Why is anyone surprised? Forgive me, but I'm about to rant.
EA UFC 1 has got to be one of the worst games ever made. I mean that when you consider what they could have done compared to what they did do. I say this as someone who owns it on PS4, plays it often, and still hates it. You might ask why I would still play it if I hated it, but my only answer is that I don't own a system anymore that runs Undisputed 3 or Fight Night Champion. And I really enjoy combat-sports games.
The career mode in EA UFC is absolutely horrendous. Let's say you want to make a bantamweight. We all know these are smaller fighters. Not EA, though. They couldn't figure out a way to randomly generate opponents that LOOK like they're also bantamweights. If you make a 5'6" tall bantamweight, until you reach fighters that are real and not randomly generated, you're going to be fighting fighters who are mostly 6 feet tall or more and look absolutely nothing like a bantamweight should.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you make a big heavyweight in career mode, you're not only going to have a 72 inch reach despite being 6'5" tall, but you're also going to be facing randomly generated opponents who are 6' tall, have the body type of a welterweight and still have a longer reach than you. Not only that, but your create-a-fighter probably looks like Shrek compared to his opponents because of the size difference.
Not only are the randomly generated characters awful, the difficulty levels are goofy and almost completely irrelevant. The only thing increasing the difficulty of the game does is increase the chance your opponent will parry, block, or dodge your attacks, and the chance that they'll shoot for a takedown/clinch. And this doesn't scale properly with the skill level of your opponents, so BJJ focused fighters with a striking rating of 65 still avoid shots like Anderson Silva. It's like they weren't even trying.
People might think these are tiny issues, but it's exactly this type of shit that ruins immersion for me. It's like they did everything they could to make something that can be called an MMA game without any of the small details that would make it feel more real.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any real competitors that EA UFC really has, so I'll probably end up buying the second game for lack of anything else in that genre to play. But I have no hopes for it at all. EA UFC is the first game that's made me actually say, "Fuck EA," despite how often I hear that sentiment elsewhere.