based on real data (some from Football Manager, lots of real studies). For every variation (base, medium, severe) and every injury we will customize the body part, whether they have to be hospitalized, recovery time and from there how long to get match fit. No mod has ever done this before and it will bring so much more accuracy to injuries. We will also try to add brand new injuries, increasing realism just that bit more!
• Complete Adboard & Sponsor Revamp. There are very few things I thought were missing from the FIFA 21 Realism Mod. This was one of them. In the previous mods, the most we did for adboards were replacing the default 2D ones (that aren’t used that often) and replacing the generic adboards with random real ones (Nike, Adidas, Xbox, Pepsi, etc). This year, we want to completely redesign the adboard system. Default FIFA is missing tons of adboards for top teams, and for lesser names, most don’t have any sort of custom adboards. We want to change that. For every club, we will go through hours of game footage looking for all. For instance, Arsenal has very few custom adboards. They are missing many like ArsenalDirect.com or SportsBet.io, and the Emirates one is outdated. We will add and update all these in the mod. But of course, we will do that for all teams. We will also make custom adboards, and this may be a lot easier due to something I’ll mention later. There are only a set amount of adboard slots we can replace, but there are many unused ones, and ~200 FUT ones (EA should add more in future FIFA updates too), but we will be careful when adding them. Luckily, most are shared between multiple teams (SportsBet.io sponsors Arsenal, Southampton, São Paulo and Flamengo). This will also fix instances of having Adidas and Nike or Playstation and Xbox adboards in the same match. We will also do the same for competition-specific adboards. We will look to PES and Football Manager to help with this process too. This will be an absolutely huge feature and will make the matchday experience so much better
• New features and existing features updates. This has the potential to be the biggest modding innovation since mesh importing. EA stores a lot of code about features as SWF files, but are converted to an EA-specific format. We already have a program to convert the EA-specific format to XML and back, which lets us make simple edits (remove or change the position of certain elements). However, based on some recent progress, I’m extremely confident we will be able to convert these to SWF (or the FLA and AS) and back. This means we can make major changes to existing features. We can move elements with more precision, but also change text styles, add whole new elements, change the logic of existing ones, meaning we can fix EA bugs and even change how things work. Potentially we could add more countries to be able to scout youth players from! Or show the nationality of players on team selection. Fundamentally change the menu. Change the calendar. Change the job offers UI. Change what info gets displayed to you when selecting a team. Unlimited save slots. Allow changing of your stadium at any point for any team in career mode. Add new cool adboard stuff. Add new scoreboard (or other overlay stuff like lineup UI) content. Even minor stuff like editing the slow-motion replay speed. Or, we even add brand new features! There would also be tons more stuff we could do, some even much more major, but it’s hard to give too many details before I’ve had a better look. There is also the potential to bring back old features like Squad Report or Request Funds, or even add whole new features! However, it will be a very costly and lengthy process to develop these tools, so no promise it will happen in the end, but I will dedicate a lot of time to this and if it happens, it will be huge. I promise to try everything I can to get this working!

Okay, so those are all the stuff feature-wise. But there’s one last thing, and that’s added leagues/competitions/teams. I’m hoping to include the missing Champions and Europa League teams (and a few UCEL ones) in the first release, plus the full Brazilian League. Now, that’s not a promise, but I’ll try my best.

The missing CL/EL/CEL teams will have these improvements:

• We will have better team ID selection, we will try to make sure all teams have a home & away kit, plus crests. Most of the added teams in the FIFA 20 & 21 mod only had home kits, and some were missing crests, so this is a big improvement!
• We will treat them more like other teams. We will try to make sure a pretty large portion of their players have minifaces, and we will try to get lots of their players’ real faces!

We will (probably) also add Maccabi Tel Aviv, Partizan and Qarabag for the Europa Conference League.

And for the Brazilian league, there was a surprising amount of negative feedback I got in the survey, most of it didn’t make sense, lots were requests for the real Brazilian league even though it was already included. Talking to some sensible people who were avid fans of the league, they all said they were very happy with how it was included in the 21 mod, but they had a few main suggestions for improvements:

1. Include the mod in the first release
2. Add minifaces for more players
3. Add better quality/more real faces
4. Add more missing players and make stats more realistic

We will try our best to do #1. We will also do #2, trying to add minifaces for the vast majority of players. For #3 I’ve partnered with PedroFifa77 to get ~40 faces for the FIFA 22 Realism Mod.

We will also work with more facemakers to make more Brazilian league faces. Compared to the FIFA 21 mod we will probably improve ~25 existing Brazilian league faces, and add another ~25, but probably more! And I will do #4 too, using Football Manager as a base for many players’ stats, plus a large amount of the community’s feedback, but I’ll discuss this more in the realistic ratings section.

But we also want to add more competitions too. We will try to add the Club World Cup and CONCACAF Champions League just like past mods. But due to something big I’ll discuss later, we should have more space to add more competitions, so I would love to hear your suggestions! Something I heard in the survey was people wanting more leagues. This is something I’ll look into more, but unlikely to happen in the Realism Mod itself due to the sheer complexity. However, a great friend of mine and legendary modder is considering creating his own addons to the Realism Mod to add new leagues! I’ll try to provide more info about this when I can.

In terms of progress, we have done a ton of research and testing for the core FIFA 22 Realism Mod, and already finished a lot of the algorithms!

We may also be able to use the new assignment system for some things, mainly teamkit settings. I’m still skeptical about this as it may make users’ own kit edits harder to make, but still not sure. I’ll think about this more, working with various community members to see what they are thinking too.

Lastly, timelines. The core Realism Mod will be included in the first release obviously. It will contain all the FIFA 21 features, plus tons of improvements. As time goes on we will continue to innovate the mod adding many of those redesigns and new features, as well as constantly fixing bugs and making subtle improvements throughout the mod. This is something new, as in the FIFA 21 mod, after the initial release we barely touched the core mod.

So yeah, so much stuff is planned for the main mods! On that topic there is one more thing I have to mention… oh yeah, we are adding a new main mod!

Manager Outfits Mod

No, this is not the same as all the manager outfit optional mods, although those will continue. This is one mod that will contain tons of manager outfits for real-life managers. Yes, you can equip these to your own manager, but the main use is that the AI managers will use them! This is a huge feature. When you play Liverpool (or negotiate with them, or see them in the news) you’ll get Klopp in his signature coat or Tuchel in his tracksuit!

I think the mod will make so many aspects of career mode much better! We want to add real manager outfits to all managers in the Premier League, and most (if not all) in La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1, plus lots of managers outside the top 5 leagues.

Throughout the FIFA cycle we will continuously update various manager outfits based on manager’s real-life fashion decisions, also opening a Manager Outfit suggestion channel!

Working with my good friends Bromley and LNMODDER we have already made manager outfits for all managers in the EPL, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A. All of them should be included in the first release of the mod plus many more!

Expanded National Team Experience

Now… this is a big one. The expanded national team mod won’t be included in the first release of the FIFA 22 mod, if ever. Now, hear me out.

First, the national mod was great in previous FIFAs, adding ~50 new national teams and adding/improving many tournaments. However, it also had a lot of side effects:

• Most added teams only had a Home and GK Kit, and some were missing banners, flags, and/or crests
• Many of the added teams rosters were quite outdated, and lots were missing minifaces
• Sometimes added teams would forfeit games
• Stats weren’t tracked at the World Cup
• Added national teams sometimes weren’t working for player career
• There were some crashes and generally instability

However, the main reason is the sheer complexity from a modding perspective.

In the FIFA 20 mod, we implemented it using a method where it was just an addon mod, you could use the normal realism squad file. However, that caused the issue where the game would crash on edit player, something which many people complained about. To address this, in the FIFA 21 mod we used a method where we had to use two different squad files and DBs. Either method has its issues, but both are equally complex and a nightmare from a modding perspective.

• It requires two separate sets of compdata. Compdata is one of the hardest things to mod. One single mistake and boom, the game will crash. Having two separate sets resulted in many issues. It was much harder to make edits, add new tournaments, fix bugs, etc. For instance, the Club World Cup and CONCACAF CL had issues in later versions of the FIFA 21 mod, with the two sets of compdata being the cause. Plus, making big compdata edits as we had to for the national teams mod caused instability and limited our ability to add other things. It also took so much longer to update after a big FIFA update, slowing down new releases.
• Same thing for the squad file. Having two makes making edits to them so much more complex to edit, and adding so much to the squad file like we had to do caused issues and limited our ability to add other stuff.
• And same thing again for databases. I won’t repeat it all again but having two databases made everything harder.
• About the databases, it made it much harder for users to make DB edits, which are required for FIFA Kit Creator mods
• After the FIFA 21 CONMEBOL update, we had to introduce "Old National Careers Loader Mod". This meant another database, causing extreme complexity.
• Graphics and other stuff. ~50 new national teams means 50 new sets of kits, 50 logos, 50 team name updates, etc. These were costly and time-consuming to create and import.

Plus, it made testing so much harder. We had to test two different sets of compdata, squad files, databases etc. Preparing for a release (talking more about that later) became a process that took hours. Creating all four squad files, not easy either.

It wasn’t great for users either. Using the wrong squad file/mod combination would result in crashing when trying to start a career. Apply the wrong mod? You wouldn’t be able to load an old career until you disabled that mod. I’d say a large percentage of issues involved the national team experience in some way.

And I know what you want to tell me right now. FIFA lost the license to so many more national teams in FIFA 22, we need the mod more than ever! That’s one (valid) way to look at it, sure.

However, it’s also completely unmotivating. Even if we made the same mod, adding ~50 teams would have a smaller impact because you’d still be missing ~20 teams compared to FIFA 21 modded. All the added teams would only have a home and GK kit again, as well as some missing banners/flags/crests. EA removed (or depleted) many international tournaments too. So we wouldn’t be able to have a similar amount of tournaments either. And since added national teams didn’t work great in player careers, I really don’t see the appeal.

This is a massive change in direction of two of our aiming pillars, better stability and faster releases. Because we don’t have to deal with the complexity of the national mods, the initial release will be so much faster. And, subsequent releases will be incredibly quick. After the big FIFA 21 CONMEBOL update, it took ~2.5 months to update. Main cause? Expanded national team mod. This year, I expect that 2.5 months to be more like a week or two, if that.

I know this will be an unpopular decision, but I want you guys to understand that gnklein92 and I make every decision based on what’s good for the mod. And in this case, we think the pros outweigh the cons. Having the mod was truly a nightmare for me.

Not all hope is lost though, after the CONMEBOL update, I won’t rule out doing some sort of national team mod. Maybe it will be full, maybe it will be scaled back and just add the major missing teams, or the ones EA lost the license to. But of course, no promises.

Backgrounds

FIFA made the background system a bit more complex this year, so the backgrounds will have to be converted slightly but nothing major. They are really a back thought and will only be worked on when more major stuff is done. That being said, hopefully, a few - at least for some big leagues - will be included in the initial release, with more being added over time.

To help with clarity, I’ll rename backgrounds to "Menu Backgrounds" and the individual themes to "Checkers Style" and "Stadium Style".

In terms of changes to the mod themselves, we will hope to create a background mod for every team in FIFA, as some were missing in last year’s mod. Maybe we will try to create more checker-style ones, or get a new template made for something different. We could also make league, player or manager-specific backgrounds. I’d love to hear what people think about this! Let us know if any of the background mods should be changed or updated as well.

Finally, for second, third, and fourth divisions, we will also replace the top league background, not just the generic one. This will fix instances where a background mod for a Ligue 2 club wouldn’t really work once you got promoted into Ligue 1.

Fantasy Kits

This is actually an area of the mod where we want to make substantial improvements to! I think fantasy kits are a really cool area of the mod, as changing kits every season is one of the best perks of playing on PC in my eyes.

But this year, we want to completely redesign the fantasy kits system. The current fantasy kits have been the same since the FIFA 20 mod, where we worked with many kit makers to design custom kits. This led to many issues, aside from inconsistent quality and style, such as missing/bad detail files (coeff, normal, taas), bad minikits, wrong hotspots (positions and sizes of name/numbers), and also incorrect teamkits. We plan to fix all of these issues in the FIFA 22 mod!

Due to limited time, the first release of the mod will contain the same fantasy kits (maybe missing some or even all, depending on how much time we get) as the previous mods, but once we get some more time, we may start completely from scratch, removing all previous fantasy kits. However, we will get some community feedback on this decision, and if many are opposed we may keep them as legacy fantasy kits.

But the new system will solely rely on FIFA Kit Creator, the amazing tool developed by the guys behind PES Kit Creator. We will open a channel in our server to submit fantasy kits made with it. Community members can submit fantasy kits for users to individually download and then (with permission, of course) we will include them in the mod, which will quickly grow to a huge collection! This fixes the issues of inconsistent quality/style, missing/bad detail files, and wrong hotspots. We will fix the incorrect teamkits (the file that controls various kit settings, mainly the collar, name/number font, and name/number color) with the new assignment system (or potentially a new FET feature, but probably the first idea)! But basically, the kits from FIFA Kit Creator should include a config file that you can apply to your career in a few seconds with FIFA Mod Manager, which will update all the necessary settings while keeping the main mod’s changes

Manager Outfits

Earlier, we talked about that main Manager Outfits mod, but the optional 1 team per mod ones will continue!

Because of the various manager outfits we will have to replace for the main mod, choosing IDs for the optional mods will be a bit tricky, so certain outfits may have to be excluded. Otherwise, the FIFA 21 manager outfit mods should be the same as the FIFA 20 versions, but we will try to include a ton more! In fact, in the past year, we have had ~170 teams worth of optional manager outfits made, but not imported due to lack of time. Hopefully, we will get some time to do them this year! We will also use feedback from the aforementioned manager outfit suggestion channel for the optional addons.

Optional Faces

These are something that a lot of users had issues with in the FIFA 21 mod, so we will be making some big changes to increase their value and ease of use. They are also the most popular type of addon mod. For starters, I want to make some changes to the "Optional Face Variants" part. They are there to provide different variations of faces (face updates and new faces) already in the mod. There are two kinds, different elements, or different styles. Different elements mean something about the face is generally different, like a different hairstyle, a beard, etc. Different style means the face has similar hair/facial hair, but just looks a bit different. In terms of style, there are generally two, "Natural" which tries to blend into how EA faces look, and "Detailed" which sometimes have a bit more contrast than the EA faces, but generally have more detail. Neither is always better and generally, they depend on personal preference, although there are probably more detailed ones in the mod than natural, so natural takes up the larger portion of optional face variations.

However, this certainly caused some confusion. In the FIFA 22 mod, we will separate different elements and different styles into separate folders. Perhaps, it makes more sense to create one big addon for the different styles? So there could be an addon called "Natural Style Face Addon" that would make some of the mod faces more natural, and then a mod for the opposite. But I am looking for feedback in this area.

And then there were "Optional New Faces". These mods enabled users to use specific individual faces that weren’t in the main face mods, but they were one of the most confusing parts of the mod for users, as you would have to manually assign the face (the ID was in the mod description) and also manually make the used face generic. This was unclear and not easy for most users, so I want to change that in this year’s mod. First, because of the new face assignment system, they will be so much easier to use, as they will apply automatically by just using the mod!

But I think I have a better idea for the format. We could bundle together multiple faces into addon mods. We could do these by team, league, or nation. So for instance there could be a "Stoke City Optional Faces Addon" or an "EFL Championship Optional Faces Addon" or a "Polish Optional Faces Addon". Each would include a good amount of faces (for teams, maybe 5? 10? For leagues/nations, maybe more like 20-40?) that aren’t in the main face mods, as the players aren’t good/popular enough. We could do the same for manager faces too.

Now, a question would be how many could be used at once. I could either make all the optional new faces mods use the same set of IDs, so you can only use one max, make them all use unique IDs, or use a few sets of IDs, so you could use a Championship and League One face addons together, but not Championships and Polish face addons.

This would be very costly for me though, as faces get quite pricey, but if there was enough demand it could for sure happen at a larger scale than just one or two mods. I think this would be a great use for the "Custom Face Tier" on Patreon though, which I could promote more and get more people to sign up to, which leads to more faces for everyone.

Of course, let me know your thoughts about this! Would you like to see the new system? Keep how it is? Or do both? Leave a comment!

4th Kits

I talked about this in the graphics mod, but I thought I would go into more detail here because I’m still unsure if I should include them in the main mod.

Fourth kits were a cool addition in the FIFA 21 mod, some addon mods that replaced various team’s third kits with the fourth kits they use in real life. We want to add these for the FIFA 22 mod too (well, 21/22 fourth kits, of course), with a few changes.

• Better teamkits (various kit settings, talked about it earlier). Just like fantasy kits, eventually, we will use a new system using FET that will be able to automatically apply teamkit changes to your own careers. This will maximize compatibility and fix the thing users complained the most about regarding 4th kits.
• Hotspot Edits. We will also edit the hotspot files (control the positions and sizes of various elements) when required, something we never really did in the FIFA 21 mod, increasing the quality of these kits even further.
• More 4th kits. We also want to add more 4th kits throughout the cycle, opening a suggestion channel for them.
• No more replacing 3rd kits? Like I talked about earlier, due to a new method, we can "add" kits. So, if I don’t decide to make the 4th kits part of the core mod, they could be addons but still adding kits instead of replacing the third kits. Of course, this has the downside of no minikit (unless we figure out legacy duplication in FET or use the live editor). So let me know what you think about this!

Timeline-wise, fourth kits are very much not a priority and probably won’t be looked at until most or all real GK kits are done.

Unemployed Manager Faces Addon

As I talked about in the Manager Faces section, we will be including the Unemployed Manager Faces Addon addon inside the main manager faces addon. This is to reduce complexity, as having separate mods led to more confusion and work for me and you guys, plus using another 5-10 IDs isn’t a big deal. I don’t think all unemployed manager faces will be carried over from the FIFA 21 mod, as many got jobs (Walter Mazzarri, Thiago Motta, etc) and for some I doubt they were used, like Carlos Queiroz or Gaizka Garitano. I will hold a poll where you guys can vote on which will remain in the mod. That being said, I want to expand the number of unemployed manager faces in the main mod. Some will be carried over from the FIFA 21 manager faces mod, mainly ones who were sacked or are unemployed, like Thierry Henry or Andrea Pirlo, but others will be made from scratch and added as we have done with Vicente del Bosque. I’d love to add more, even if they aren’t managers, but just club legends. As Well as say, assistant managers, so you could do a manager career with Pepijn Lijnders or someone like that. Any ideas? We will again listen to the community and do a poll, as well as opening a suggestion channel for unemployed/retired managers to add.

If the amount of unemployed manager faces grows too large, perhaps we will go back to the addon mod model, however, I think that’s quite unlikely.

Half Sleeves Addon

To my surprise, this was actually a pretty popular mod, although in FIFA 21 it had a clipping issue due to mesh updates in the new game. This year, we want to fix that, and we won’t include the mod until it is fixed. I’ll be working alongside very talented modelers like Keparik to try to recreate the mod in all of its glory. In fact, this leads to even more possibilities than before, which I’ll talk about later.

High LOD Addon

This was a pretty cool mod that made its debut in the FIFA 21 mod. It should be in the FIFA 22 mod too, with some improvements! If you were unaware, LOD means Level of Detail, so the addon slightly increased the quality of players in-game, nothing too noticeable but a nice improvement. However, in the menu, they looked the same. That’s until now, at least. Royalbluesupporter shared some interesting values with me that can slightly (actually, pretty noticeably) increase the quality of renderings in the menu. A really nice change in my eyes. If you are wondering why this is an addon, it’s because it requires slightly more PC performance.

No Crowd Addon

This mod will continue for the third year in a row. Not too much else to say really. Most leagues now have in-person attendance again, but I’m sure some don’t, plus it probably requires less PC performance. There is also another method to remove the crowd that would remove crowd sound but keep ball and game noises, so perhaps I could look into that. Some leagues now have only 50% attendance or some other figure, so I could create a "Half Crowd Addon" or something. Would that interest people?

Scoreboards

This is an area of the mod I really want to expand this year. We added some more scoreboards in the FIFA 21 mod, but I think we can do even more. I will be working with the legend that is Ege to make more scoreboards, but also pairing up with a few of my graphic designer friends to try to create some independently, where they will make the graphics and I’ll do the assembly bit (the harder part generally). We have some more tools available to us to speed up this process, and more will be developed this year. I think we can easily add another 10, maybe even 15 or 20 (or more?) scoreboards this year, for tons of competitions. I will create polls and a suggestions channel too. Stay tuned in this area!

Stadiums

I also want to work on this area of the mod more. The Camp Nou Replica mod will continue, although renamed to "Camp Nou Lookalike", but I want to try to introduce a few more stadium lookalikes too. Perhaps Allianz Arena, Allianz Stadium, and some others. Most of these probably won’t be as accurate as the Camp Nou lookalike, it really depends on how close existing stadiums in FIFA are, as all we can currently do is change various colors and textures. However, there is a chance that we will get CompositeMeshAsset importing sometime, which would allow us slightly more freedom with stadiums. Plus, with the aforementioned new mod manager features, applying stadiums should be so much easier.

TV Logos

This is another pretty cool part of the mod I feel, but something I overlooked in recent times. There are plenty of TV logos in the mod, but there are also plenty missing, and many are low quality, outdated, or have bad positions. So for the FIFA 22 mod, me and gnklein92 will go through various TV logos, making improvements or completely redoing some. We will then look for suggestions on new TV logos to make. There are currently 30 unique ones in the mod, and I’m hoping to double that!

Squad File

This is a huge one. The squad file contains an incredible amount of database stuff, relating to teams, players, leagues, etc. So, let’s get into it.

General Changes

• More stability. We will be more careful with squad file edits, as one minor mistake can cause crashes. I’ve noted down lots of common mistakes and will make sure I avoid them.
• Faster.  With new tooling developed by FET, I’m hoping we can have a new squad file editor to replace the great, but also a bit old, RDBM. This will allow us to make changes much faster. There should also be a UI that will make many changes so much easier.
• More compatibility. A huge perk of the potential new FET squad file editor is the ability to save just the changes to a squad file, and then apply those changes all at once to any squad file. This means that you could easily apply the Realism Mod’s changes to your own squad file (or even career!), but more excitingly, it could also be applied to a winter squad file, bringing winter squad files to the Realism Mod for the first time ever!
• One Squad File. This is another change to help stability and ease of use. There were 4 squad files in the FIFA 21 mod, and we will eliminate 2 by removing the expanded national team mod. But there would still be two, one with faces and tattoos applied and one without them applied. Because of the new assignment system, we no longer have to edit the database values for new faces, manager faces, referee faces nor tattoos! This means that we can just use one squad file which doesn’t have the faces applied, but then using the face mods will apply them, because of the new assignment system. This makes it a lot easier for me, but for you guys too!

Specific Changes

• Realistic Ratings. This is one of my favourite areas of the mod, although it is a controversial one (maybe the wrong word, but some people weren’t huge fans in the survey results). Ratings are the fundamentals of FIFA, everything relies on them. Realistic ratings drastically increase realism in gameplay, form, training, AI team selection, morale, player growth, player values, player wages, player retirement, simulation, transfers and more. We vastly improved how we create realistic ratings in the FIFA 21 mod, completely redesigning the Football Manager to FIFA stats formula, making the FIFA stats so much more realistic. I think there were very few complaints about them in the FIFA 21 mod compared to the FIFA 20 mod, but there’s always room for improvement. This year we will look at the formula again to see if any changes are necessary, and Football Manager 2022 will be out soon with even more realistic stats, but the main improvement will be consistency. In the FIFA 21 mod, some ratings were done without Football Manager and were less accurate, that won’t happen this year. But mainly, we will do realistic ratings for so many more teams, ideally the top five leagues and tons of other teams outside them. This will be made possible due to new tool features, which will make converting stats from FM to FIFA 10x faster. These ratings will increase realism in all areas as previously mentioned, but especially simulation. FIFA tends to fairly rate/slightly overrate (generally of course, there are individual teams/players that are underrated) big teams, and vastly underrate smaller teams, leading to big teams winning the league with too many points. The mod reduces this as much as possible, but especially for other leagues, the core issue is ratings, which we will properly fix this year! Now for those who aren't fans of the ratings, perhaps there could be an option to disable them, although that seems like a lot of unnecessary work. A better solution I’ll implement will be a rating suggestion channel to suggest and debate ratings (both OVR/POT and individual stats).
• Transfer Budgets. Budgets were also a thing that caused some complaints and confusion in the FIFA 21 mod, but also something that was also very realistic, although inconsistent. First of all, COVID is happening so teams are obviously a bit short on cash, and secondly, when you start a career in FIFA you already get the players the teams signed in real life during that window, so it makes sense that the budgets are pretty low. Some people said "Why do Chelsea only have 15 million in the mod, but they spent 100+ on Lukaku in real life?", and the answer is that they signed Lukaku in the 21/22 season, and the FIFA 21 mod had budgets for the 20/21 season. If you had a similar season to Chelsea in the FIFA 21 mod, you’d also get 100+ million for the 21/22 season. So, I don’t think the budgets need drastic changes, just more consistency. Obviously, we will convert from Football Manager 22, so budgets will be different and more accurate to the current season. Some teams will have more, like Arsenal will have around 20 million euros, but some will have less, like Barcelona. However, we want to generally decrease all team’s budgets, and then make individual edits (we want to make more individual edits too), so that all teams, even outside the big leagues also have a lot less budget. This means budgets will be more consistent across the board. For those who aren’t fans of realistic budgets (a decent amount based on the survey), the good news is that only the team you control has a budget, other teams use a collection of their player values. And you can always increase your budget before creating the career in the career settings window, so I think there’s an option for everyone here!
• Real Team Tactics. This is a huge change, which I mentioned briefly in the gameplay section. In the FIFA 20 and 21 mod we edited in-game tactics for a few teams here and there, but this year we want to do that for every team in the top 5 leagues, plus many more outside of them. We will also edit secret database values very few mods have ever edited, which are the key to replicating real-life styles. We will use data from Football Manager itself and external tactics for the game, but mainly real data from places like Fbref, WhoScored, Wyscout and SmarterScout. This will make gameplay so much more realistic and engaging, going up against teams that play in so many different ways. Burnley will no longer play Tiki Taka, for instance. We will also customize how teams play against different qualities of teams, so for instance Roma will play differently against a relegation side than against Juventus. We will also open a tactics suggestion channel for users to talk about tactics and changes for me to implement in the mod.
• Team Details. We also want to edit tons more team details which will make each team feel different. Like I said earlier, we will customize objective settings, but that’s just one part of what we plan to do. We will also edit team’s crowdregion ethnicity and skintone, which controls settings about each team’s crowd, league titles, Champions league, Europa league, and domestic cup count, foundation year, goal net colors, jersey type, team colors, location, whether they have a flame thrower cannon, large flag, standing crowd, substitution board, tifo, viking clap, banners, competition cards, pole flag, scarfs, skinny flags, goal net pattern and style, mow pattern and flame thrower. I also managed to change the training stadium teams use (thanks to a reminder from nol, petke), and it can be changed per team, so in theory, I could make each team train in their game stadium. This obviously isn’t realistic as teams train at a separate ground (although perhaps there are teams that do train at their stadium that are in FIFA? Any ideas?), but it is super cool and makes doing training drills quite refreshing. Let me know your thoughts on this, should I include it in the main squad file? Not at all? As an addon or something?
• Added Wonderkids. A lot of people asked for this in the survey and throughout the year generally, so we are delivering! We will add tons of wonderkids, mainly from Football Manager, that aren’t in FIFA 22. I’m not sure how many players we will add, hopefully by the end of the modding cycle it will be up to at least 100, but I’m aiming for a few hundred at least. We will try to make all their stats, info and appearance realistic, and I’ll try to make sure a good amount have minifaces and even real in-game faces! I think this adds one of the few things the FIFA 21 mod, adding so many possibilities to your careers, getting to sign, manage and play with/against players like Youssoufa Moukoko or Naci Ünüvar.
• Player Grudges. FIFA has a table for player grudges with teams, which means the game won’t let said team sign with them. However, some of these are unrealistic, like Neymar and Barca, because he’s been linked with a return every season. So, in this year’s mod we want to remove unrealistic ones, while also adding tons of new ones based on Football Manager, like Ramsdale with MK Dons. These only apply if you use Strict negotiation, so I recommend you do that for all your careers, although it can be changed for an already-started career with RDBM (and later the Mod Manager).
• Competition and League Details. Similar to teams, there are tons of competition/league-specific details that we will customize based on real data! This includes stuff like importance, goal-scoring record, crowd region and skin tone, colors, language region, adboard stuff, whether the competition uses abba penalties, celebration arched board, backboard, media pen, sponsor board and stage, custom bibs, goal jingle, goa net ads, goal-line tech, tarp ads, large flag, mascot, media rope, standing crowd, Viking clap, inflatables, anthem, confetti, team portrait, archway, ball plinth, banners, pitch flag, champion board, competition crowd cards, competition flag pole, scarfs, flame thrower cannon, handshake board, injury board, stadium dressing, flamethrower, vanishing spray, pitch graphics, pedestal, pitch branding, pitch tarps, 360 replay, and more. Editing these values will bring competitions to life!
• Formations. There aren’t any major changes planned, but we may be able to create a new formation or two, so let me know of any suggestions! We can also certainly adjust existing ones, perhaps there are some with CMs that should be CDMs or vice versa. Again, I want to hear ideas for this!
• Better Stadium Assignment. I talked about stadium updates and potentially more stadium addons earlier, but this is another area in the goal to improve stadiums overall. For teams without a real stadium, we will try to match them to a stadium that’s more realistic than the currently assigned one. We will assign real or generic stadiums, as long as they are more accurate than default FIFA.
• Referee Details. Aside from referee faces, we want to customize more referee details too. Gnklein92 went through everything and did real referee names which will be implemented in the mod for the first-ever time, but we also want to customize skin tones, heights, body types, boots, and foul/card strictness from Transfermarkt. This will really increase the personalization of refs, and maybe you will start screaming their name at your PC when they make a bad call!
• Manager Details. We want to do something similar to managers. Like last year, Gnklein92 has done real manager names, but we will make sure to keep those more up-to-date than the FIFA 21 mod. We also want to customize skin tones, heights, weights, body types, and more to make every interaction feel more real.
• Better Generic Faces. We may also try to customize generic faces more accurately, for players, managers and referees. This could be by simply editing the hairstyles, skin tones, etc, but we could also try a method where we are able to use create player faces for these characters, meaning a ton more customization.
• More Rivals. Some rivalries seem to be missing in FIFA, so based on data from sites like Wikipedia, and games like Football Manager, we will add tons, to create new storylines and narratives!
• More Previous Teams. In FIFA, there is a table that contains teams players previously played for. However, tons are missing, such as Inter, United and Everton for Lukaku! We want to try to add some new ones, which will lead to many new scenarios and news stories to make every career more interesting!

Timeline-wise, don’t expect too many of these changes to apply in the first release, most of it is low priority so will be looked at later on. But I think these changes will really take the mod to the next level, doing things no mod has ever done before!

Other Potential New Mods

I’ll quickly discuss some other new addon mods that could be added in the FIFA 22 mod sometime. No promises, but please voice your support if any of these catch your interest, as demand is really key for these.

• Play as a real manager. This is something I will definitely include. Using the new assignment system, I’ve made something revolutionary. An addon mod that allows you to select real managers to play as. See below.

Yes, it’s so cool. And because of the new main manager outfits mod, they can all have their real-life outfits too! Yes, it was possible in the past to play as a real manager via RDBM, but it was pretty complicated and using a real outfit was even harder. Here it’s literally as simple as selecting one. This will be of course an addon mod, as we want to keep the ability to create your own manager. But we will create more than just 1 addon mod too. We can create one with the manager faces in the above screenshot, and then another one with Graham Potter, Frank Lampard, Ralph Hasinutel, Thomas Tuchel, Marcelo Gallardo, Julian Nagelsmann, etc. We can also create one with the aforementioned unemployed manager faces mod, so there can be an addon for Sir Alex Ferguson, Wenger, etc. And club legends too, like there could be one for Ronaldinho, one for Drogba, etc. All will be super easy to use, just apply the mod! This is one of the biggest things in the FIFA 22 mod, something that has never been possible before. I’ve played with it for a bit, and it’s hard to express how awesome it is. See a little clip on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/RI5446NnNvo Simply amazing!

• Menu Themes. These were in the FIFA 20 mod but didn’t return for the FIFA 21 mod as EA made them much more complex. However, we could totally make them in the FIFA 22 mod (would take some work though). We could do specific colors (Red and White, Black and Blue), or do stuff to match team/league backgrounds, like we could combine a background and menu mod into an "Arsenal Theme" mod. Or, even a black and gold menu + background one called the "Realism Mod Theme"!
• Youth 3D Faces. We already have a mod for youth minifaces, but we could create an addon for real youth in-game faces (3D). These could either be individual mods, or as part of one big addon. How many? Probably not that many, maybe like 20. There could be some ones with some pretty crazy hairstyles or stuff. I could either set them up to be manually assigned via Cheat Table, Live Editor, RDBM or in the Mod Manager, or automatically assigned to specific players (but they might not be your players) via the same system as we are now using for face assignments.
• New Hair and facial hairstyles. We could probably add new hair and facial hairstyles to be used by created players and managers, like a proper 3D beard. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
• New sleeves, accessories, etc. There is already a half sleeves addon, but we could create new sleeve types, and go even further than sleeves. More sock types, ankle tapes, short and jersey styles, new accessories, etc. We could have this as one big addon mod, separate addon mods, or even in a main mod and then assign them to players based on what they wear in real life. No promises, but I’d love to hear what you guys think about this, and if you have any ideas!
• Volta Revamp. Highly doubtful, but I could create a mod that makes Volta gameplay a lot more fun, and maybe makes some more adjustments to the mode. Maybe a squad file with real Futsal players?
• FUT Revamp. Again, not likely, but something to make Ultimate Team better? You can actually use mods online, just not the gameplay mod. I wouldn’t add/change anything to give people an unfair advantage, but maybe there are improvements to the menu that could be made? Or specific Ultimate Team graphics? Any ideas?
• Kit Short Alternatives. Some teams have multiple variants of shorts for the same kit, so I could create addon mods for different ones for different teams for example Manchester United's black or white shorts.
• Alternative GK Kits. Similar to above, most teams have a home and away GK kit, yet FIFA only has one, so there could be addons for different ones (probably just for the main 5 leagues).
• Referee Kits. EA actually added some referee kits in FIFA 22, which I appreciate, but they still only have real ones for the top 5 leagues plus CONMEBOL, EFL, Eredivisie, FA and Recopa, meaning most leagues are missing them. I think we will create addons for different leagues and competitions  (maybe not all, but at least a good amount) editing the generic ref kit to be real. This will provide another bit of realism no other mod or game provides!
• Retro Kits. I could work with some kit makers to bring back some classic/retro kits! Is anyone interested in that?
• Team Mods. This could be an addon to the Background+Menu theme, changing various menu images to be about that team.
• Agent Mods. Currently, agent faces are taken from the managers table, based on which managers have their "hashighqualityhead" value set to 0. By adding rows to the managers table with the value at 0, team ID some non-existent one and then whatever head ID, plus setting some, all, or none of the existing manager’s hashighqualityhead values to 1 I could add some faces into the existing pool, or completely replace the existing pool, only using real agent faces. I could work with various facemakers to create these. Obviously we couldn’t assign these to specific players so it would just be random, but we could have an addon for say 10-20, with names like Jorge Mendes, Mino Raiola, etc. In fact, this could even be a new main mod or inside an existing one.
• Soundtrack Mods. I am incredibly confident we will get some sort of audio import this year, which will be revolutionary. Hopefully, even if it’s a bit of a workaround, we will be able to have custom soundtrack mods!

So, let’s discuss the final section of the actual modding stuff. My much-requested plans for Create a club…

So there’s three things that people really want to know about, crests, kits and stadiums. Let’s start about how all are handled in FIFA.

Crests: Every create a club crest is stored individually, there are 3857 total.

Kits: Kits are stored as RGB templates, which the game then converts to whatever colors you select in game, same for the minikit.

Stadiums: The game just stores the ID, not sure where all the customization options are stored.

I will create an optional Create a Club expansion mod, but the main thing is the customization you can do yourself. You can change your crest to whatever you want with the FIFA Editor Tool, same for Kits. FIFA Kit Creator has a Create a Club kit creator tool that can create kits using the RGB system meaning you can customize the colors in-game. But you can also use non-rgb kits (created yourself, imported from other teams, or created using the normal FIFA Kit Creator), but of course, you won’t be able to edit the colors in FIFA. If you want to do the second option however, you will have to make a minor career file edit with RDBM.

Edited Kit using the RGB System.

Edited Kit not using the RGB System + Imported Logo.

You can also edit the GK kit, which doesn’t use the RGB system

Third (and probably 4th) kits can also be added via simple career file edits.

For Stadiums, I’ve managed to unlock all Stadiums for use in create a club. So you can use Old Trafford or the San Siro! For real stadiums, they can’t be customized of course, but still a really cool thing I think.

So yeah, the main thing I will be doing for create a club is creating documentation and tutorials on how to do all this stuff yourself, since it is create your club, not mine, so you should have the customization.

That being said, I want to create a Create a Club Expansion addon mod. I’ve managed to extract almost 60,000 real club logos from Football Manager, but the vast majority are from lower league or completely foreign clubs 99% of people won’t recognize, but they still look real, so perfect for create a club. In the mod, I plan to replace all the existing create a club logos, with new ones.

There is a very basic version I whipped up in an hour. The final version will look much better as we will crop and upscale the images better, and remove low-quality and bad color (ones that aren’t visible on a light or dark background, as unlike other logos, create a club ones have just one variation).

There are almost 60,000 logos available, yet only ~4,000 create a club ones to replace, so it’s possible I could create other addons to offer alternate options, and perhaps I will, but generally, I think if you aren’t happy with any of the ~4,000 mod ones you might as well just create your own. But let me know your thoughts on that.

In terms of kits, I guess we could just prepare many kits using the RGB system, replacing all the old templates. These would include many different patterns,

Above are some examples of what that might look like. Still a work in progress of course, the final version would have better quality minikits, updated hotspots and would be more refined generally.

I could also create separate addons for create-a-club for adding fictional teams or teams that aren’t in FIFA, such as Hashtag United, AFC Richmond, Sidemen FC, Icons FC, etc.

So yeah, those are my plans for create a club. Looking for ideas, suggestions and feedback in this area so please let me know!

General Improvements based on pillars

Before we discussed the 4 pillars we used to make the changes to the mod,  so I want to review and summarize those, plus there are a few things I didn’t mention yet that apply to many mods.

• More & better content. I think the changes above achieve this, consistently improving and adding new content.
• Simpler and easier to use. We are doing this in many ways I already mentioned, like a redesign of optional faces, including the unemployed manager faces mod inside the manager faces mod, better naming of some folders and mods, and no longer having the expanded national team experience. We will also rename some other mods/folders I didn’t mention above, but a big change is we will try to include pictures in mod descriptions for many addon mods. Mainly fantasy kits and optional faces, so the user knows what they look like in a click or two, rather than having to check in-game. New FET features will make this much easier too. Throughout the mod, I want to make things more intuitive too. For example, in the gameplay mod, I will try to disable going into FUT, Pro Clubs, etc as the gameplay mod doesn’t work online (you will be forfeited)..I also want to make releases more clear to understand. I will try to use the word “free” more often when it comes to public releases, and I will make a tweet the day before releases explaining what times across different time zones the release will be, to hopefully clear up some confusion. I will also remove the download links at the bottom of a patreon post for an old version so people only download the latest mod. But perhaps the biggest change in this area is the new face assignment system, something which will solve like half of the issues people report. Lua scripts were also voted the hardest part of the mod to install, so I think it’s great we are getting rid of the need for them!
• More stability. Lots of changes I discussed above will lead to this, including removing the expanded national team experience and fixing some of the mod bugs. However, a giant one will be keeping almost all textures at their original size. For the FIFA 21 mod, countless textures were a different size than the original, and by countless I mean thousands. Most were just accidental, but some were on purpose and made sense to be larger than the default texture, but most that were on purpose didn’t make sense, for instance, faces. There were some 2k or 4k face textures, which sound good in theory, but EA rescales them in-game anyways, so they aren’t any higher quality. What these size mismatches do cause though are longer loading times, requiring more PC performance, and in rare cases, crashes. This year, due to many new FET features, we will prevent these as much as possible, leading to a much more stable and fast mod! Many new FET features added throughout the year will also lead to more stability, such as shifting away from RDBM, instead of using an in-house squads/career editor in part of the main editor! I will also perform longer-term testing, which primarily relates to the core Realism Mod, but affects the others too. I will create careers and sim/play for all 15 seasons, and if any issues appear or things to improve, I’ll do them! For instance, maybe in season 10 there aren’t enough high-rated players, if that’s the case I might have to increase youth academy potentials, etc. I also learnt a lot of lessons in the past two modding cycles, and have put most of those lessons into various documentation I have created, such as Google Documents about common modding problems and solutions, as well as a long guide on how to prepare a release, from verification to testing. These were created during the end of the FIFA 21 cycle and updated as I discovered more issues. For releases specifically, there were a couple of (relatively minor) issues with some late FIFA 21 mod releases, so I altered the documentation to make sure they never happen again, and I’ll continue to do that!
• 
• Faster releases. And this is the thing I want to discuss next, as part of its own section.

Releases

In the FIFA 21 mod, there were only 5 total releases. This was partly due to the first version releasing so late in the cycle, but also our release plan was based around big updates, for instance, in 1.2 we added the Brazilian League and Euro Mod. Lots of people weren’t too happy with that though, as lots of people requested faster releases in the survey!

This year, we will plan many quick releases scheduled by FIFA updates. So after every FIFA update (which break the mods), we will try to have a release ready to publish within ~48 hours of the update, and if I think a release won’t be ready within that timeframe, I’ll try to release a hotfix within ~24 hours. We already showcased this at the latter end of the FIFA 21 cycle, releasing 1.2 hotfix less than ~48 hours after the update (only reason it took that long was due to slow upload speeds, the upload was started within ~24 hours) and releasing 1.3, a whole new version around ~48 hours after the FIFA update.

1.3 was a perfect example of the releases we want to execute, at least in the early-mid cycle. A fast release after a FIFA update, that contained some new content and fixes.

Those two fast releases were made possible by many internal changes like having release documentation and getting gnklein92 to help upload the files, but we want to speed up the process, even more, this year. I’ve upgraded WiFi to be faster and more stable, so that should help with upload times. And more documentation and new FET features, like the ability to update all mods in ~10 minutes rather than ~3 hours won’t hurt either!

In the FIFA 20 and early 21 mod’s, I (somewhat stupidly) created the Lua scripts myself, copying in thousands of values manually, which led to mistakes (so players got assigned the wrong faces, although quite rarely) and took forever. Early in the FIFA 21 cycle though, I created a quick Excel script to automatically create the Lua scripts. Even though there won’t be Lua scripts in the FIFA 22 mod, internally for the new assignment system, I still have to format all the IDs. But this time I will integrate it with Google Sheets, which I use for the documentation about all the faces, so it’s even more automatic and will save more time!

I’ve done a lot of research and analysis on when FIFA do updates, so I will be more prepared than ever and hopefully, that will lead to fewer instances of me dropping a mod release, and EA releasing an update a day or two after. Luckily, EA seems more cautious with the updates this year than last. Currently, they have released 2 updates, when in the same time frame last year they had released 5. This is great news for you and me!

Of course, once the FIFA updates slow down so will the mod releases, focusing more on bigger new features, so don’t expect 3 releases every month, but there should definitely be a number more similar to the FIFA 20 mod. You might be thinking, "Okay great, but now I have to download more files, and last year it was really slow and annoying…", and I have some news to share in that area too…

Mod Hosting

So in FIFA 21, we used Mediafire and Mega. Both had their issues, Mediafire was very slow for some users outside North America, and Mega forced you to pay or wait after 5GB. So, we will be implementing some solutions this year.

First, we will encourage the use of download managers. These were an unofficial method of speeding up the download before, but I’ve had time to research and test them and came to the conclusion that Internet Download Manager and Free Download Manager both are safe and work well, so I will mention those in the Patreon post, and encourage use!

Secondly, we want to use more download providers. I will be using two new ones, SendGB and JetDrop for the first release, which based on brief testing seems to be an improvement on Mediafire speed-wise. I’m looking to test others too, so if you have any suggestions please let me know!

Google Drive and OneDrive won’t work, as Google Drive is fairly slow for large files, but more importantly, both restrict downloads after a certain amount of people download the file within a certain amount of time, making them practically useless for our purpose.

There is also the option of using our own website. I had one developed last year but never was fully used due to awful service from Bluehost. I could try using AWS, which would probably work and bring solid speeds, plus many cool features, however, AWS is incredibly expensive, so this is more of a last resort option!

Lastly, I also want to implement a modular download system. I will upload the mod to Google Drive, but not as a RAR, but by uploading the folder. This will let users go through it, download what they need, and leave. This will be more of a Hidden thing, not laid out with the other download options, that way people won’t mistakenly download the whole thing which will cause Google Drive to limit access to the file. In preparation for all this, I’ve got a 2TB Google Drive Subscription, and got myself a new 5TB Hard Drive.

I’m hoping the above changes will bring relief to your issues with downloading the mod in FIFA 21. This is something of high priority for me this year, so if you have any feedback or ideas, please make them known now!

Patreon Changes

I also have made some changes to the Patreon. 91% of users say they are happy with the rewards they currently get, so nothing major, but some cool new stuff!

Small Tweaks:

• I updated the branding and the description
• I updated some tier descriptions to be more accurate
• Removed the "Live Help" perk from the $3/Suggestions tier as it wasn’t really a thing

Bigger Tweaks:

• Rebranded the "Progress Updates" ($15) tier into the "Live Help" tier
• Changed the "Daily Progress Updates" perk to the "Development Channel" perk
• I will increase visibility of the Custom Face Tier, increasing the max amount of patrons and making a special discord channel for users to request their face (perhaps a bot can keep track of that later).

Live Help

This is a brand new perk I am introducing where you can request Live Help from me on any mod related issue, and I will assist you via software like Teamviewer (if that’s what you want, of course, I can also just guide you through it on Discord via text or screen share). Got an issue with a mod and want me to fix it? Sure. Want to do something mod-related but not sure how? Sure. Want me to install the whole thing for you? Sure. The only catch is it must be somewhat related to the mod. I’ll help you make your manager face into Klopp’s or whatever, but I can’t help with installing other mods, or creating your own, generally speaking.

There isn’t a specific limit to how many times you can ask for this help, just has to be within reason. And generally, I’ll be available to assist you within 24 hours.

It will be part of the $15 tier to start, just to gauge demand and see how it will work. I’d hopefully like to make it part of the $7 or $10 tier later on.

Development Channel

This replaces the daily progress updates, which were just too much work for me to consistently do. So this new development channel is a place for me and gnklein92 to share semi-regular updates about what’s going on in mod development, and for users to ask questions about it!

I also added many patreon goals, such as giving away copies of FIFA 22, winter squads for the FIFA 22 mod (although that will hopefully happen regardless), extensive modding tutorials, and a 2022/23 mod!

That’s all the Patreon changes. Perhaps I will make more later, but I’m not sure too much is necessary. Let me know if you have any suggestions, of course.

I’m also exploring alternatives to Patreon, not to fully replace it, but for users whose payment wasn’t accepted by Patreon.

Mod Installation

This is an area I have huge plans for. Soon, the Editor and Mod Manager should get tons of new features, including one called "Mod Packs". This should help make the mod installation process much easier, something which lots of people said was a bit confusing in the FIFA 20 and 21 mods.

This will let me practically create a custom UI to install the mod. All, or at least most mods will be packaged into one Mod Pack file. When you try to install it, you will be given a menu where first you will select which main mods you want. There will be text aiding you, recommending what you do. Once you have selected the main mods, you will get the chance to select 1 background mod to use, fantasy kits, 1 manager outfit, etc etc. It won’t take long and you can skip any section. But the Mod Manager will remember what choices you make, for instance, if you don’t use the New Faces and Face Updates mods, you won’t be able to use the Optional Face Variant mods. Once you have selected the mods you want to use, a process that should take a minute or two, they will automatically be applied in the right order. Want to change something? Don’t worry, you can change your selection of mods very easily. You will also be able to update the mod much easier, say you have already installed the 1.2 modpack, when selecting the 1.3 modpack you will be given a mod update prompt, just one click and it will automatically keep your applied list the same but update all mods!

Another thing that will hopefully be added is a career editor. In its purest form, it will give you access to edit whatever you want, but my envision is having custom mod actions. For instance, this can replace Lua scripts, which would be nice as many users had issues with them. But this will tie in with Modpacks. If you use the Manager Faces mod, you’ll be prompted to apply them to your career. If you don’t use that mod, you can’t apply them. If you use the Barcelona stadium add-on, you’ll be prompted to apply it to a career, etc.

Mod Manager

In FIFA 21, we switched from Frosty Mod Manager to FIFA Mod Manager, a major positive change I think all users who used both will vouch for. FIFA Mod Manager fixed many issues that Frosty had, plus adding tons of new features. We want to extend that even furthur this year. Here are some of the improvements planned:

• Bug Fixes and Optimizations. Throughout the cycle tons of Mod Manager bugs were fixed, and many other bug fixes/optimizations will be in the first release of the FIFA 22 Mod Manager, including fixes for missing texts, and the tool now tries to load the backup configuration file if the main one can’t be loaded, hopefully fixing instances where sometimes a user’s applied mod list might reset. Things will continue to be fixed and optimized throughout the FIFA 22 cycle too.
• Faster Launching Speeds. This is a huge change that will be included in the first release of the FIFA 22 Mod Manager. Major improvements have been made to the launching process, which will speed up launch times, especially when the game is on an HDD. On an SSD, launch times will be faster but not too much, as they were already very fast (a couple of minutes for me). I moved FIFA 22 to my D drive to test, and before the improvements, it took ~30 minutes to launch. This time it took 45 seconds. So yeah, big improvement!
• More Custom Error Messages. Something cool that was added in many releases was custom error messages which reduced the need for troubleshooting. There are still a few errors that don’t have a custom messages, which are the ones that are the most reported. So custom error messages will be added for these, with texts to give steps on how to fix.
• Better Locale.ini System. In the old Mod Manager, the tool would just replace the user’s locale.ini with the mod one. Soon, a new system will be implemented, where the tool decrypts your locale, finds the bottom, then adds the mod content and re-encrypts. This will solve issues where you would have to use certain currencies, measurements, etc if you used the mod’s locale.ini.
• Career Editor. Hopefully, the Mod Manager will get a career editor too, which will let users do stuff like changing their manager’s face much easier!

Support, Troubleshooting and Discord

This is the final section about changes. Support and troubleshooting are a major area I want to improve this year. During the FIFA 21 mod, it was incredibly hard to help everyone, and at times I wasn’t able to. I’m sorry for that, but it was just not manageable. It was, at least somewhat, during the FIFA 20 mod. In January 2020, a few months into the FIFA 20 cycle, the server had 1,500 members. In September 2020, at the end of the FIFA 20 cycle, there were 11,000 members. A year later, there are 40,000. In September 2020, there were ~350 messages a day in the general and help channels of the server. In April 2021, that number was over 1,600. And that’s before you count in Discord DMs (to me and other admins), Patreon DMs, Twitter DMs, Reddit DMs, Instagram DMs, Instagram Replies, Patreon Replies, Twitter Replies, Youtube Comments, Emails, asking for help in other servers, and at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if I got mailed a letter containing "any body has squad transfer lastest can run with 1.4 fifer pls help me" (a real thing I get DMed quite often).

Simply put, it’s impossible for me to help everyone as it currently is, and work on the mod. I can only do one or the other. Yes, there are other support members, but they are busy and have lives too. That being said, I want to make the job a lot easier for me, by making it a lot easier for you.

To start, the best way to decrease the amount of help needed, is to reduce the amount of situations where a user might need help. The changes above do that. Removing the expanded national team experience, more clear mod/folder names, less need for Lua scripts, more stable mod and mod manager, custom mod manager error messages, modpacks, etc, all will hopefully mean it’s easier for users to install mods, and won’t need as much help!

But of course, people will still need help, because issues can arise and people are naturally curious, which is totally fine. So, I want to make some changes so that I, and my team of admins, can better help you guys

• More Admins/Support Members. I hope to bring in lots of new helpers to assist people. I also want to make a "handbook" full of problems and lists to troubleshoot for support members (and perhaps users) to find a solution quicker.
• Automated Help System. This is really the only proper solution. We already have a FAQ channel, but many users don’t check that, which is annoying, but to be fair it’s not the easiest to find. By the first release, I will have implemented a basic version of a new automatic help system. It will look like this:

User will send a message in the help channel. The bot will respond will respond asking them if they have checked FAQ, and providing a list of what their problem might be (and links to solutions) based on the contents of their message. Hopefully, this will be good enough for most user’s problems. If the issue isn’t in FAQ, or the solution didn’t work, they will react to the bot’s message, and then the bot will create a private channel, just for the user and support team. The bot will ask a series of questions so the user can lay out their problem in lots of detail, and then a support member will manually assist them. Obviously, this is still work for me and the other helpers, but it wipes out the two most common things we do, refer people to the FAQ, and ask for more detail.

If that doesn’t work, I may have to implement a more advanced version, using discord bots or something like Typeform, where the bot will ask the user a series of multiple-choice questions and then provide an answer itself. But hopefully, that’s not needed!

I will also try to be more active with helping people on other platforms, although most likely that will just be referring people to the Discord. I’m not exactly ecstatic I have to do that, but it’s the only social media platform that’s somewhat okay for troubleshooting.

Patreon isn’t great for this, as DMs aren’t "live", you can’t attach images, etc. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc are also not great and missing features.

I will also make so many more tutorials on my YouTube channel about the mod, and I’m sure gnklein92 will do similar. Hopefully, they will provide a useful resource for lots of people who need help. Based on survey feedback, it seems like if these tutorials had proper subtitles or separate tutorials in different languages, would be very helpful, so that’s something I want to look into!

Discord Changes

I also really want to revamp the Discord in other ways. We will try to remove unnecessary channels and make things more clear, utilizing some of Discord’s newest features. I also want the bot to help with many other things. Lots will be admin side, but some will be super cool, like a helper for posting community-made fantasy kits, commands to suggest career modes to do, commands to provide pictures of faces from the mods, as well as features to help report and keep track of bugs and suggestions. Perhaps levels, so if you are active enough you can become a tester or something. Speaking of testers, I’ll be refreshing the group soon with some new faces. Lots of other cool stuff though too! I’ve also unbanned a few hundred users from the server, 99% were banned because their accounts were hacked. If you were banned but you got your account back, or you haven’t joined at all yet, please join the discord here!

Transparency

Another thing I want to improve on is my transparency, as well as communication, as I feel that it was somewhat inconsistent in the past. I will try to keep you guys updated as much as I can! I have a few changes to present in that area:

- Realism Mod Public Trello. I set this up late in the cycle of the FIFA 21 mod, and it was a big help for me, and hopefully, it was nice for you guys too! I will continue it into the FIFA 22 mod, you can find it here.

- Mod Open Source. I will continue the mod open source this year, as I think people appreciated it last year! Hopefully, I will do it quicker too, and maybe include some more mods (not graphical ones) like gameplay. Although, I suspect it won’t be used as much as last year as FIFA moved the teamkits table to the squad file, so you no longer need to edit the DB for your kit mods! We also want to share more generally, like sharing what IDs we use for added teams, players, tournaments, etc so they are easily available.

- More Blog Posts. I’d love to create a "Making the mod" series with gnklein92, going behind the scenes on how certain things are done. But I’m also open to other stuff, so please let me know what you want to see!

- More Q&As. I’ll try to do Q&As once and a while, before and after release, some public, some patreon only (the patreon only ones I’ll give more detailed answers to).

- More Surveys. I want to do mini surveys throughout the cycle before the big one at the end. Probably one shortly after the first release, then another a few months after that. Also want to do a patreon-only one.

- More Giveaways. I will try to do a few giveaways this cycle, giving away copies of FIFA 22 on PC, plus copies of the mod (when it’s in alpha, beta, or early access)

Plans for other mods

Last thing I have to cover!

2006/2007 Mod

This is a complex one. Like I said, I want to try to make this mod in the FIFA 22 cycle, once I’m happy with the FIFA 22 Realism Mod. However, it will be incredibly complex to make. I’m still in two minds about it, I know the demand is huge, but to make it, and make sure it’s stable, would take so much effort and cost. First, how many leagues would be added? It would need to be at least the Premier League, Serie A and La Liga, but do we go further than that? Do we have to? Does it ruin the experience if you are using the 2006/2007 Man Utd squad and go up against the current Benfica squad in the Champions League? How do we handle the start date, do we try to make it 2006 which will take a lot of time to get working, if it’s possible at all, and even then it will still be buggy probably. Will people be fine if it’s still 2021? How do we handle stats? Minifaces? Etc etc. So yeah, I need more time to think. If you can answer any of my questions in the comments that would be helpful!

2022/23 Mod

Not sure about this one either. Certainly more chance of it happening than in FIFA 21. My two biggest issues are that it’s incredibly boring work, mainly manually checking Transfermarkt and writing lines of text, importing kits, editing kit settings, and fixing bugs. And that it’s a bit pointless, since a month or two after we do all that, nobody uses it anymore and we switch to FIFA 23. I’m not totally opposed to it, but I feel like the resources could be better aimed elsewhere. I won’t make a firm decision yet though. Perhaps there is some sort of solution in the middle that works for everyone. Of course, if we can reach the Patreon goal for the 2022/23 mod then I’ll get it made!

Icon Squad Files

I’ve created a basic Icon Squad File, which I’ll release soon, so stay tuned. I’ll try to do Mid, Prime, Moments and Heros at some point too, but not a priority.

More

Might do some crazy FNG-style mods sometime, any interest in that? Again not really sure. Maybe as a Patreon exclusive.

So, those are all the changes.

Let’s wrap this up then. I want to do a little Q&A last, to answer some questions I never got to. These were submitted by the community on Discord, Twitter and Patreon.

Q&A

Will the mod be compatible with existing careers?

Same as the FIFA 21, the majority of stuff will be. This includes pretty much everything (faces, graphics, gameplay, etc) minus some squad file features, like realistic ratings, and any added teams/tournaments. We will be working hard to try to make it possible to use as many features as possible in existing careers, far more than in previous mods!

Can you mod in the next-gen features, like hypermotion or new cutscenes?

Sadly we can’t. However, I believe we can certainly make gameplay way better than next-gen, and increase graphic quality (even if it’s marginal) in other ways.

What’s the best way to stay up to date with mod development and updates?

I would recommend you follow me on Twitter and join the Discord server, as that’s where I’m most active.

I genuinely believe this will be an incredible year of modding, full of things you’ve dreamed about. I think this year’s mod will be the best there is, and I’m honestly not sure what we will be able to improve for the FIFA 23 mod! So, I’m really hoping you guys will stick around into FIFA 22 with me. I’m really happy with the vanilla game from a modding perspective, it’s all set up for us to go and do what we do best, mod!

I also want to note that I will be setting everything up to be more easily carried over to FIFA 23, working on lots of documentation and making more future-conscious decisions.

If you want to support me, and tons of other hard-working talented individuals on our collective mission to create the best possible FIFA experience, please consider becoming a patron. No matter how much you pledge or how long you are subscribed for, it truly helps. And patreon support is needed more than ever, as we enter a costly few months full of spending lots of money on the FIFA Editor Tool, kits, faces, banners, flags, adboards, etc. The link is https://www.patreon.com/realismmod. Thanks to anyone who decides to support. And if you don’t, that’s totally fine. Just by reading this, just by using the mod, you’re helping more than you believe.

But I must take some time to express my incredible gratitude to my former and current patreon supporters. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, and I’m sure gnklein92 and everyone else does too. The mod would not be what it is without you. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have been able to mod FIFA 21 or 22 without you guys. I really enjoy creating this mod, and you make that possible, as well as making it possible for thousands of others to enjoy it too.

Specifically, I’d like to thank Tyler, Scott Littlewood, Kristian , DaRabbit123 , luke, Nicholas Bateup, Garren Rock-Meyer, Jacquie T, Graham N Klein (who?!), ukktra, Solulite, Joey Seager, Ross Fisher, Santosh Joseph, Sam Petersen, Señor Sanchez, Adam Cresswell, Corner Flag Games, Thomas Hickling, Sneakie , . , Greg Walters, Oliver Palm, Vili Ikäheimonen, Jack Lawrence, Masl, Wayne Lambley, Kai'Chien Chisholm, Simplyy, Marcel Reijnders, James Dowson, Simon, Cyrus , Paul Lengert and Ryan for their long time support, having been here since the FIFA 19 days!

And I also need to thank craig, majed alshamsi, The Darth Vindictus (sounds familiar!), Jeannie Koenigsberg, Everton Shibata, and KINGFOOTY - FIFA & PES for their large contributions.

I also want to thank everyone who has helped with this mod. Whether you made one face or 100, just did some data entry or answered a few questions for me, you helped an incredible amount, so thank you.

Specifically, I need to thank gnklein92, a great modder and an even better friend, for the incredible help he has done for the mod. Even with somewhat boring tasks, he always works hard to make the mod the best it can be. He has helped with literally everything, from importing kits, banners, etc, to creating new mod content, helping with the discord server, proofreading posts, creating graphics, and so much more! If you are in the Discord sometime, please take a moment to either thank him in a DM or message in the server, he does not get anywhere enough appreciation for the work he has done.

I also should thank Keparik, AlexLexa, APasZ, Southwest87, Galactico, Mamareza, Maqwell, 6ons1, LNMODDER, Pedro10do7 BromleyPlays, Jen_Facemaker, Rosevelt Alief, and of course javad1375_pv for their tireless and high-quality work on the mod in recent times. I urge you to show your support to them, and all other contributors when you can. The mod is only what it is because of them.

So that’s about it. I promise to everyone that I will do my best to create the best possible FIFA experience. And I think we will do just that.

Again, I highly recommend buying FIFA 22 if you haven’t yet. If you are still unsure, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66RGQU_ZfJs

And use this link to get the game while supporting the mod: https://www.cdkeys.com/pc/fifa-22-pc-origin?mw_aref=FIFER

Alpha and beta versions of the full mod soon, and the release of the Realism Mod Lite is coming even sooner!

If you have any questions, comments, feedback, ideas, suggestions or anything else, please leave them in the comments below, or bring them up in the Discord server. I’m looking for feedback, critique and suggestions regarding everything!

I hope you guys enjoyed this post, thanks for everything once again, and see you soon!