January 15, 2025
We’re excited to soon release the Gameplay Refresh Update for EA SPORTS FC 25, featuring the most significant mid-season gameplay overhaul we’ve ever made, based on your feedback.
With the Gameplay Refresh Update, you can expect to see:
Let’s jump straight into the changes we’re making to EA SPORTS FC 25.
Attackers controlling the ball are naturally slower than when they’re at full sprint without the ball, but we’ve seen that defenders can sometimes catch fast-moving ball carriers too quickly.
As a result, TU #8 addresses instances of players catching up to the ball carrier despite the ball carrier having much higher Pace Attributes.
In practice, this means that it will now be harder for slower defenders to catch up to faster attackers in FC 25. Addressing this issue not only removes a pain point you’ve been telling us about, but it also helps us further focus on providing a more fluid offensive gameplay experience, as detailed throughout this Pitch Notes.
Here’s how a defender could have caught up to an attacker before TU #8.
And here’s how that same scenario can play out with TU #8, notice how the defender doesn’t catch up to the attacker easily.
We’ve seen your feedback about the balance between how effective attacking and defending feels in EA SPORTS FC 25, so we’ve decided to make some changes to the attacking side of the game to make it more effective and fun:
To clarify that last point, this does not mean that you will see someone like a CDM all of a sudden become a striker. It means that all Roles are simply faster at performing support tasks like making themselves more open to receive a pass or making a run into space.
Overall, these changes are intended to make your team more active when you’re attacking, giving you more options while making attacks feel more fluid and organic at the same time.
For example, here’s a situation before TU #8 in which attacking AI teammates did not make any particularly effective runs.
And here’s the same situation with TU #8, showing how attacking players can now make more intelligent decisions and runs, potentially leading to a goalscoring situation.
Sometimes what feels like a successful tackle results in a tackleback, meaning that the opposing player wins the ball back. It happens in real life on occasion, it happens in video games too, but we’ve seen it happen more often than it should in FC 25, causing unnecessary frustration.
As a result, we’re making two changes to reduce how often tacklebacks can occur:
Here’s an example of a tackleback situation we’ve addressed. This footage is before TU #8—note how the attacker ends up winning the ball.
And here’s how the same situation can play out after TU #8, note that the attacker doesn’t end up winning the ball.
In addition, we’re also addressing two issues that could have resulted in tacklebacks:
As usual, we’ll continue to closely look at your feedback regarding tacklebacks.
We’re looking to make goalkeepers more authentic when dealing with near post shots. To start, we’re addressing this issue:
Here’s how this issue looked before TU #8.
And here’s how goalkeepers react in the same scenario with the issue addressed in TU #8:
At the same time, we’re also making a more general behavior change intended to make goalkeepers more effective at covering near post shots.
We want FC 25 to reward intelligent and quick thinking passing plays, so to that end we’re introducing the following combination of changes:
While some of these changes might sound small in a vacuum, when combined with other passing changes they are designed to enable players to move the ball easier across the pitch.
Additionally, we’re tuning the effectiveness of certain passes based on your feedback and how you want the game to be played:
But that’s not all when it comes to Passing, we’re also addressing a number of issues you’ve let us know about:
With TU #8, we want players to feel empowered with their shooting and have the ability to score more goals. So we’re introducing changes aimed at rounding out goalscoring, particularly from inside the box:
To clarify the second point, “low difficulty” shots refers to situations made up of many different factors, such as the shooter not being under pressure, the player’s input being accurate and well timed, the shooter having a good quality angle towards the goal like in real life, and so on.
You can think of low difficulty shots as the types of shots you would expect your favorite high skilled real world players to make.
Now, while we are generally looking to improve goalscoring from inside the box, we also wanted to adjust some tuning around Finesse shots in general. This is because we wanted to lessen the gap between players with high shooting Attributes but no Finesse Shot PlayStyle, and those with the PlayStyle or PlayStyle+. We know there has been some concern that we were planning a wholescale reduction in the Finesse Shot PlayStyle, but this is not the case:
We’ve also addressed the following issue:
We’re also making changes to the defensive side of the game to further encourage players to take direct control of their defensive efforts rather than relying on AI positioning.
At the same time, we of course don’t want to neglect the defensive side of the game, so we’re looking to address a few areas based on your feedback:
We want to make it easier for players to search for the right Player Items when putting together their Rush Squad, and to make it easier to hit Rush Point Bonuses.
Following a near future Server Release, you’ll be able to search for Player Items simply by selecting the current Rush Point Bonus requirement. For example, if there is a minimum 75 DEF requirement, selecting that will give you 5 search results with applicable Player Items.
In cases where you don’t have 5 Player Items that meet such criteria, search results will list your top Player Items instead. For example, if you have 3 eligible Player Items, they’ll show up as search results, and the other 2 would be your top Player Items. Or if you have no eligible Player Items, you’ll just see your top 5 Player Items instead.
Of course, you can still do manual searching, and when you enter Rush squad building the default search will focus on the first Rush Point Bonus criteria.
Thanks everyone for checking out our Gameplay Refresh Update Pitch Notes. We can’t wait for you to experience all of the new changes in this update and look forward to hearing your feedback.
