It’s perhaps fair to suggest that when you’re on the 34th edition of your annual sports series, new ideas may start to get thin on the ground.
Every year EA Sports finds itself faced with the same dilemma – how do you take a series that started back in 1993 and has now spent more than three decades evolving under the same Canadian studio, and continue to add new features to it?
Despite this, it still manages to find something every time, and this year the answer is The Grounds. That’s the main addition to EA Sports FC 27, the latest instalment of EA Vancouver’s football game and the fourth since EA cut ties with FIFA and adopted its new FC branding.
In short, The Grounds is EA’s attempt to replace the game’s Clubs mode with something that appeals to a wider range of players. In previous EA FC and FIFA games, Clubs let players form their own teams, controlling a single player in each, for full 22-player, 11v11 matches. It was a great mode, but only really came into its own when you had a full team of friends.
If you have a big squad of chums and still crave those 11v11 matches you’ll still find them in The Grounds, but this time it’s also full of other new match types and other features aimed at smaller groups of co-op players, or even just those flying solo.
It takes place in an open-world town, similar to The City in the NBA 2K series or The Island in WWE 2K. Players create their own avatar then wander around the town, talking to NPCs and taking on their quests, which usually involve playing against others in the various game modes.
This includes a drop-in stadium for those 11v11 matches, as well as a Clubhouse where Clubs can still meet up and play massively multiplayer matches together. But it also includes smaller parks with 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and Rush match types, as well as various mini-games (similar to the training ones in Career mode).
The hope is presumably to offer another thriving new area for players to compete against each other, to split up the grind that is the eternally popular Ultimate Team mode. Naturally, given that I was reviewing the game before release The Grounds was fairly sparse, but just before publishing this review I checked again (now that Early Access is underway) and it’s certainly filling up now.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/review/ea-sports-fc-27/
