I play mainly career mode and that as a leg spinner allrounder...and the wicket keeper, in that context, is useless unless you make them stand back rather than up to the stumps. If they are at the stumps they stop nothing and the ball will travel through them so they don't even block well. If you make them stand back, they can actually catch the ball. Since stumping has been removed from the game, in this iteration, there is no point in the wicket keeper being close to the stumps anyway for spin bowling. Still it feels like a step backwards from previous iterations. I think about 82% of dismissals are now bat-pad to short square leg or caught off a bounce into the boot.
I have had some good matches in career mode...and am grateful that BA are looking to enhance this...but overall it is a mess. The enhancements in this version are not properly implemented which degrades the whole experience. Some of it is just crazy stuff that shouldn't have made it to a release build (press conferences, training, fatigue management, coaches following you from club to club and saying random stuff, umpires being the same at every level and in every region, sponsorship, player of the match cheques, etc.). They could be part of a career mode...but there is no coherent design or proper implementation. It feels like the output from an 8 hour hackathon rather than anything better...or there is absolutely no QA in the testing process. The fact that career mode also inherits the errors in the main game (the overthrow issues, fielding, edge-o (or whatever it is that they call snicko), playing with sliders etc.), adds to the frustration. I do feel that we are close to a decent game...but it seems like basic issues remain unadressed from earlier iterations, which undermines all of BA's good intent.
