EA Sports FC 26 preview – rip it up and start again

This year’s EA Sports FC 26 has been revealed at last and it’s going to be fundamentally different from its somewhat unloved predecessor.

The franchise previously known as FIFA is one of the games industry’s great cash cows. However, it has had a rocky time recently, when two years ago EA made the break from the famously money-hungry FIFA and rebranded the series to FC. At first this seemed to work out fine but last year’s iteration, FC 25, didn’t live up to EA Sports’ sales expectations. To their credit, EA’s response to that failure has been immediate and seemingly far reaching, when it comes to the changes being made to FC 26.

EA has cited community feedback as the driving force behind EA Sports FC 26’s radical rework. The company has released a raft of presentations to insiders, covering every aspect of the game but, tellingly, the first of those was conducted by Sheldon Rogers, head of FC 26’s global community team, who said: ‘When we say ‘The club is yours,’ we really mean it. We have been tracking what is most important to our players, and bringing that directly into our development process.’

So what, exactly, has that process brought to FC 26? Undoubtedly the headline change will be that for the first time in the franchise’s history, players will be able to choose between two gameplay styles, called Competitive and Authentic.

Paul Parsons, FC 26’s lead gameplay producer, explained the thinking behind that radical move: “We’ve got two different, really core, audiences in our game. We’ve got the competitive player, who wants a high-paced, uptempo, head-to-head experience, and we’ve got the offline career player who’s looking for something that’s slower, more tactical and with scorelines that are lower, in line with what you see in a real-world game.

‘In the past, we’ve found ourselves disappointing one of those two audiences, but we’re not willing to do that in FC 26. This year, we’ve come up with two completely different tunings for the game.’

So, the Competitive style will breed ultra-fast, end-to-end gameplay that may not bear a huge amount of resemblance to the real-life game, and is aimed at those whose FC gameplay revolves around the FC Ultimate Team (FUT) and Clubs elements of the game. According to Parsons, the priority of the Competitive preset was to improve responsiveness and foreground user skill, and one key way in which EA does that is by dialling down the game’s fatigue system.

EA has also added sliders that will enable players to fine-tune both experiences, and one key difference between the two will be that in Competitive mode players will have to control defenders manually, whereas in Authentic the game will take more control over their positioning. You’ll be able to pick either system in any mode of the game, and also to save and quickly retrieve your tweaked versions of them.

Adding two different gameplay-tuning presets to FC 26 is an unprecedented move. In the past, when FIFA games would slug it out with Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, PES was renowned for taking the more measured, true-to-life approach that EA Sports is attempting with the Authentic preset, whereas FIFA fell squarely into Competitive territory. It will be fascinating to see which tuning FC 26’s fanbase ultimately prefers.

FC 26’s Authentic mode is still unlikely to provide an experience which is anything like as measured and, some would say, ponderous as that of PES games of yore. That’s because the other raft of changes EA has made to FC 26 is to rework a large number of fundamental gameplay elements, in a quest to improve player responsiveness.

Those fundamentals include dribbling, where FC 26’s players will make more touches while dribbling, turn more sharply, and move faster with the ball. Goalkeepers’ AI has been rewritten so that their tendency to deflect the ball to incoming attackers, as seen in FC 25, has been reduced, and they generally position themselves more intelligently. Tackling and interceptions have been retuned to reduce the previous tendency for the ball to bounce back to opposition players.

EA has also tweaked players’ run curves, giving them more explosive acceleration and allowing them to turn more sharply. And the final fundamental that has been reworked is players’ ability to shield the ball. Parsons said that the company has worked hard to make ball-shielding more consistent in the game, adding two new shielding mechanics (called Contested Boxouts and Shield Entries), a new Enforcer play style, and by upgrading the physics of shielding.

Another fundamental aspect of the game that EA says it has improved is general online responsiveness, especially the area of delay between players’ inputs and what happens on screen. The publisher has also highlighted a number of additions and less fundamental tweaks to pretty much all of FC 26’s game modes – such as the return of low-driven shots, triggered by double-tapping the shoot button – but we’ll bring you a deeper dive into those when we’ve had a chance to play the game.

Given the sheer amount of changes and upgrades that we already know about, EA Sports FC 26 should feel radically different to its immediate predecessors. Hopefully in a good way. But it certainly looks as though EA has been making better use of the vast amount of money it used to have to pay FIFA each year, and pouring at least some of it back into the game itself.

EA Sports FC 26 will launch on September 26 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

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