My girlfriend said she's leaving me because I keep wasting money on stupid football games. She didn't say if it was on loan or a permanent transfer though.

FC 26 feels like a yearly reminder that PC players are still treated as second-class citizens in EA’s ecosystem. No meaningful optimization improvements, no real performance focus, no signs that years of feedback were ever taken seriously. Stutters, inconsistent frame pacing, random input delay all of it is still here, untouched, like EA is preserving bugs as legacy features.

What makes it worse is that none of this is new. PC players have been reporting the same issues for multiple titles now, and FC 26 confirms one thing very clearly: EA hears the complaints, reads them, and then chooses to ignore them. The game runs like it’s permanently stuck in beta, yet we’re expected to treat it as a full priced AAA experience.

Now let’s address the topic EA desperately wants to pretend doesn’t exist anymore: Momentum, or as the community knows it, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment. EA has released statements, explanations, and carefully worded excuses to make themselves look innocent, but FC 26 completely exposes the truth. The system is no longer subtle. In older games, at least you could doubt yourself. In FC 26, you don’t doubt anything you can literally feel when the game decides it’s not your turn to win.

The moment you enter Ultimate Team, skill becomes a suggestion rather than a rule. You can dominate possession, create clear chances, manually defend like your life depends on it, and still concede goals that feel scripted straight out of a bad comedy. Defenders suddenly forget how legs work, goalkeepers turn into training cones, and your perfectly timed tackles bounce back to the opponent like the ball is magnetized.

At that point, you’re not playing football anymore. You’re participating in a prewritten experience where the DDA system already chose the winner before kickoff. Your controller input just fills time between cutscenes.

Instead of addressing server quality, input responsiveness, PC optimization, or overall gameplay consistency, EA proudly delivers updates no one asked for. EA Play Music. Menu aesthetics. Cosmetic nonsense. The house is on fire, but EA is rearranging the playlist. Priorities are clear, and none of them involve improving how the game actually plays.

The lack of competition in the football game market is where everything truly falls apart. EA knows FC has no real rival, so there’s no pressure to innovate or improve. Players are given tiny drops of enjoyment just enough to stay hooked, while being hit with massive waves of frustration, grind, and monetization. Ultimate Team isn’t about football anymore, it’s a psychological endurance test designed to drain patience and wallets at the same time.

FC 26 feels less like a sports game and more like a live service experiment where fairness is optional and consistency is a luxury. Every match feels like flipping a coin, except the coin costs time and mental health.

In the end, until EA faces real competition, this cycle will continue, new title, same problems, louder marketing, and the same unanswered complaints.

Same game. New number. Same frustration.

A waste of money. Unfinished product that should be illegal to sell.