EA Sports has released a deep dive into Ultimate Team for FC 24, the next game in the franchise formerly named after FIFA. Ultimate Team for 2024 will include a handful of new features, including player evolutions and playstyles, as well as community-requested updates, as well as the addition of women’s soccer for the first time ever in FUT. Here’s everything you need to know.
Evolutions
Evolutions is a brand new feature in Ultimate Team that will allow you to customize and upgrade players, with the ability to make a lower rated player one of your top players. Evolutions will allow you to improve overall stats or specific attributes, and may even involve customizing or improving a player’s skill moves, playstyles, work rates, alternate stances, or weak foot. player. Evolving a player will also add unique visual enhancements.
A limited selection of evolutions will be available each season, with some available for free and others requiring coins, or a mix of coins and points to unlock. Some evolutions will also be time-limited throughout the season. Each Evolution slot will have specific requirements for the players it can be used to upgrade, from broad categories like “any Silver player” to details like “a left-back with 3* skill moves”, like the examples donated by EA.
Once you hire a player into an Evolution slot, you will need to complete challenges to get the upgrade. Again, EA gave some examples of Evolution challenges, ranging from “play 5 games where you score with this player in your starting XI” to “win 10 Ultimate Team Champs games with this player”. You will only be able to work on one evolution at a time, but you can freely switch between them, with your progress being saved each time.
Players committed to an evolution will become untradable, and once committed to a slot, they cannot be removed or lost.
Women’s football
The introduction of women’s soccer in Ultimate Team has added five new leagues to the game, with every club and player from the following leagues available at launch:
- Barclays Women’s Super League (England)
- D1 Arkema (France)
- Google Pixel Frauen-Bundesliga (Germany)
- League F (Spain)
- National Women’s Soccer League (USA)
A number of UEFA Women’s Champions League clubs and players will also be available from launch. The addition of women’s soccer leagues adds around 1,600 players to the game, with both male and female players able to compete together on the same pitch. New chemistry links have also been added in the Men’s and Women’s Football Leagues and Affiliate Clubs.
Styles of play
PlayStyles is another new feature that has been added to complement the overall ratings, giving a more nuanced view of each player’s strengths. While every player will have a selection of PlayStyles, a few top players will also have PlayStyles+, essentially signature moves performed at an elite level – for example, Sam Kerr’s powerful header or Haaland’s acrobatic ability.
PlayStyles will be useful both for building your own team or for evaluating an opponent’s pre-game, giving you a more intuitive idea of the team’s overall playstyle. Players with PlayStyles+ will have an icon on the front of the item, giving you an idea of a player’s special skills even if you don’t know them or their league.
Only a small number of players will launch with PlayStyles+, though more will be added over time, and players will also be able to customize PlayStyles through Evolutions.
Goals
Objectives are refreshed in FC 24. Along with a visual refresh to make the page more appealing, the objectives will also be split across multiple tabs so they’re a bit easier to follow. In a major quality of life upgrade, you’ll also get a Claim All button to redeem all of your objective rewards at once.
Quality of life improvements
EA has included a number of quality of life improvements based on player feedback for Ultimate Team 24. Elements have been visually redesigned to make information easier to read at a glance, as well as the introduced aesthetic improvements that make special items even more special.
Stance modifier consumables have been completely removed from the game, allowing you to move players around your squad as much as you want.
In Club Finder upgrades, players on loan will now be hidden when building a squad in SBC. Searches for positions in your club will now include primary and alternate positions by default, although you can also choose to search only by primary positions.
In order to bring them in line with heroes and regular players, Icons will now only have one base version at launch, with more versions to be released over time. Each icon in your squad will also give an additional contribution to the squad for each league represented in your squad. This bonus will stack with Nation Chemistry.
The way items work has also been streamlined: you can now equip customization items directly from the new items screen. You will also be able to bulk trade duplicate untradeable items with tradeable versions in your Club.
Final quality-of-life improvements include new menus designed to make it easier to navigate Ultimate Team’s various features, as well as reducing the length of Squad Battle matches from six minutes per half to 4 minutes.
EA Sports FC 24 launches September 29 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Players who purchase the Ultimate Edition will receive early access on September 22.
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