As if the world wasn’t sufficiently football-obsessed, it’s time to prepare for the arrival of its biggest football video game. EA Sports FC 27 (the franchise that used to be Fifa – what better time to no longer be Fifa-branded?) is due to be released on 25 September. I just spent two intense days in Vancouver, where the EA FC games are made, playing FC 27 and talking to its developers.
With an annual franchise such as EA FC, it helps to have something fresh to entice regular fans, and FC 27 has a whole new element, entitled the Grounds. It’s a physical hub-type area, similar to the City as seen in 2K’s recent NBA 2K basketball games, but much more pleasant to frequent, split as it is into areas inspired by British, French and Argentinian street-football culture.
The Grounds provides a new physical home for an existing element of EA FC: Clubs, its casual online mode in which you control a single player and play matches closer to kickabouts than real-world football, but beyond that, it has plenty of other activities and distractions.
Visiting the Grounds
I spent about an hour in the Grounds, and found it more enjoyable than expected. Among its buildings are playing areas, whose entrances act as lobbies where you can choose to play against random people or to set up a custom game with your FC 27-owning friends. Each playing area hosts a specific type of game, and the Grounds has a map that you can teleport around.
It rewards exploration: I encountered targets that could be smashed by spawning a football and drop-kicking it, some of which were clumped into mini-games. Its games offered clever twists on the Clubs blueprint. In one 3v3 game, target areas appeared for short periods, and if I scored from one, I got a bonus goal for my side. And one game based on dodgeball gave its players three lives, which they would lose if others successfully kicked a ball at them.
The Grounds should prove popular: it has been tastefully and cleverly constructed and will no doubt expand as new game-types are added. You could also envisage it, in future years, hosting a narrative mode along the line of the Journey from Fifa 17 to 19.
Gameplay revamps galore
FC 26 marked a mission by EA Sports to improve the franchise’s responsiveness by enacting a surprising number of changes to its fundamental gameplay, and that process continues apace in FC 27.
Although anyone who played FC 26 will testify that those efforts actually caused some new problems, such as an annoying tendency for defensive interceptions to bounce back weirdly into the path of forwards. EA Sports, according to gameplay design director Kantcho Doskov, took radical action to eliminate such aberrations: “We had to completely strip out the existing system for interceptions and build a new one from scratch. We spent six months doing that.”
Via a build that let me play Champions League games between a limited number of teams, I found that to be a worthwhile exercise: those defensive bounce-backs were blissfully absent. But an awful lot more was also in evidence in FC 27 on the gameplay revamp front.
Much of this – perhaps counterintuitively at a time when AI is worming its way ever deeper into all our lives – involved paring back the in-game AI. That’s certainly the case for the defensive AI: whereas previously, defenders would rush towards the ball, getting pulled out of position and opening up annoying gaps, FC 27 now gives much more manual control over defensive jockeying, movement and tackles.
Crossing, previously AI-assisted, has been revamped in FC 27, leaving it up to me to get the direction and weight of cross right, then giving me more of a chance to position my centre-forward correctly. The AI controlling forward players, meanwhile, has been improved, so that off-the-ball players now move much more helpfully, allowing pass-and-move sequences, and they are much better at staying onside.
I was also impressed by revamped two-stage corner and free-kick systems. But FC 27, gameplay-wise, achieves what FC 26 set out to, this time with no evident anomalies, and feels more responsive to your inputs than any of its predecessors.
Making transfers more true-to-life
FC 27’s Career Mode, in which you get to play out your fantasies of managing your favourite team, has also been extensively revamped – primarily with a view towards making its transfer system more like the one that operates in the real world, and to force you to do more actual management.
The headline means of doing the latter is called Dynamic OVR. OVR is simply jargon for any player’s all-important overall rating; where previously OVRs remained constant, in FC 27’s Career Mode they will go up and down depending on form, fitness and general happiness. Thus, you will have to rest your best players over the course of a long season, but you may also be able to buy players cheaply with artificially low OVRs if, say, they are coming back from injury.
Pete O’Donnell, FC 27’s Career Mode game director, explains how the game’s transfer system has been modernised: “Previously, you could do things instantly, which was good for a game but was not very realistic. We looked at how clubs interact with each other, how they do the deals themselves, and we spoke to scouts and directors of football. Then it was about extracting the fun bits of those jobs.”
The new system will back you up with more data; now each player will have an xTV (Expected Transfer Value) rating, which should speed negotiations. FC 27 will also reflect clubs’ real-life transfer policies, according to O’Donnell, with clubs’ boards requesting that you sign certain players. Press conferences in FC 27 will force you to make decisions that will please some players and annoy others, and 20 Unexpected Events have been added to Career Mode.
Ultimate Transfer: a new showcase
FC 27’s Ultimate Transfer (FUT) mode, the hardcore card-based system that provides a home for most of FC’s loot box action, will have a new headline feature in the form of a Gallery, which will showcase all the players and card-sets collected, rather than just first 11s.
EA Sports says it has also “streamlined” FUT’s previously impenetrable Squad-Based Challenges (SBC) system, and has made a tweak designed to avert stalemates, which affected the latter stages in FUT in FC 26, by restricting plus-level FUT players to three, rather than five, play-styles. But the nature of FUT – which develops over a long period post-launch – means that it will take a while to ascertain whether those changes prove effective.
Now rated 16
There will be another major change to FC 27 that has nothing to do with how it plays: because it contains microtransactions, it will now be rated 16+ rather than the previous 3+, after a policy change at age-rating organisation Pegi. Given the game’s enthusiastic young and teenage audience, we asked EA Sports’ top brass to comment, but they blandly responded: “While the game functionally remains the same, this has resulted in a new Pegi age rating. It marks a change in the way we are giving the information to players and parents.”
Beyond Pegi’s European jurisdiction, the game will be rated E for Everybody. But in the UK, parents should think hard about letting youngsters play a 16-rated game. If they are worried about their offspring racking up huge bills for FUT transactions, the good news is that a new Ultimate Plus Edition of the game, which includes loads of stuff that would previously have cost in-game currency, will go on sale. But the bad news is it costs £139.99 and will only be available as a pre-order before 31 August.
• EA Sports FC 27 is out on 25 September on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC. It will also launch on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, but without some features, such as the new Grounds mode.
