EA Sports FIFA Ultimate Team is a staggeringly popular game mode that is one of the most profitable sources of revenue in all of gaming. Every day millions of players spend money to open packs of players in the hope of collecting a star to play for their team, against other Ultimate Teams online or against the CPU.
It's incredibly addicting. You start off with a crap team of bronze players, and slowly but surely you have to upgrade your team to gold players, and then even better gold players, until you have assembled a team that links together via nationality, playing in the same league, or playing in the same club.
It's been seven years since the last EA Sports Rugby game, 'Rugby 08', which not so coincidentally was the last decent rugby game released. The reason? Rugby games just are not profitable enough to EA Sports to spend their time developing. Fair enough, but... What if they included a game mode that would guarantee them money?
Sure, Rugby Ultimate Team wouldn't come close to FIFA Ultimate Team in terms of revenue, but does it need to? All it needs to do is make enough money to justify the game existence, right?
We took the liberty of mocking up EA Sports Rugby Ultimate Team cards and sketching out how we think the mode would work, and honestly now we're just a bit upset that it's not a real thing. Who knows, one day maybe.
How it would work:
The leagues included are the Rabo Pro 12, The English Premiership, French Top 14, and Super Rugby. You start off with a collection of terrible players from these four leagues, and the idea is that you slowly assemble a team either all from one league, or all from one nation, in order to achieve full chemistry and make your team as effective as possible.
Player cards are available in packs, which you open with real money or with coins earned from playing games, you can also buy and sell players on a transfer market. The stats on these cards are pace, handling, passing, carrying, defending, and physical, in order to give an overview of how they will perform.
An All-Irish Squad:
The beauty of this is that you don't have to have an all-Irish squad if you don't want to. Sexton could provide a link for a French Top 14 backline with an all Irish pack, etc.
The teams you would see experiment with would have gamers coming back again and again, provided the gameplay was solid of course, but really, EA have done a very good job every time they put out a rugby game. In fact, both Rugby 06 and Rugby 08 were voted by Balls.ie readers into the Top 10 sports games ever released on the PS2, so we're confident they could handle the task.
For the moment, however, Rugby Ultimate Team remains a pipe-dream. Hopefully someone at EA Sports sees this and gets inspired to create the rugby game we've all been waiting for, but for now it's just fun to dream.
