Long-Ignored Career Mode Is Receiving Updates In FIFA 20, Hallelujah!

With Konami’s PES gaining an increasingly large bite of the apple in soccer licensing, EA Sports was always going to have to up its game with FIFA 20, which has already announced some cool new additions like a FIFA Street mode called VOLTA. But, to the delight and surprise of many, EA Sports is finally listening to its fans and making updates to the FIFA 20 Career Mode.

Hallelujah!

New features in #FIFA20 Career Mode:
  Manager Customization
  Morale Management
  Dynamic Player Potential
Check them all out  https://t.co/qZi5ApWKmI pic.twitter.com/lx1ERU0zK2

— EA SPORTS FIFA (@EASPORTSFIFA) August 7, 2019

“This cycle has been an incredibly busy one for the entire Career Mode team,” the devs said on the EA.com website, which makes us wonder what the hell they’ve been doing in during past cycles. But we’re just happy EA Sports is finally making positive changes to Career Mode. 

FIFA 20 Career Mode Changes

The change that immediately jumps off the screen is the ability to play through career mode as a female manager. Players have a greater level of customization for their FIFA 20 Career Mode managers than ever before, including body type, skin tone, clothing and hairstyles. 

FIFA 20 Career Mode will give you extensive options to customize your manager, although all of these look like androids from Detroit: Become Human. Where are all the fat coaches? Photo: EA Sports.

Best of all, you can give your manager a goofy hat.

Very professional. Photo: EA Sports.

EA Sports has also revamped the manager experience regarding press conferences and player conversations. The devs promise “the experience of each match will be treated differently by the ‘journalists’ and will always feel authentic and dynamic, depending highly on the outcome, goals scored, opponent, time of season or stage of competition and more.”

This is all a part of the new Player Morale System, which weaves the press conferences and one-on-one player conversations into better or worse performance on the pitch. It sounds cool, but whether or not it grows tiresome will only be seen after we play a few seasons with the FIFA 20 Career Mode. 

Of more interest to career mode enthusiasts are changes like Dynamic Player Potential, where a player’s potential can change based on performance. This works on both ends of a player’s career: A young player can improve his potential with a strong debut season while a veteran can extend his career with a good season at age 37, and vice versa. 

Another cool but mostly useless feature is Live News Screenshots. During FIFA 20 Career Mode, the game will take screenshots from key gameplay moments and use them in the news feed. 

Other changes to the FIFA 20 Career Mode, from EA Sports’ Pitch Notes: 

• Added an option in the Player Actions pop-up to add a player to the shortlist and immediately go to the Transfer Hub with the respective player.
• Redesigned Team Management layout to allow for easier player attribute comparison.
• Added an option to disable International Management job offers at the start of a new career.
• Increased the initial Composure attribute values for generated youth players and redistributed weights for player growth between physical, mental and skill attributes to allow for more physical growth.
• Improved distribution of ethnicity within a country when generating youth players.
• Significantly increased the initial amounts for wage budget allocation.
• Increased the player value of defensive players based on the latest transfer market activity.
• Fixed multiple issues with leagues that split into playoffs after the end of the regular season. League objectives are now correctly tracking the playoff instead of the regular season standings. Champions celebrations are triggered at the end of the playoffs.
• Improved the algorithm used by AI teams to determine their starting XI. Moving forward you should see far fewer instances in which the opponent isn’t using their prime starting XI in important matches. (This is actually huge.)
• Readjusted the number of saves to eight, inside Career Mode, to address the feedback received from our players during the ’19 cycle.
• Fixed multiple fixture congestion issues. The winter break roll out this season as well as the removal of the FA Cup 5th Round Replay have improved fixture congestion issues in English leagues. We’ve slightly altered the authentic schedule of the English Championship by pushing its completion to a later date. This ensures that schedule conflict situations between Championship rounds and European football nights aren’t possible. A lot of the congestion issues reported by the community were happening with mid-week league rounds happening at the same time as European football, which, although unlikely in the real world, is a common occurrence in Career Mode.
• Added the new format and schedule of the Spanish Supercup.
• Added support to round down the points in leagues that split into play-offs and halve the points such as the Austrian Bundesliga.
• Updated usage of the fourth substitute in extra time to all competitions that support this new law of the game.

FIFA 20 comes out on Sept. 27, 2019. For the first time in a while, we here at The18 are legitimately excited for the new edition instead of just buying it out of habit. 

Also, we hope EA Sports again sends us a few free copies (PS4 and Xbox, please) and puts Megan Rapinoe on the cover.