Red flags go up for anyone left wanting more out of FIFA over last year’s Nintendo entry.
At EA Play today we learned about what’s new to the next entry in the FIFA series including the Street-inspired Volta Football game mode coming alongside the usual affairs. While I’m genuinely interested in kicking out a few games on the street level environments and enjoying tighter play formats, it would seem the Nintendo Switch edition of the game is going to be one of those infamous ‘Legacy edition’ games.
This essentially means nothing is going to be changed from FIFA 2019 for the switch aside from brand and roster updates, which means you’re still essentially paying for a yearly roster update to FIFA 2018 for Switch. This entails updates to the lucrative Ultimate Team model as well, but given many of the contents of FIFA 19’s entry to Ultimate Team were excluded from Switch in the lead-up to this year’s announcement you can expect similar treatment from the 2020 entry.
This is not the first time this has been done and will not be the last, as the practice of ‘Legacy Edition’ rebranding as existed since FIFA 2013 on the Wii and the release of last year’s FIFA 19 coming to the Xbox 360 and PS3 continued this. The engine being used here is codenamed Ignite and has been in place for every game before FIFA 17 brought the PS4, Xbox and PC versions of the game to the Frostbite engine.
If you’re expecting anything new of FIFA 20 we’d highly recommend not buying it on Switch and even if you care about Ultimate Team you got a bad deal out of last year’s edition on the Nintendo console. Look elsewhere for your fix of yearly releases. FIFA 20 launches September 27th.
