FIFA 20 Out September, Brings Back Street Football and Set-Pieces Receive Overhaul #EAPLAY
As expected whether you like sports or not, the latest FIFA was revealed at EA Play with FIFA 20. Now of course with every yearly release, the developers will tell us about the new and improved ball physics, how the body language might change and how each blade of grass has been in development for the past 7 years. But in truth, any FIFA player will know, the series has gotten to the stage where not much in terms of mechanics can really be improved upon all that much.
Yes we appreciate the little tweaks here and there on the pitch, but we also want to know if they’ll be any new modes. So with FIFA 20, it’s not so much a new mode, but rather a returning mode of sorts, but updated upon for this modern era. The mode in question is Volta football, which in a nutshell in its essence is street football and it looks like it will be a lot of fun. And they’ll be no elongated, cartoon Peter Crouch’s either from FIFA Street.
In Volta you’ll be able to create your own player, male or female and you’ll be able to customise their clothing, accessories and style to your heart’s content. You’ll play matches on the group in courtyards to rooftops and underpasses from locations across the world such as London, Tokyo and Amsterdam. Matches will be played with no goalkeeper in 3v3, 4v4 or 5v5 games. Volta will even have its own narrative driven story mode, replacing The Journey from the previous three releases. You’ll even be able to play Volta online in leagues, build your squad or just one-off matches.
As much as the developers bang on about the improved realism, until I play the game myself, you can’t really appreciate any subtle improvements until then. However, gameplay improvements that did catch my attention were to the set-pieces, such as free-kicks, penalties and I assume corner-kicks too. Once you place your target for the free-kick or penalty, with the right analogue stick, you will have full control on the amount of spin that you put on the ball. You can even use this after-touch mechanic to attempt the Ronaldo ‘up and over’ style free-kick if you’re daring enough.
In some ways, this improved mechanic kind of reminds me to what you might see when hitting the cue ball in snooker games or the after-touch that you might apply in EA’s PGA Tour Golf series. Even though I roll my eyes at the authenticity of improvements made each and every year, this is one that I’m quite looking forward to trying. To give you an idea as to what I’m attempting to explain, you can check out a couple of GIF’s below.
Here are the release ‘dates’ for FIFA 20. The normal release date is September 27th, if you pre-order the Ultimate Edition you’ll get it on the 24th. And if you subscribe to EA Access or EA Origin, you’ll get the game a full week early to trial on the 20th.
FIFA 20 will release for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and it will also release for the Nintendo Switch as a Legacy Edition, which is essentially the version that you might find on PS3 or Xbox 360. Speaking of which, this year’s release will see the end to PS3 and Xbox 360 releases.
Finally, if you missed the full FIFA 20 steam, you can find it below.