The biggest changes and additions coming to FIFA 20 this year

By Gabe Gurwin August 7, 2019

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Madden NFL 20 might have disappointed some of its players with its lack of a dedicated story mode and stagnant gameplay systems, but Electronic Arts’ other football game will be here soon. FIFA 20 promises some major changes compared to last year’s game, including an entirely new way to experience the Beautiful Game. There are the biggest additions and changes coming to FIFA 20.

Contents

The Journey ends
Manage the manager
Volta street football
Composed finishing
Stadium Tifo

The Journey ends

For the last three seasons, the FIFA series has included a mode called The Journey, which chronicles the rise to superstardom of young striker Alex Hunter. The mode included familial discord, strugges in new environments, and rivals between developing players, but it culminated in a finale last year. EA has opted to end The Journey, so keep this in mind if the mode was the main reason you purchased the new games.

Manage the manager

FIFA 20 gives you all-new choices for how you create a manager in the game’s Career Mode, including their body type, skin, clothing, and hair. For the first time ever in the series, you can create a female manager as well, and once your team has left the pitch, you can answer questions from the media regarding its performance.

Volta street football

FIFA 20 | Official Reveal Trailer ft. VOLTA Football

Celebrating the asphalt-based soccer matches that have defined the sport for many kids and adults alike, FIFA 20 includes Volta street football. Depending on the pitch you’re playing on, you can knock the ball off the wall for a strategic advantage, and show off with extra flair that fits the laid-back tone of the sport. There is also a story mode included in the Volta option, and you can even have professional teams play on the streets.

Composed finishing

Anyone who has played FIFA 19 knows it can be surprisingly difficult to score, even when facing the keeper in a one-on-one matchup. The “composed finishing” system used in FIFA 20 looks to eliminate that frustration. The timing for finishes has actually been tightened, but you will see much greater shooting accuracy in situations when you logically should score a goal.

Stadium Tifo

FIFA Ultimate Team allows you to express yourself with custom colors and logos, and another new addition has made its way to FIFA 20: The Tifo. This large, coordinated piece of art will be shown before the match and after goals, and you can choose to have the crowd celebrate when you knock one in during a decisive moment.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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FIFA 23 career mode: the best teams to manage

Player kicking a ball surrounded by other players in EA Sports Fifa 22.

FIFA 23 is the latest in EA Sports’ popular soccer franchise, and one of its best features is career mode. This lets you choose any club in the game -- or even create your own -- and lead them to glory, picking teams, making transfers, and doing things your way.

But which club should you manage? With over 700 teams to choose from, it can feel overwhelming. Fear not -- we’ve analyzed every club in the game to find five that will create careers as thrilling as they are unusual. Whether you want to start from the bottom or rely heavily on youth, these are the best teams to manage in FIFA 23.

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With EA’s help, Wild Hearts solves Monster Hunter’s biggest problem

Three players build to fight a monster in Wild Hearts.

Although Capcom’s Monster Hunter series is more popular than ever in the West, it’s still a daunting series to get into because of its overbearing tutorials and complicated UI. Koei Tecmo development team Omega Force didn’t want to repeat this mistake with Wild Hearts -- its upcoming fantasy monster-hunting game with a complex offensive crafting element. To solve this issue, it partnered with Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label to better understand how western players prefer to be treated in the earliest stages of a complicated adventure.
“We wanted to understand better how this game might be received by players in different parts of the world,” Co-Director Takuto Edagawa said when discussing the fruits of the EA partnership. “Players around the world don’t tend to like information being over-presented. They don’t want you to explain too much; they want to learn more in a hands-on way by experiencing it themselves through play.”
WILD HEARTS | 7 Minutes of Gameplay
Digital Trends put this to the test with our playable three-hour build of the earliest parts of Wild Hearts and found its introduction and tutorials to be better than anything Monster Hunter has done. Within 30 minutes, Wild Hearts players should be familiar with the basic concepts the game deals with and be set for what’s shaping up to be an enjoyable cooperative hunting and crafting adventure.
A wild hunt
“One thing that was very important to us was to not do a lot of explaining and then get into the story and gameplay,” Edagawa tells Digital Trends. “We wanted you to be able to play as soon as possible. We know that our players want to experience the game and world as soon as they can, so that was the fundamental approach we took with the opening.”
Wild Hearts begins peacefully, with a lone hunter walking through a forest rife with small friendly Kemono creatures. Soon, a small-time hunt begins as the player spots a deer-like Kemono. During this hunt, players will learn the basics of the camera and movement controls, the attacks at their disposal during combat, how to climb ledges with limited stamina, and how to sneak up on an enemy.
These are some basic fundamentals in hunting games, but the difference compared to Monster Hunter Rise is that the game isn’t constantly stopping the player with long cutscenes or large text boxes to explain basic things. Text boxes only appear if players choose to activate them when a tutorial pops up.
WILD HEARTS Official Reveal Trailer
The best game openings get right into things, which Wild Hearts successfully does. According to EA Originals Executive Producer Lewis Harvey, this is the aspect of the game Koei Tecmo wanted to work closely with EA on, although EA provided some character and world design input to the Japanese development team at Omega Force as well.
“EA has a great wealth of experience in its user research division, and we were able to provide a huge amount of testing and data to Koei Tecmo that really helped them fine-tune the game and make critical decisions around their feature set,” Harvey said. “A lot of the creative input and feedback we have given has been around tutorialization, onboarding, and clarity of features and UI to players.”
The hunt continues
The setup EA and Koei Tecmo settled on was already effective but wasn’t quite over yet. I soon came across a mystical being calling themselves Mujina. During a discussion with them, I established my character’s backstory, customized their look, learned more about the Kemono, and got my first significant objective: go to the nearby town of Minato.

Before I could do that, though, the environment around us quickly changed and was overtaken by ice. I used the skills the game had effectively taught me by that point to hunt down the source, a giant ice wolf Kemono, and I engaged them in battle. Unfortunately, this fight was impossible to win, so my character was defeated and tossed into a deep cave. That’s when Mujina reappeared and activated my Karakuri, a little device my hunter found in the last hunt and carried with them.
Then came the second part of the tutorial, which focused on this unique system. During development, Koei Tecmo decided to make crafting in Wild Hearts not just a defensive or preparation thing but something that can help during exploration and fights. To get out of this cave, I had to build up boxes of Karakuri to help me climb up a wall and then build more to create a vantage point I could aerially attack enemies from.
Karakuri building skills are critically important when preparing for hunting large Kemono, too. After escaping the cave, I used the Karakuri more traditionally to build a camp near a girl I found unconscious on the ground. Once I did that, another giant Kemono that looked like a giant rat with plants growing out of it attacked, and I set off on the first real hunt of the game, concluding the opening and kicking off the true Wild Hearts adventure.
While a lot more pleased me afterward -- like the colorful world design, attack damage numbers, and fact that Karakuri remains in the world map after a hunt to remind you of previous exploits -- this opening is what stuck with me.
Sayonara, Monster Hunter
I’ve tried to get into the mainline Monster Hunter series multiple times but always found the beginning of those games off-putting because of how daunting their openings and tutorials are. The king of this genre has an approachability problem, and Wild Hearts has a great chance of becoming the preferred option for new players thanks to how it handles player onboarding. Couple that with a cleaner UI, and this Wild Heats already has a better user experience -- even just 30 minutes into a preview build I played months ahead of its launch.

Gaming

FIFA 23 beginners’ guide: Tips and tricks to level up your soccer skills

Dusan Vlahovic celebrating a goal in FIFA 23.

FIFA 23 is the latest installment in the long-running FIFA series (that will soon come to an end), and it comes with a bunch of new features to give you an edge come match day. If you’re new to the series -- or have just been away for a while -- there’s a lot to learn.

That’s where our FIFA 23 beginners’ guide comes in. We’ve delved into the game and found all the best advice for features new and old. All of them will help you get to grips with FIFA 23 and take your skills from amateur level to world-class in next to no time.
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