EA Sports FC 24

EA Sports FC 24 is an association football-themed simulation video game developed by EA Vancouver and EA Romania and published by EA Sports. It is the inaugural installment in the EA Sports FC series, succeeding the FIFA video game series after Electronic Arts’s partnership with FIFA concluded with FIFA 23. EA Sports FC 24 is the 31st overall installment of EA Sports’ football simulation games, and was released on 29 September 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

HyperMotion technology was first introduced in FIFA 22, with EA touting the HyperMotion V technology used in EA Sports FC 24 as the “biggest leap forward”; promotion for the game highlighted the feature as the game’s USP. Volumetric data from 180 matches featuring predominantly English and Spanish professional men’s and women’s teams was used in developing the technology. The match data was collected from “cameras around the stadiums”, meaning the in-game figures would move more like their real-life counterparts, and was also used to train EA Sports FC‘s proprietary machine learning algorithms.

The machine learning used the data to learn what realistic footballing movement is like, and how to recreate it in other figures. The cameras captured all players on the pitch at once, further informing team movement for the game, as well as ball physics. As well as the cameras, EA used data recorded by StretchSense gloves worn by (outfield) players to record data on how hands moved while playing, training the game’s AI on this. EA also improved their AcceleRATE feature, to AcceleRATE 2.0, with HyperMotion V. Previously, figures were rated with one of three acceleration archetypes that affected their movement when running.

AcceleRATE 2.0 uses seven archetypes, though they are still assigned automatically based on physical features rather than on player data (the figure’s speed is informed by player statistics). Another well-promoted addition to EA Sports FC 24 was PlayStyles, a feature of the in-game footballer figures that better represent the real footballers’ unique styles. The data used to create and assign PlayStyles was “optimised by Opta Sports”. An extension of this feature, PlayStyles+, are a further enhanced version of PlayStyles attributed to elite players. EA used the Opta Sports data to create 34 PlayStyles in 6 categories, which represent various roles in a squad.

Scoring, passing, ball control, defending, physical, and goalkeeping (the last was limited to the Be a Goalkeeper modes in Player Career and Clubs). Having previously been named “FIFA Ultimate Team”, the FIFA brand prefix was dropped in line with the games series’ rebranding. A new development for Ultimate Team in EA Sports FC 24 was the addition of Evolutions, a mode that allows gamers to improve certain player cards for use in Ultimate Team, giving stats boosts and new PlayStyles. Women’s footballers were included in Ultimate Team for the first time, with gamers able to use both men and women in the same team: the release roster had Alexia Putellas, Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne and Kylian Mbappé tied for the highest overall rating at 91.