 Hey guys, this is Nate, AKA the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. Today's video, we're starting off with FIFA 20, but we're gonna be talking about FIFA 21, the FIFA Ultimate Team deep dive. I guess they released all the features. I don't even know what you call it. It was basically FIFA 21 Ultimate Team day yesterday. I wanna talk about all the information that was dropped, give you some of my thoughts on it and kinda cover that sort of information. And honestly, come to you in sort of a perspective of just analyzing everything in terms of what we saw today, in terms of how it's gonna affect the market, how that is going to affect gameplay and how that is just going to affect how Ultimate Team is used because there's a lot of very simple changes in what they released yesterday that I think are gonna impact how we access Ultimate Team and how we participate in FIFA inside of Ultimate Team differently in FIFA 21. So of course the pitch notes that were released today, there was an FAQ with the FIFA Direct Communication Account. We're gonna look at all of that today and as well talk about some of the roads of the final stuff that happened today as well. I wanna check my Jal Felix first things first because on foot bin he has a dynamic image. Woohoo, that is a nice dynamic image. Gigi's EA finally upgraded that card. Hopefully he gets upgraded for their game that is being played later this week. But without further ado, let's talk FIFA 21. Now I know this is kinda coming out a little bit later so you've probably already seen a lot of this stuff so this might not be new news to some of you but I wanna give you my thoughts on it because this was basically our content for Monday on FIFA. We didn't have any SBCs or objectives or anything in foot 20. It was all FIFA 21 related material that they were pushing us towards today. I don't even think we got road to the final upgrades for the Champions League cards which I think we were expecting. But anyways, this is a very, very long article. I'm gonna use some of these bullet points to take you through certain points that I wanna talk about. A lot of people are talking about this foot co-op, right? And just before I get into all of this too, if I had to rate this out of 10 what I had read today and what I'm understanding from today, some of the positives, some of the negatives, I'm giving this kind of like a 6.5, maybe seven out of 10-ish. I mean, it's just kind of just above average in terms of yes, they added some cool new things but it's almost like we're gonna talk about some things, how this relates to last year. Yes, we had a cool new thing but it could have been this much better, right? And I feel like we're just kind of settling for okay. Maybe there's still figurants and things out. And I know that COVID definitely threw a wrench into a lot of these plans. I'm sure just preparing for FIFA 21, getting the game ready, adding all these new modes and the new layout and everything like that. I'm sure that COVID had a play in this. So that's something to kind of think about as well that there was probably a lot of restrictions while they were going forward and making this game. But anyways, Foot Co-op was a big thing today and I think this is one of the bright points that also kind of could have been pushed to another level. It is very cool that you can now play with somebody in some of the foot-friendly modes in squad battles and division rivals. But the thing that a lot of people are upset about with this co-op is you are not going to be able to play with live foot-friendly or play a friend, right? So live foot-friendlies is different from what we have in FIFA Ultimate Team right now. And I'll talk about that in a second because there was a common misunderstanding about that stuff today. But you cannot play 2v2. Basically there's not really a mode where you can just sit down and play 2v2 kind of like how you can in seasons, right? Or the original co-op mode. I think people were hoping that you could do the original co-op feel of play 2v2 inside of FIFA Ultimate Team. Now that's not a guaranteed so far, so I'm gonna go through this really fast. The co-op is again through some of the friendly games and then squad battles and division rivals. In squad battles, this is actually gonna be a way, there's gonna be ways like this throughout but it's especially in squad battles. If you're somebody who is not that good of a player, you can co-op with somebody who is a very good player, maybe an elite level type player, you could co-op with them and get better rewards through squad battles. I think it's basically squad battles only, right? Because in squad battles, you're playing against the AI and you get more coins and stuff. So based on the result of the game, each participant will earn their weekly scoring coins for the match using the regular in-game calculations or squad battles and division rivals. Now division rivals is a bit different, I'll talk about in a second, but in the way that this is with squad battles, you could have somebody that's an elite level player and somebody who's like a silver level player and that silver level player could tag along with the elite level player, get through the higher stages and the more difficult AI levels of squad battles and get the higher rewards for that. So that is one way that you can kind of, I guess, cheat the system with this, but it doesn't work that well in division rivals because if you're playing with that elite caliber player who's maybe in division three or above, then you're playing with that silver level player who's maybe division seven or six. The skill rating is going to be used, the matchmaking that's gonna be used for skill rating will be the higher of the duo. So if you have a division three player with a division seven player, the division three player is gonna be the one who is used to matchmake and you're probably gonna find somebody in the division four or three or two range for that. So you can't really like tag along and get carried, I guess, in division rivals like you can in squad battles. So that's kind of, I guess, maybe a bit of a bonus. If you're somebody who's a lower tier player and you have somebody that wants to play with you that is more advanced. This is the part where they added a setting into division rivals where you can choose to play either solo or co-op opponents or just play against solos. And this is where people wanted EA to add play against co-op only. They wanted a third option here to have just solos, co-op and solo, so everybody or just co-op. And EA said at this time, they're not able to do that for whatever reason. But this is, I guess, kind of cool if you think, well, we'll see how it gets this year, right? We'll see how it gets this year. If it's super duper sweaty in division rivals, then we might have to start using the play against solo players only to try to not face a set of two players if it just becomes that popular this year that it's overwhelming in rivals. I honestly don't feel that it will be, but that is a setting that they have at least added. So then also in friendlies, you can pair up and play together using the in-game classic matches, mystery ball swaps, King of the Hill max chemistry. The base friendly experiences is what they called that. But again, that is only going to be, and as far as I am aware, if you go into the friendly section on foot, you're only gonna be able to use those modes in the play online, or I guess obviously the couch play, because that's LAN, but the play online, you're not gonna be able to use this play a friend tab with the co-op. That's the big problem with what they added two foot today. You can't actually play with a friend like a 2v2 co-op game. That was kind of the issue with this. I guess you can't even use couch play co-op as well. So with an online partner, well obviously co-op with an online partner, that's not couch play, because couch play, you're sitting beside each other in your LAN. So this is the other thing that a lot of people were questioning, live foot friendlies. This is not something that we have in FIFA right now. This is a totally new thing. Live foot friendlies is a totally new objective. I think it somehow is gonna relate to the events that we'll talk about in a bit. But this is like one of the bigger Ls of today. And the biggest disappointment about co-op is there's no player friend, you can't play 2v2 and stuff like that. They updated the co-op trainer, so I guess if you wanna learn how to play together, there's now you can see both players input actions. Maybe just another way where you can expose the flaws in the game. Anyways, that is foot co-op. If you have any questions, drop them down below. I would love to hear your thoughts on some of that. Foot events, now this one I think has some potential, but I think there's also some issues with this as well. Basically these are objectives that we will kinda complete as a community. I mean, I've seen this before in like Call of Duty, you know, like get a certain number of kills, and then this will be unlocked for the entire community if you participate it, right? So you see on here, it's like a stadium theme, a TFO stadium themes and TFOs, but it says, I think it says down below that inside of these events, there's gonna be more than just like TFOs and just kind of filler content to unlock through these events, but there's gonna be community events, which is what is shown here, and then team events as well. And this is where it gets a bit sticky, right? Team events will divide the community into different teams to complete head to head for rewards. Joining a team is easy. When you start the event, you'll be given the choice, and then basically you choose one or two. So here the example is Holland or Chal Felix, you jump into that team, and then you complete the objectives and to get the rewards inside of there. Now, of course, it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. And if you can especially see like how many, like if there's a percentage of people that have chosen one side or the other, like in game, if there's that sort of thing, and you're gonna have to also, it's just like a voting SMC with these two, with these team events. That's how I feel like it's gonna work. You're gonna have to realize who's the most popular player, who's the most meta, what type of team, if there's any indication of what the reward might be from these team events, the most meta rewards probably going to win. Again, if it's Premier League, you know, all the stuff, like the reason why Ryan Kent didn't win the summer heat vote a couple of weeks ago, because there were other cars as a part of that vote that were, it was Jovic. Jovic that won over him, because he was a Real Madrid player, more well-known to the casual FIFA base. That's where I think you're gonna have to kind of input that sort of thought process into these events as we run down the line. Now, this is the only part that I am not so sure about. At the end of the competition, the winning team will be rewarded with the new customization items to show off your allegiance, coins or packs. The types of rewards will change with each event. So, the winner gets the reward. And it says at the end, if your team does not win, fear not, there will still be consolation rewards available in-game for the losing teams. So, of course, since there is a better advantage to come out as the winner, again, this is like almost becoming competitive. Like this is not something that seems to me super laid back, super, you know, casual. This is gonna turn more competitive because there is a better reward for the winning team than there is the losing team. At least that's how it is worded here. A consolation reward versus the winning reward, right? You wanna be a part of the winning team, right? So that's gonna make this competitive. I'm a bit uneasy about that one. Just kind of saying that. This is the other big thing that was added in today. Foot stadium, a lot of concept. This is something that has been a part of NBA 2K, I think Madden maybe, and a lot of other sports games for a long time actually being able to customize the stadium or the pitch that you are playing in. Of course, it looks like there's gonna be tons of options and from the video they released today, the trailer, it looked like there was tons of customization options that are gonna be unlockable through objectives and also they're gonna be stuff that is in kits, right? So you'll basically be able to customize stadiums with badges, balls, kits, so those are nothing new. Default celebration, nothing new. T-Fos, nothing new. Stadium theme, crowd chance, base paint color, and then you'll be able to go unlock more T-Fos, commentary names, sounds and visual effects in space to show off trophies that you've earned, which that's kinda cool. The completion of the first milestone group culminates in a foot challenger stadium upgrade. Okay, so I guess there's gonna be some sort of milestone group that will unlock the foot challenger stadium upgrade, which then I guess becomes, your stadium will grow with capacity, giving you even more ways to customize additional placement options in your stadium with T-Fos and trophies. I guess this is kinda cool, right? But this almost looks like to me that we're given one stadium. So, yeah, so you'll unlock the foot stadium, a modern design inspired by many world's greats. Foot stadium is the first home for your newly created football club. So then we all start with the same stadium, we all start with the foot stadium, we unlock the foot challenger stadium, and then from there is when we can really start customizing it. So it's not like you can go customize Stanford Bridge or you can go customize the Allianz Arena, that is what I'm reading. You're gonna be able to customize the EA prescribed stadiums, which I guess makes sense because they probably have rights for the stadiums and they have to make them look a certain way for the legit stadiums in real life. But that's how this stuff is going to work. There are a couple of pictures here that a lot of people were kinda confused with. What is this purple item? The EA direct communication account said today on one of these tweets, we'll take a look at them in a second. That this purple item is basically just a rare stadium item that you will be able to upgrade. And as we're gonna talk about a bit later, fitness and fitness items have been removed. So like squad, fitnesses and stuff have been removed from the game. Every single player will start with full fitness in a match in FIFA 21, foot 21. So those things are gonna be removed from packs and these types of things are going to be put into packs. There's gonna be a lot more stadium items and TIFOs and kits and balls and that sort of stuff inside of packs this year. Also, they said they're gonna make chemistry styles, dropped more often. So we'll talk about that as kind of foot steps. Basically, you'll start with like a set stadium. You'll be able to upgrade it and add a bunch of things. Now these pictures in here look pretty sweet. All the different colors. You know, I saw in one of the things they were doing there was like these little pyrotechnics from behind the goal when you scored. You can paint the pitch lines, different colors. Like in this one right here blue it almost looks like. So, you know, that's kind of cool. I guess through that. So that's kind of like more of a cosmetic change. Division rivals placement through squad battles and promotion coin rewards. The only relevant thing for this is the first time that you rank up to a new division there will be some sort of coin boost. Their option here will show you getting 10,000 coins for division one. Hopefully it's more than 10,000 coins. I beg EA sports like 10,000 coins for your first time getting to D1. This should be 100,000 coins. Yes, it should be 100,000 coins for your first time that you upgraded to D1. That does not mean that you can relegate and then re-rank up to get more coins. It is only the first time that you reach a new height. You're gonna be able to get those coins. And then I guess you can play matches and squad battles to then qualify for the weekend league. So, you know, somehow squad battles is gonna count for skill rating and then you'll be able to qualify for weekend league that way. If you're somebody who hasn't qualified for weekend league because you don't like online games or you just wanna get a fee of a fee for 20 at an offline level before getting online. I guess you can rack up points that way as well. That's kind of more of a minute detail. We talked about this before but there's gonna be caps for division rivals. Only a certain amount of games are gonna count each week to your weekly score which will then give you like foot champions points or maybe not foot champions points but rivals points to get you higher tier rank three, rank two, rank one in rivals rewards. This is another big thing, expanded top leaderboards. Instead of top 100, it's gonna be top 200 now which is gonna get kind of interesting because they're making it top 200 for rewards and this is gonna change how rewards are spewed out. But one of the tweets today for the leaderboards what they said and I'm trying to find this is that the PS5 and the PS4 user boards will be on the same market, yes. And wait, where is this at? Somewhere I think they said today that PS4 and PlayStation 5 top 100 players. So if you're top 100 on PS4 and top 100 on PS5 they're gonna be both listed in the same leaderboard. So that's honestly why I think they combined and made this a top 200 to kind of put in both of those consoles and show both of those at the same time. All right, moving on, live foot friendlies. Now this is something that is honestly very not close but similar to what tournaments used to be in older FIFAs. Let me get into this and kind of talk about it. But when I first read about this today I was kind of reminded of old tournaments. It is interesting and I like what they're going for here. This is supposed to be more of a casual based type of mode in FIFA but there's still gonna be some sort of competitiveness to it. So if you read here, live foot friendlies combining squad rules with the different house rules in friendlies. So squad rules are basically gonna be you have to play with max three players in the Prem, silver, bronze players. That's kind of what makes it like a tournament, right? Or a max two from the same league, minimum chemistry 100. And the other side of this is that's not like a tournament. It's not gonna be a classic FIFA match. There's going to be the different house rules from friendlies. Again, like mystery ball and all sorts of those. So like the example here, silver mystery ball, player quality, exactly silver, Premier League players exactly 11. So you'd have to have 11 Premier League, silver players and you would have, you know, nine, 10 days to score a goal in three, in three silver player only mystery ball matches. And then you would complete like that objective. So, you know, you would kind of still get rewards but it's still kind of like objective base with on a timeframe. So that's how it's kind of like tournaments but also kind of not really. And they make this seem like it is gonna be, there might be limited number of total games and other times there might not be. So live foot friendlies is basically just gonna be another way that we have objectives inside of FIFA 21 and another way that we will complete those objectives which if this gets us out of playing division rivals for all of our objective or at least greatly reduces the amount of division rivals that we have to play to complete objectives like we did this year. I'm a fan of that. Make objectives mostly squad battles and like these mystery ball, like live foot friendlies. All right, now, yes, it's still gonna be some sort of competitive nature because you're all trying to complete the same objective and people are gonna be playing FIFA against each other but I think that might, you know, just take it out of division rivals where it does not need to be like objectives. I feel like should not be done in division rivals and hopefully this can move them out. All right, last couple of things. Meaningful moments. Now this is basically, they're explaining here how when they give upgrades in the past to like special cards like team of the weeks, all sorts of other special items, they've just upgraded the six face attributes and we've always been left wondering, okay, somebody who gets a 99 pace card like team of the season, oh cement, right? If we remember this card for how the in-game stats don't exactly match up with what the face card rating is. This guy's got 99 pace but 99 sprint speed and 90 acceleration. Like how does that add up to 99? We might have upgrades this year, two cards based on their real life performances that just make a lot more sense, right? And this is how they word this, right? We build a feature that will allow certain items such as moments items to better reflect the real world footballing moments they are based in. As an example, if Trent Alexander Arnold wants to receive a moments item to celebrate him as a dead ball specialist in the previous games, his passing would increase to raise his free kick accuracy stat. In foot 21, we'll be able to raise his free kick accuracy to new heights without also impacting his short, long passing to better reflect his pitch abilities in foot. So basically they're gonna be upgrading cards based off of in-game statistics. So upgrading cards based off of these singular line items instead of the six big time general categories that all of these individual stats go by. Couple things that I think about with this, right? This gives them more opportunity to create more special cards and more promos. And kind of like how we saw last year where they boosted the defense, like I think of like the scream for Reno card, right? He got a big time defense boost. You know, this just opens the door for them to put out a lot more special cards in this game to possibly make more money and to just make a new type of special card in FIFA, which definitely helps them as a business and creates some cool new opportunities for cards and special items inside of foot. So I'm very curious to see how this is gonna play out and how these upgrades are gonna be used in game. This is a big part. One of the last things that I wanna talk about in this video, updated game menus. This goes overlooked by way too many people because these are the menus that we have to use all year long. The menus were different this year in FIFA 20 with the whole squad screen, the circle wheel or whatever they called that. And the menus and how we navigate are gonna be even more different this year. Now one thing I wanna point out right away is if you notice the background of the stadium, it looks like the background of your FIFA Ultimate team, your hub, right? The foot hub, the background is going to be your FIFA stadium, your customized FIFA stadium because all the stuff that I'm seeing here in the background and especially that top upper echelon kinda looks like that foot stadium that they talked about in the upgradeable, in that section above, foot stadium. So that's kinda cool that your background of your menus is gonna be tailored to you. I like that, I'm a fan of that. Hopefully I'm correct on that. But again, there's no tabs this year. You're not gonna have to use R1 or L1 to get across the tabs at the top. Instead, you're gonna use the left stick, which this I feel like could get a bit annoying because we're used to going right, left with the bumpers. You know, you click up to go to customize your stadium and then click A on that or click X on that. Then you go back down to click on one of these. If you accidentally click down again, you're gonna be moving down into the squad screen. And as you can see here, this is kinda how it works out, right? You go up, you go up and you see this, you go down. It's like how you see the stadium or the squad. Like you're kind of like moving into a level down below. If you look at this kind of right here, you kinda click down on the down arrow, you go down to your squad. This one here I think takes you, if you click up, you go from stadium, you go from your foot hub home into the stadium, which is pretty interesting. There was a lot of questions based on this today because if you kinda look at this mode, you're like, yo, where is squad building challenges? Where is my club? Where is that kinda stuff? So I know I asked this for a fact today. EA Sports actually replied to me as like the first question. I am two for two boys, two for two. Getting tweeted back for these direct communication tweets. I said, where will squad building challenges be found in the new menus? They said they will be available under the play menu. So basically it'll go down, click play, and you will find those in there. That's not gonna be easy to find for somebody who is a casual player on this game. So you gotta take them a bit to find that, which is kinda interesting to me. But hopefully the reason why they made these menu changes is I think to kinda streamline it a little bit more. So hopefully that does help. And of course, hopefully it is less glitchy and stuff like that. So we'll have to see how that kinda stuff goes. I'm kinda curious to see how all the stuff inside the transfer box works. And of course what this little infographic is. Now there's some other cool things with this. Like as you go into the club, you will be able to view your cards like this. Instead of having your players all like this, you'll be able to spread them out and look at them individually and see more players, I think. Actually no, that's actually the same amount of players that you can see there. But you can see them not as up close and spread out. If you wanna look at more of the stats, statistics, League nations or whatever. And then also, there's gonna be these options down here where you can show your objectives, right? Like you can select take me there from an objective. And at the beginning of the game, this is really nice because instead of having to go back to objectives to figure out what the heck you just clicked on and what objective you're trying to accomplish, the one that you just clicked on, you can actually click down on the left stick and it kinda pulls up that objective for you which is kinda nice. And the very last thing is again, the removal of fitness items. I talked about this earlier. As they said down here, they're only gonna be two healing items in the game, common and rare, so there's no more knee healing or upper body or lower body or all those different things. There's not gonna be all of those, just two of them. So they're removing fitness, training and healing items and staff items. So you're not gonna see Zara on the game anymore. You're not gonna see foot economists in the game. They're gonna be gone. Which, fitness going away kind of does impact the market a little bit. People have to spend less coins on those fitness cards and people have to spend, you know, bronze pack method might not be as profitable. I still think it'll be profitable at certain times during the year, but it may not be as profitable throughout the year because, you know, maybe one out of every six, seven packs that you did for bronze pack method, you were making your coins back because of a squad fitness. That was a bronze squad fitness, which was like 1,000 coins for most of the year. So with that opportunity not there anymore, bronze pack method may not work as well. And this is the part that I think is the most interesting. Packs in FIVA 21 will be rebalanced around these changes. We've added a suite of new licensed club customization options, TIFOs, stadium themes, kits, badges. And then they also said we're gonna slightly increase the frequency of chemistry styles. So this is quite interesting. It's gonna be very, we're gonna have to take notice of this, right? Because last year, chemistry styles were so rare, whatever they had wrong with the algorithm, shadows and hunter chemistry styles, we traded with those and cards that had those chemistry styles on them for months in FIFA, for months in FIFA, we traded with those. And now this year, if the chemistry styles are gonna be more readily available, that might not be as profitable an outlet for trading because those cards are not gonna be that expensive. And then of course they did talk about icons today as well. You guys probably saw the full list of icons. I think we're still short one. I think if you actually count this up, we're still short one icon. I think we might only have 99 here. But Kanto Na, Cole, Czech, Eto, Torres, Lam, Javi, Vidic, Zuccher, the return, Schweinsteiger and Puskas. So I'm pretty pumped about these cards. Again, I just hope they make them usable. Hopefully they give them really nice statistics. And especially in the game this year, I hope that they are very, just not overlooked and very usable cards in this game. So again, overall my thoughts on the content that came out today, the FIFA 21 content. For the menus and stuff, it's gonna take a little bit of getting used to, but if you have the beta, if you have any of the demo, you're gonna be able to get used to some of that stuff inside of the game and get used to that very, very soon. We spend a lot of time on the menus, right? You're gonna get used to that very, very fast. That's not gonna be an issue. The co-op stuff is kinda cool. I think the biggest thing from today that I'm a fan of, the number one thing that I'm a fan of is the removal of fitness and the potential for what this meaningful moments means in FIFA as well as the live foot friendlies kind of interest me. I'm not super-duper pumped about the division rivals, the competitive moment improvements because I don't feel like those are really relevant. Foot Stadium is really cool from a cosmetic section. Hopefully this same foot stadium stuff is available in pro clubs because if this is available in pro clubs, that would be sick as well even to another level if it is available there. I'd be a huge, huge fan of that. The team events would be one of the things I'm the most worried about and how that's gonna be incorporated and just how the rewards for that are going to be distributed with the foot events. And then of course co-op is yes, cool, but I feel like it's not gonna be that hype just because you can't play 2v2, which I think what a lot of people would have seen that as a really, really hype thing to do in foot if you could actually just set up a 2v2 versus playing a friend or if you could play just 2v2 as a matchmaking setting inside of rivals. So I think that would have been sick if they were to add that today. But all in all, a lot of information on FIFA 21. We're gonna get more information down the line. Probably, I still think we're due one icon. I might be incorrect on that, but again, so much of this stuff is gonna be learned on the fly when the beta comes out, the closed beta, the open beta if they're doing that, the demo. And of course, as we get into like EA access, there's gonna be leaked gameplay everywhere from people that have the beta. You're gonna see all sorts of things in the coming months. I mean, we're still basically 50 days away from like the early access times of FIFA 21. So it's a long time before we actually get to the game. But it is nice and it is useful to start getting this information so that we can start thinking about things, starting planning things and just get an overview and an idea of what is coming. And of course, EA wants to build the hype and with all this new features that are coming two foot. So there's a lot of cool stuff. They coined this as the most interactive FIFA ever, which I do think is definitely what they were trying to go for. Maybe that became their objective, of course, after COVID. And maybe they couldn't do some of the other things that they wanted to. Or they just kind of wanted to make it collective or play with your friends just makes you feel good, right? And maybe during this time they just want to make you feel good about FIFA. So we'll see. I'm not sure about their motivations, but I like some of this stuff. Again, I think I gave it like a six and a half out of 10 in terms of how hard it just hit me and how pumped I got after reading this. I don't think I'm pumped. I just think I'm positively, I'm ready to see how this is played out in foot with the events and stuff like that as I talked about. So let me know your comments down below if you have any on this. And of course, if you enjoyed this video, smash a thumbs up on a comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel for new. It's been Nate, the Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace out.