For those of you who don’t know, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship, it is an American-held Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) league that celebrates all kinds of fight styles. Electronic Arts currently holds the license for all UFC development and publishing. Since 2015, the EA Sports label has been developing and publishing UFC titles. UFC 4 is obviously the fourth iteration of this lineage of games. Recently, there has been a lot of leaks and rumors about a possible UFC4. During the UFC 251 fight in Abu Dhabi, EA Sports revealed UFC 4…
Premiered Jul 21, 2020 on YouTube, EA Sports revealed gameplay for UFC 4…
EA Sports laid out some of the features of UFC 4 as follows…
It may be surprising for some of you to learn that Ultimate Team is no longer a feature included in our UFC game. It probably isn’t surprising to hear me say that this was not a decision we took lightly. When we introduced our vision for Ultimate Team in UFC 2 and invested in significant updates in UFC 3, our objective was to create deeply engaging experiences for our players, in the same way, EA SPORTS FIFA, Madden NFL, and EA SPORTS NHL Ultimate Team modes have for theirs. However, there are a number of factors that make team sports different from mixed martial arts. We based the final decision on two factors we felt were the most important:
1. One of the most obvious ones is right there in the word, “team”. MMA is not a “team” sport (I know fighters have teams of coaches and trainers that play a huge role, but only two people step inside the octagon). So Ultimate Team, as a concept, has struggled to fit and resonate in the context of MMA. We spent lots of time and resources in UFC 2 and UFC 3 to make it fun and engaging, but the feedback we received directly and through player data was that it still isn’t as engaging as we intended for it to be.
2. Speaking of player data; we see, overwhelmingly, less interest in UFC Ultimate Team compared to other titles. Lots of people played it and some still do – but the large majority of our fans prefer to spend their time elsewhere. That fact is loud and clear through our game data and couldn’t be ignored.
Looking at the number of players engaging with UFC Ultimate Team compared to the amount of resources required to develop and support the mode, the math just didn’t make sense. Even to port it from UFC 3 to UFC 4 without any material changes or improvements required significant time and effort, let alone revamping the mode to make it more fun and engaging.
So we made the decision to refocus those resources toward new features and updates we hope all our players will enjoy. In particular, the new Connected fighter profile, challenges, progression, vanity rewards and improvements to created fighter features represent the result of our efforts to create something new and unique to EA SPORTS UFC for all of our players.
If you were, or are, an avid UFC Ultimate Team player we understand that this isn’t good news, and if you’re disappointed, I apologize. Even though it’s a smaller group of fans, we know that those fans enjoy the mode and it is not easy to take that away.
But there’s also lots to be excited about. There are tons of new features and exciting innovations in UFC 4 and I’m excited about being able to share more information with you in the coming weeks. The team will also be monitoring your feedback and questions as we get closer to launch.
Last but not least, I’ve included answers below to some of the most frequent questions we’ve received from you all. Hopefully, this helps everyone understand what’s coming.
