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Fifa 20 Ultimate Team: New features, Icons and latest updates revealed as EA Sports shows off most popular game mode

Developers criticised for features that have not changed

Andrew Griffin
Wednesday 31 July 2019 15:40 BST
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Fifa 20 Gameplay Trailer

Fifa has revealed the future of Ultimate Team, showing how the game's most popular mode will change in the latest installment.

EA Sports is making a whole host of changes to the game mode with Fifa 20, which will be released in September. It comes alongside a host of other changes including a new "Volta" mode.

Ultimate Team is easily Fifa's most popular game mode. It is so beloved – and addictive – that it accounts for more than a quarter of EA Sports' revenue, and so has received a variety of changes to make it even more exciting this year.

Some of those changes include new options to give progression through the season, better ways of customising your team and how they should look, whole new ways of playing against and with friends as well as changing up the way that people buy new players.

Perhaps the most important of the changes is a new feature called Season Objectives. That allows players to progress over the course of a whole season – which will run for a couple of months in the game – not just on a daily or weekly basis

There will also be even more long-running objectives, known as milestones. Those will not be tied to a season but instead offer a way to progress the club between seasons, with players being offered a variety of different challenges.

There will also be new ways of personalising your club, so that it feels like an individual and unique institution. In the past, the game has offered a set of custom kits to allow each team to look different – but only in a limited way.

Now thre will be eight different ways of customising teams. They will include new stadium themes, special balls, club crests, Tifos and special celebrations, which can be combined to make thousands of different possibilities.

Fifa will also add new friendlies, so that people can play together either locally or online in new ways that don't eat up contracts or fitness. Now, players will be able to jump into traditional 11v11 gameplay, using the special House Rules modes or not.

The latest game will of course bring with it a whole host of new Icons. Those include new players such as Andrea Pirlo and Didier Drogba, as well as Zinedine Zidane, who also stars on the cover of the Ultimate Edition and gets a legendary card.

Ultimate Team is already being criticised for what has not changed, however. EA Sports has decided not to make any changes to the fact that children are allowed to spend large amounts of money on the game, will still not let players transfer their progress from one version of Fifa to the other, and has no plans to add women's players into the game mode, all of which Eurogamer reports was met with criticism at a reveal event in Berlin.

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