EA Sports has defended its decision to let men and women footballers play together in FC 24 Ultimate Team mode, and said it’s using new tech to combat toxic behavior online.
FC 24, EA Sports’ first post-FIFA football game, lets male and female players play with and against each other in Ultimate Team, the game’s most popular and most controversial mode. Women players are not at a natural disadvantage in Ultimate Team, either. If a male and female player have the same attributes (stats), the same height, and the same mass (governed by weight), the outcomes on the virtual pitch are exactly the same. Attributes are relative to the competition the player plays in.
This means Chelsea superstar Sam Kerr brings her 91 overall rating relative to the Women’s Super League into Ultimate Team, and can compete with similarly-rated male players in the mode.
Following last week’s FC 24 reveal, some within the FIFA community claimed that mixing women and men in Ultimate Team was unrealistic and in opposition to what they considered an “authentic” football simulation. The problem, some of these players said, was that they felt women would struggle to compete with men in real life, and so should struggle to compete in FC 24, too. Some said men and women players should be restricted to their own modes within Ultimate Team or suggested they don’t want women players in Ultimate Team at all. Some even threatened to boycott FC 24 entirely.
'It's something we thought deeply about'
In an interview with IGN, John Shepherd, VP, Executive Producer at Electronic Arts, insisted the decision to mix men and women in Ultimate Team was the right one, and said the developers felt strongly about using their game to promote women’s football.
“It’s something we really thought deeply about,” Shepherd said. “We feel we can play a really important role in the growth of that sport in introducing it to all of our fans. We just have this conviction that we believe we want to unite the world around football.
“Ultimate Team is a great place for that. It is a mode where you can build your fantasy team with different nationalities, different leagues, different clubs. And so it felt like a great spot to be able to do that.”
When asked what message EA Sports had for so-called FIFA fans who are complaining about FC 24 Ultimate Team mixing men and women, Shepherd highlighted Kick Off mode, which restricts players to using virtual versions of real-life teams with their real-life players.
“We have a vision of connecting not just the 150 million fans we have now, but a billion fans,” Shepherd said. “We want this game and this brand, this club, this ecosystem, to welcome everybody. In terms of our decision around how we’re integrating women’s football into Ultimate Team, we feel really strongly about that.
“There are other modes of play, such as Kick Off, where it’s more about that club playing together against another club. But Ultimate Team to us is a mode where you can have a mix of players and you can build the best team. And we think that’s going to be great for football, and we think that’s going to be great for our fans and our future fans. That’s what I would say.”
Speaking to IGN, senior producer Sam Rivera said Ultimate Team should be thought of as a “fantasy mode” that already lets users create teams made up of players who could never play with each other in real life.
“Ultimate Team is a fantasy mode,” Rivera said. “You don’t see Mbappe playing with all the Icons. It’s Ultimate Team — fantasy football is what’s happening there.”
In general, FC 24’s women players will probably be shorter and lighter than the men. While stats for both attributes affect gameplay — a tall player can reach balls shorter players cannot, a high mass player will outmuscle a low mass player, etc — women players are expected to hold their own in Ultimate Team. Indeed, some of the best male players currently in the mode, such as Argentina legend Lionel Messi and Italian Icon Fabio Cannavaro, are short with low mass.
As Rivera put it: “It’s not just about being tall and being strong. The core of the message here is: if everything is equal they play the same way.”
Agility is a key attribute. How fast a player reacts, turns, accelerates, intercepts, and blocks are all important factors in determining their usefulness in-game.
EA says it takes toxicity 'really seriously'
With the addition of women into Ultimate Team, there is concern about increased online toxicity. FIFA has in the past drawn criticism for racist user-generated content in the Pro Clubs mode, but Ultimate Team has suffered similar problems. Players are bracing themselves for everything from sexist club names to inappropriate team composition once FC 24 comes out in September and Ultimate Team players venture online.
Without going into specifics, Shepherd said this was an important issue for EA Sports, and confirmed new work had been done to try to tackle online toxicity as more women potentially try Ultimate Team mode.
“It’s something we take really seriously,” Shepherd said. “It’s an ongoing thing. It’s a constant effort. We have a team within EA that is fully-focused on toxicity and understanding what’s happening in the game. We are moving to some newer systems even for this next game, where we’re using some new services to help us monitor names.
“It gets really complex. Because people are able to get around different systems, we have to update and adjust those systems. We’re moving to some new tech in our backend on the server to help us with that. But that’s just one thing of many. It’s a group of people constantly looking at the toxicity in the game and understanding how we can make sure it is a safe environment for everybody. But it’s one of those things that’s going to take constant effort for us to continue to focus on.”
Check out IGN’s EA Sports FC 24 hands-on preview to get an idea how this year’s game plays. Nintendo Switch owners may be interested to learn their version is much improved over previous Legacy editions of FIFA.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
