EA SPORTS FC™ 27 | FUT Developer Notes - November

Hey FUT Community,  In our previous Dev Notes, we shared some context for our ongoing effort to support Ultimate Team. We planned some investigations into some different aspects of the game in the weeks following the launch. Since then, our team has been following your conversations closely to see how the new features and systems have been playing out for everyone.

Today, we want to share how Ultimate Team is shaping up in FC 27, our thoughts for Evos & Streamlined SBCs, Champions rewards, as well as how we intend to improve the overall Ultimate Team experience in upcoming updates. 

Squad Upgrade Experience

One of our key goals for FC 27 was to evolve the squad-building experience so that the Player Items you earn have an even more lasting role in your Ultimate Team. We want you to have more time to enjoy your favourite Player Items, experiment with different squads, and feel excited about each new addition to your Starting XI.

So far, we're seeing some encouraging signs. Players are spending more time with the Items in their squads between upgrades, and we're seeing positive indications that Campaign Player Items are more likely to feature in a player's squad when received from a pack.

These are positive developments that we want to build on as FC 27 progresses. At the same time, we’ve heard feedback that players want even more rewarding ways to pursue some of the most desirable Player Items, such as those featured in new Campaigns.

Starting last Friday with UEFA Road to the Knockouts and continuing through upcoming Campaigns, we’ll be making adjustments to increase access to select Player Items while continuing to keep Campaign content feeling special and impactful. We still want meaningful upgrades to feel like a significant milestone, but we believe there are opportunities to make certain Items more accessible at release. Finding the right balance will take ongoing refinement, and we’ll continue using player feedback and engagement with new content to guide our approach.

Evolutions

One of our biggest goals for FC 27 is to make sure you have multiple viable paths to building your squad. Whether you prefer using the Transfer Market, completing SBCs, or progressing your Evolutions, we want every single one of these to offer compelling opportunities to develop your Starting XI. 

During certain periods of FC 26, Evolutions became an incredibly popular way to build personalized players. We love the creativity and squad variety that Evolutions enable, but given the flexibility that they offer, they can be challenging to balance with other rewards across FUT. 

With FC 27, our goal was to find a better balance between all of these different paths. However, looking at both our data and community feedback, we see an opportunity to fine-tune Evolutions and make them feel more rewarding. 

Finding the right balance is an ongoing process. As we continue releasing new Evolutions throughout the season, we’ll be exploring and testing adjustments to make them a more rewarding part of squad building, while maintaining compelling choices across the broader FUT experience.

Squad Diversity

We want Ultimate Team to be an experience where you have the freedom to build an engaging squad around your favourite Player Items and preferred playstyle. However, we've seen that certain types of Player Items are becoming increasingly popular, leading to more similarities between squads than we'd like.

Several of the areas we've discussed in this update should encourage greater squad diversity, including our work to make Evolutions a more meaningful part of squad building and improve access to a wider range of Campaign Player Items. We're also exploring gameplay adjustments aimed at making different types of players and playing styles more effective on the pitch. Additionally, we spoke about some of the gameplay changes you can expect to see in future updates in our recent Gameplay Developer Notes and Q&A.

We know there's more work to do, and we'll continue looking for opportunities to encourage greater variety in how squads are built. Ultimately, we want a wide variety of Player Items with different playing styles to feel like compelling options for your Starting XI, giving you greater freedom to build an Ultimate Team that feels uniquely yours.

Streamlined SBCs

In FC 27, we introduced Streamlined SBCs to make completing SBCs a more seamless experience. To accomplish this, we not only reduced the number of individual Challenges and simplified their requirements, but also re-engineered the core mechanics to make the player submission process faster and more intuitive. Our goal was to remove friction and make it easier to progress towards earning the rewards you're most excited about.

We've heard feedback about the removal of individual Challenge reward packs. While those rewards are no longer part of the Streamlined format, we want to reassure you that their value is taken into consideration when determining SBC Item Score requirements.

When tuning an SBC, we consider several factors, including the estimated Transfer Market value of the reward, whether the content is tradeable or untradeable, the cumulative Transfer Market cost of obtaining the items needed to accumulate the required Item Score, and more. In FC 27, we've also adjusted our approach to account for the removal of individual Challenge rewards, with the goal of delivering a comparable overall value when comparing the two SBC formats.

Finding the right balance isn't always straightforward, and we recognize that we won't always get it exactly right. And while we don't currently have plans to bring back individual Challenge rewards, we'll continue listening to your feedback on SBC pricing and the Streamlined format as we look for opportunities to improve the experience.

Holographic and Standard Player Item “Duplicates”

We've seen feedback about receiving both the Holographic and standard versions of the same Player Item within a single pack or Player Pick. For example, with the FUT Champions TOTW Player Picks available in the Champions Token Store.

We're exploring adjustments to give us greater flexibility over when Holographic and standard versions of the same player can appear together, with the goal of creating a more rewarding experience when opening packs and Player Picks.

Champions Rewards

We've heard feedback about Champions rewards, particularly around how rewarding the experience feels compared to other ways of playing Ultimate Team.

One of the changes we introduced in FC 27 was an increase in the FUT Coins earned through playing Champions matches, allowing rewards to accumulate as you play throughout the weekend. While this provides additional value over the course of a Champions run, we recognize that it may not always be as immediately noticeable as the rewards you receive at the end of the competition.

We're also continuing to learn how players engage with the new Champions Token system, including which rewards players are choosing from the Token Store and how they perceive the value of those rewards. This is helping us better understand what players find most rewarding and where there may be opportunities to improve the experience.

We want Champions to be an engaging, rewarding part of Ultimate Team that recognizes the time and effort you invest. We'll continue listening to your feedback and evaluating how players engage with Champions as we consider opportunities to improve the experience moving forward.

The FUT Developer Team will be hosting a live Discord Q&A on 13 November at 9:00am PCT. If you want to submit questions for our team to answer during this session, join the Official EA SPORTS FC™ Discord server and leave your questions in the dedicated FUT Q&A channel. As always, be sure to follow us on X @EAFCDirect for the latest news and updates on future Developer Notes.  

-The FC FUT Development Team