EA is finishing up the last of their leftover reveals this week, and today Ultimate Team had its turn in the news cycle.
I would say I play Ultimate Team more than most of our vocal members here on OS (at least MUT), so today’s reveal was interesting to me in terms of just wondering how much “new” stuff was being introduced to the mode overall. I came away thinking there’s not a ton of “new” stuff being introduced to the mode.
One could argue that’s a good thing as it mostly feels like a copy and paste from MUT and thus not a ton of resources were put into Ultimate Team at the expense of dynasty mode and so on. That said, this is still the mode that will make EA money after the launch of the game, so you don’t want it to totally bomb either because you want the game overall to be “healthy” from a financial standpoint.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit for a fan of EA Sports College Football 25 was just EA showing off the 19 schemes in the mode.
To be clear, schemes are different from playbooks. Think of schemes like buckets, and then playbooks would go in those buckets. So we’re still going to have the 130+ playbooks in the game (one for each college team), but it appears these are the buckets the defensive and offensive playbooks will fall under.
The other big new feature to me is the Gauntlet mode. This is an even more competitive version of Champs where you need to secure 16 wins in your 20 games in Champs for the week to then be eligible for a one-time entry to Gauntlet. In Gauntlet, you then can go for 10 wins but are eliminated after your second loss.
The other new mode here is Solo Seasons. This is a common sense addition so now you can play through offline Seasons against the CPU rather than only doing Seasons in a H2H online format.
In terms of looks, I do like the added colored emblems for cards to showcase their rarity.
- Common – Grey
- Uncommon – Green
- Rare – Blue
- Epic – Purple
- Legendary – Gold
The color signifies the rarity of the card. In addition, much like back in ’14, we are going to be getting legends and current Madden players in EA Sports College Football 25. Lastly, as a tip of cap to all that we missed while EA was out of the college football game, EA will have 100+ challenges dedicated to celebrating all the big moments we missed in the last 10+ years.
Otherwise, this felt rather familiar and so I can see why EA held it until near the end of the media blitz. If you like the mode already, this will work for you. If you did not care about the mode, then this will do next to nothing for you.
Published: Jul 9, 2024 05:16 pm