FIFA 21. Every Detail We Know

The release of FIFA 21 is extremely important considering that it should take place around the same time as the new consoles from PlayStation and Xbox. The coronavirus pandemic will affect the financial prospects of the simulator, but this does not diminish the interest of fans of the series.

FIFA has long managed to establish a monopoly on the market. But last year PES made a knight’s move and acquired exclusive rights to Juventus, which forced EA Sports to remove the official logo and club name from their game. Also, there are rumors that the franchise is in for a big change.

FIFA is an amazing game. It is made on an engine from a shooter, it has not been updated for years, but it is sold in tens of millions of copies and has been pissing me off for seven years. I pinned a lot of hopes on the current FIFA 20 and naively believed that with such a beautiful number in the name EA would come up with something cool. I was wrong ‒ the twenty was plus or minus the same as the nineteenth. The past presentation of FIFA 21 buried hopes for changes in the 21st part. The engine is the same, the gameplay is the same, but still, there will be a couple of chips that should again affect the balance and fix a number of some especially enraging gameplay elements.

FIFA 21 Release Date

The previous three versions of the game were released on the last Friday of September. This time the release should take place on Friday, September 25th. However, football is stopped right now due to the pandemic. Will the coronavirus affect EA Sports’ plans?

Sadly, it looks like COVID-19 will also affect the world’s best-selling football franchise. After all, how can they replicate the 2020/21 season if it doesn’t start in the fall?

Electronic Arts says FIFA 21 will arrive in October this year, first on current-gen consoles and, following the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, on next-gen consoles. FIFA 21 launches on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on October 9, 2020. But I’m not sure that these statements can be trusted, given the situation in the world and the endless transfers of films/games/whatever.

When is the FIFA 21 Demo coming out?

The demo is usually released two to three weeks before the game itself, so we expect it from EA in early September. Again, this is likely to largely depend on how soon the football season is resumed. We advise you not to wait for the trial version at the beginning of autumn.

Bonuses are guaranteed for those who pre-order!

Pre-order the Standard Edition and get:

• up to 3 rare gold sets: 1 per week for 3 weeks,
• Cover Player Loan for 5 FUT Matches,
• FUT Ambassador of your choice ‒ 1 out of 3 players for 3 matches,
• special FUT kits and stadium items.

With pre-order champion edition:

• the ability to play 3 days earlier,
• up to 12 rare gold sets: 1 per week for 12 weeks,
• Cover Player Loan for 5 FUT Matches,
• a graduate of the club academy in career mode,
• FUT Ambassador of your choice ‒ 1 out of 3 players for 3 matches,
• special FUT kits and stadium items.

With Ultimate Edition pre-order:

• bonus: FUT 21 version player (n / a),
• the ability to play 3 days earlier,
• up to 24 rare gold sets: 2 per week for 12 weeks,
• Cover Player Loan for 5 FUT Matches,
• a graduate of the club academy in career mode,
• FUT Ambassador of your choice ‒ 1 out of 3 players for 3 matches,
• special FUT kits and stadium items.

Who will be on the cover of the game?

The face of FIFA 20, instead of Cristiano Ronaldo, is the newcomer of Real Madrid, Eden Hazard. However, in his debut season for the “creamy” the Belgian had problems with injuries and playing form. We believe that EA will look for an alternative.

When PES acquired the rights to Juventus, it became clear that FIFA 21 would not return to the Ronaldo option. And it is unlikely that it will be Messi since Barcelona is a partner of Konami, which creates PES.

We dare to assume that it will be someone from the great Liverpool, storming the top of the Premier League, and also won the Champions League last season. Sadio Mane or Mohamed Salah are worthy contenders. And then there’s Virgil van Dijk, who has also achieved superstar status. Another opportunity for EA is to negotiate with PSG’s Kylian Mbappé.

There is already a poll among fans of the franchise who should be on the cover, but Asian fans have tried there ‒ the leaders are Son Heung Min (38%) from Tottenham and Wu Lei (37%) from Espanyol.

How will the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles affect the game?

Given that the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft will not go on sale until the end of November, FIFA 21 should be released in regular format for PS4 and Xbox One, and then re-released on new consoles with improved graphics before Christmas.

Will there be a special edition of the game dedicated to Euro 2020?

Historically, separate games from FIFA were released for the World and European Championships, but this did not happen during the last tournament draws.

Konami, in turn, acquired the rights to Euro 2016 and released additional downloadable content for PES. They also have the right to the next tournament, which is likely to take place next summer. This cannot be said about EA.

How will the game change?

The battle between EA Sports and Konami continues. FIFA has already been deprived of the right to use the logo and the name of Juventus, which became known as Piemonte Calcio.

But a much more serious question is the graphics of the game. Critics and gamers alike generally agree that PES has a much better gameplay experience. It will be interesting to see if FIFA 21 can stand up to its main competitor visually. For this, the latest 3D scanning system of players will be used, which will become as realistic as possible. But this will happen only after the release of the game on the next-generation console.

New leagues and stadiums

Currently, three of the world’s top five leagues boast a full set of digitized stadiums and players’ faces. FIFA 15 has the English Premier League, FIFA 19 has the Spanish La Liga, and the German Bundesliga made its debut last year. There are still Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1.

If one of them appears this year, it will most likely be the second option: the absence of Juventus in the Italian championship is a serious drawback. Besides, the game already has the stadiums of three Ligue 1 teams ‒ Lyon, Marseille, and PSG ‒ and there are 17 more to be added (which EA is quite capable of). 

Will Volta mode get updates?

Volta mode has become the main novelty of FIFA 20. It is “back to basics”, or rather ‒ the emergence of street football with teams of several people and futsal elements. Most likely, in the new version of the game, FIFA Street will become even brighter, adding platforms and plot meaning.

What’s changing in the Ultimate Team?

The main question is whether EA Sports will change the main element of this mode ‒ buying players for real money.

The developers responded to all critics with accusations about siphoning money from children, that they have the opportunity to receive free packs and wait for football stars in them.

Yes, free packs may have kept some players from spending large sums of money. But you still get Granite Jaka or Troy Dini, and your opponents often turn out to be football stars who were bought for donations.

What FIFA 21 needs a fairer matchmaking system. Users should receive teams of their level as rivals, and not those that cannot be beaten for the reason that you did not pour your dollars into the game.

Will there be a VAR in FIFA 21?

The video replay system has not yet been used in the simulator for the reason that VAR regularly causes many debates and scandals. There is currently no evidence that a video assistant referee will appear in FIFA 21. Let’s see how the developers can maintain a fine line between fun and realism in the game.

Gameplay

Actually, today we have information on the details of the gameplay ‒ these are the behavior of football players, new features and movements. In general, as a rule, these are major changes in all license plates and a headache for all players. By what principles and why EA is constantly changing the basics of gameplay, no one knows, but every year you have to relearn how to play. For example, in the current FIFA 20 at the start, absolutely everyone had to re-learn to work with defense players, who, apparently, in EA, simply turned off their intelligence. This year, the defense will be even worse. Because all the main improvements in the gameplay are aimed at strengthening the attack.

First, we’ll get a new kind of dribbling called Agile. Now, of the simple options to get away from the defense, there is only precise dribbling, which requires serious concentration and leads to frequent ball losses due to erroneous turns. Agile will allow you to work in one plane, swing the defender along the flanks and throw the ball between his legs. Of course, this could and should have been done before, but now everything is greatly simplified. Agile will work on one button and will spoil a lot of nerves during the defense. At least in the demo that I was able to touch, Agile with computer dummies works wonderfully.

The next great news is that EA decided to shake up the influence of some stats on AI behavior. If a player is doing badly with the “choice of position”, then in attack he will open worse and will start running offside, and in general, he can run away from the field, probably. But the players who are more expensive and “smarter” and on the verge of an offside position will slow down and return to free zones if they are covered before receiving a pass.

In contrast, the defenders will work in the same way. A newbie will miss the oncoming players, open up free zones for them (which they do not hesitate to do now), and, in general, behave like a guy from the yard team. The stronger guys will suppress the active actions of the enemy. And he will seem to be able to calculate the situation in advance. Ok, it will work at the level of the numbers and characteristics of the players. Because in the demonstration, we were shown exactly the behavior of two AI and not artificial intelligence against the player.

In general, this sounds and looks reasonable, but in my opinion, it will increase the imbalance in Ultimate Team at the lower and middle levels of the skills. Now it is extremely difficult for a conditional team with a rating of 85 to fight with clubs that have a rating under 90 (this is a huge gap in the cost of teams), and what will happen when the difference between them increases, even more, is difficult to imagine. However, okay, such things only temper character and increase sales of gamepads.

By the way, since we have already touched on AI, we note that those who like to play with the computer on the conventional “Legend” will now also have a hard time. Artificial intelligence is promised to connect all attacking feints, and it will actively use them. By the way, the chain of feints in the new part will be lengthened. Without losing the ball, it will be possible to carry out not two. But three “difficult” movements, six “medium” and an infinite number of “simple” ones.

Another joy in attack is the control of the oncoming players. Let me explain. Now you can disperse an attack in a couple of proven ways. It is good to run into a “wall”, go along the flank and wait for support in the penalty area, and the most commonly used option is to give a command to your partner to run or support. All this works, but it is far from always possible to read the future actions of the partner: either he runs in the wrong direction, then he will generally stand in a closed area, or even he may stay in place. How much it spoils the nerves ‒ beyond words, so in FIFA 21 they decided to shift the story of running up to our shoulders.

That is, now, as before, we will give a command to the partner to overclock, but at the same time with the right stick, we will be able to indicate in which direction to run. This opens up a huge space for maneuvers and tactics.

One more feature will be added to this ‒ player fixation. Now you can only control the player with the ball. And when you pass you are automatically switched to the receiver. In FIFA 21, it will be possible to “lock” the current player and stay with him even after a pass. Whoever accepts it, will take control of the AI. And you can run back into the open area and ask for the ball back.

How responsive the control of the second player will be and how competently the AI ​​will work, I cannot say yet. In the demo, the function worked. But we did not have access to the classic 11v11 mode, where there is room for a run. So we will just fix this moment and make a verdict after the release.

But for what EA can be praised now ‒ they finally, after so many years, decided to fix the problem of the great heaps. For those who don’t know: FIFA players love to bump into each other, fall, and wallow in a large company. And to run up and stumble over a lying goalkeeper or a defender who has gone into the tackle is the sacred duty of even the most eminent football players. In FIFA 21, our players will not only be deprived of such joy but will also be taught to jump by pressing two sticks. It’s a little surprising that this problem has been solved for so long, but it’s good that they have finally solved it.

When it comes to humanizing player behavior, EA promises to fix the passing system as well. Today, the ball passing animation is a solid kick and then a touch. Considering that FIFA is generally quite critical to the correct pass and before passing it forces you to handle the ball, brake it, and turn towards the receiver, a long animation often led to losses. In FIFA 21, passes will be played with much shorter animations. A player can simply poke the ball from a standing position and give it to a partner. The only thing is not yet clear whether this will affect all programs or only affect short ones. EA also decided to refine the crosses, allowing you to choose between cross passes, counter passes, or coast passes.

But there is practically nothing to tell about the defense. After FIFA 20 and the promise of a massive boost in the attack in the upcoming FIFA 21, I was hoping that this aspect would be thoroughly reworked. But at the presentation, it was given very little attention and in fact, they said something like the following: “Yes, in FIFA 20 the defense was a little random, and not everyone liked it. We have worked on this, and now the players will better choose their positions, take the ball, and hit it more actively.” On the trailer, however, I did not notice all this. Stopping the attacker, especially with all the new moves, has become even more difficult. So the only sure way to take the ball away is to read the opponent’s play, block off possible pass zones and meet them at the beginning.

Well, the last two points that you can talk about today. First, EA promises to fix many small mistakes that have always pissed me off personally, but I believed to the end that my crooked hands were to blame. We are talking about the failure of skills, incorrect reactions to pressing, and accidental or erroneous switches.

The second point is audience toxicity. Yes, FIFA 21 will become even more politically correct and more attentive to the feelings of the players. For those who have not played for a long time and do not know, I will explain. In modern FIFA, any interactions with your online opponent are generally disabled. If earlier there was a voice chat in the game, in which you could just communicate with an opponent during a match, now you can’t even see your opponent’s uniform so as not to accidentally be offended. FIFA 21 goes even further. To begin with, part of the goal-scoring celebrations will be removed from the game.

Further, EA plans to reduce the time allotted for celebrations, replays of critical moments, as well as the execution of free kicks and goal kicks. Previously, all this was given 30 seconds, now ‒ no more than 15-20. On the one hand, this is good news, since sometimes opponents drag out time and throw off the pace. On the other hand, this delay is part of a tactical game that works and is applied even in real sports.