OS Weekly Wrap Up, Getting You Caught Up on Sports Gaming News (Nov 29 - Dec 5, 2020)

If you want to see a human on the sticks rather than just an AI vs. AI game, then Brian is here to showcase that aspect of FIFA 21 next-gen gameplay. He uses the “dynamic difficulty” setting here so EA is changing his experience as the game progresses in this Liverpool vs. Leicester City matchup. This is a full game in 4K, and hopefully this helps you gauge things a bit more as we all learn about these next-gen games together.

We have posted a 4K video of our Madden 21 next-gen graphics comparison. This shows off the current-gen and next-gen versions of the game running on a PS5.

Welcome to the squad, Blake. (Also, just a heads up, I’m still on current gen for now.) Now that’s a really short, simple sentence to type out, but the card itself took over my life. I didn’t do myself any favors by starting the XP grind slowly in Season 2, so these last couple of weeks were especially intense as I tried to catch up. It got to the point where I was constantly buying cards to earn XP, then turning around a day later to sell them so I’d have MT to buy more cards. I couldn’t even tell you if those cards were fun to play with, or any good on the court, which kind of defeats the purpose of the mode in my opinion.

Like most sports titles over the last several years, the in-game slider settings have become an increasingly crucial and useful in-game tool for people. Now, the sight of all these sliders and options at your disposal can be overwhelming for many, but the perfect slider settings — depending on what you’re looking for — can help to create the most realistic or unrealistic gameplay experience possible. For the last few years, EA Sports has included the ability to customize skill levels, how frequently penalties are called and even how fast the game plays. I will include these factors in my NHL 21 realistic sliders and settings.

Every sports game needs a roster share or general “share” feature. But in a sport like football, soccer, baseball or hockey it becomes even more useful due to the wide breadth of leagues and teams available. What’s unfortunate here is that only two of those sports have quality “share” features: baseball and football. We made another stink this year during pre-release when we were informed there would once again be no NHL 21 roster share feature, but it’s not the only culprit here.

With pretty much all of the information about next-gen FIFA 21 out now — plus the game itself — we’re all going to go on this journey together. But is it justified to be excited for next gen? Let’s recap all the biggest pieces of news we’ve gotten the last two weeks to answer that question and get you all caught up if you’re taking the next-gen plunge today.

When I first started writing this article, we had sparse details about what this leap into the next-generation of gaming would entail. There were no full videos of actual gameplay and even some of the screenshots may have been enhanced to showcase the power of the systems. About the most information we had came from the OS preview via Bob, and from EA developers.