FIFA 24 is dead, long live EA Sports FC 24 – preview
Can positive gameplay impressions and nerdy additions make EA’s new wonderkid a FIFA successor to be reckoned with?
I never thought I’d be impressed by arms in a video game, but here we are.
Realistically, EA Sports FC 24 was always going to be the same sort of iterative step as if it was called FIFA 24, building on and balancing the showpiece features of its predecessor while tentatively introducing its own. But it’s amazing the tricks on your brain that flipping the orientation of a menu can play. With a glitzy, black, vertical UI, the slickly-branded EA Sports FC feels genuinely new, on and off the pitch, with plenty of exciting, nerdy additions to set the pulse pounding.
From kick off, the first things you notice in EA Sports FC 24 are the tiny details. Much was made of the Hypermotion tech powering natural-looking animations, but here “Hypermotion V” delivers a lot of really perceptible, organic motions in the arms, hands, and bodies of players.
It’s beyond cliche to say “players feel like they have more weight”, but players do feel like they have more weight, with a greater variety of small interstitial movements and touches. This is, of course, compared to a post-Shapeshifters meta FIFA 23 Ultimate Team (where 95 pace is about the minimum), but there’s noticeably less ice skating where players slither around the pitch. And while there are some places that feel samey – celebrations in particular – on the whole it’s a definite improvement.
Previous iterations of Hypermotion were based on just a couple of full matches of data from the Spanish 2nd and 3rd tier, whereas Hypermotion V pulls from more the 180 top-flight and premier competition games where cameras around the stadium were used to capture the pitch as a 3D space. The realistic motions of the players could then be converted into animations.
An example EA has given of this is Erling Haaland’s dominant, acrobatic volley against Dortmund last season, which has been translated directly into an animation players can draw on in EA Sports FC 24.
Stemming from the player motion in general, there’s a much better cadence stepping out of defence. I remember playing a build of FIFA 23 when Lengthy AcceleRATE was at its most overpowered and it felt like Wendy Renard could go box-to-box in about three strides. The pitch feels bigger here, giving everything a bit more room to breathe.
There are a couple of new ways to use this space, too. Holding R1 and sprint gives you a new controlled sprint that’s faster than jogging but slower than running flat out – sort of like the opposite of a defender’s ability to jockey. Players get their shots away faster in EA Sports FC 24 than they ever did in FIFA 23, making this another way to approach goal without being immediately closed down.
Top-tier passers can also perform controlled and swerve through balls with R1 and Triangle/Y – think De Bruyne or Kane finding a teammate in the box with the outside of their boot – as another attacking option.
AcceleRATE has also been rejigged. Rather than just Explosive, Controlled and Lengthy, there are 7 different skews. So players can now be “Mostly Lengthy” or “Mostly Explosive” in different contexts.
Next up, as you play you see a few different RPG-style icons pop up around your players as they go about their game. These are the new PlayStyles – apparently built using data from leading statisticians Opta Sports – which aim to give players more unique-feeling abilities on the field. It gives the gameplay a bit of a superhero or a MOBA vibe, as a magnet-touch symbol flashes up over Riyad Mahrez when he traps the ball or the smart tackler icon pops for Kadeisha Buchanan as she comes away with possession of the ball after a slide tackle.
Players can have multiple Playstyles each, while the world’s best players can also have access to PlayStyle+ abilities; even more juiced versions of the base archetype.
For example, Neymar is a Trickster+, helping him feel extra silky on the ball with access to different moves despite him and Mbappe both having five-star skills. Whereas Mbappe’s great strength is his unreal speed dribbling (his top-line ability), he’s also a clinical finisher, so he has access to a shooting PlayStyle, too.
There are 34 PlayStyles, with a regular and + version of each for a total of 68. These are spread across five archetypes with PlayStyles for goalkeepers and defenders as well as ones governing heading, ball control and shooting.
In game, some PlayStyles – like Possession Holder – are subtle and help technical midfielders like Marco Verratti and Jack Grealish feel more authentic than ever. Others are less subtle, such as the barnstorming Power Shot PlayStyle which lets players like Rodri absolutely leather the ball from distance.
It’s the former that has me most excited, though. The ball just sticks to nippy midfielders now, and it feels like they might finally have cracked how to translate the skill set of Icons like Xavi and Andrea Pirlo to virtual football. It’s also my pick for what might end up being the overpowered mechanic of this cycle though, since with a little effort you can go full “ankara Messi” and squirm away from onrushing defenders like never before.
However, this stands to make well-timed, high risk-reward tackling more prominent, since a solid slide tackle seems to win the ball a lot from even the jinkiest technicians. But with that said, one interesting defensive PlayStyle gives players access to a larger suite of animations to block shots from opponents, raising questions about how prominent and powerful controversial “AI defending” animations will be.
It’s another interesting wrinkle in the ideological battle at the heart of EA Sports football games. Esports pros and players on the hyper-competitive grind vocally want consistency in the gameplay, whereas EA Sports FC 24 doubles down on idiosyncrasy - giving players more uniqueness in their abilities and a greater variety of contextual animations to draw from in any given situation.
Obviously, these impressions all come from Kick Off mode, which has always had a different feel to both Career Mode and Ultimate Team. The most eye-catching addition in EA Sports FC 24 is probably the inclusion of female players on the same pitch as men in Ultimate Team, and it will be very interesting to see if the intricacies of each new mechanic can expand the relatively small pool of meta players we see in that massively popular and intensely competitive game mode.
There’s nothing Ultimate Team players love more than rinsing an overpowered, glitched, or generally scummy tactic, whether it’s power shots from a corner, the kick off glitch, or the dreaded rainbow-flick-to-jump-shot combo from old gen. And like I said with the unstoppable Lengthy Wendy Renard, in my experience with women’s matches on FIFA 23, the best players felt very powerful. Delphine Cascarino is going to be another Mbappe on the right wing, Bonmati will be as untackleable as Modric, and there are a slew of rapid, world-class CDMs who are basically Kante - it will be mayhem while we figure out where everyone slots in and the variety and diversity can only be a good thing.
So while all of that might turn out to be less impactful than it seems at first glance, in its first iteration at least, you can’t say that EA Sports FC 24 is exactly the same as last year.
The EA Sports FC 24 release date is set for September 29th, 2023.