The street football-centric VOLTA Mode is the big new addition EA Sports are making with FIFA 20 to their annual sports sim franchise, as they look to replace The Journey. Various different modes, a different style of play, customization and personalization of your character, and a story mode are all promising to come together to make VOLTA a pretty full-featured experience- but the big question mark here, especially since this is an EA game (and a FIFA one, no less), is whether the mode will have any microtransactions.
Apparently, VOLTA Mode won’t have any microtransactions at launch. Via IGN, FIFA 20’s producer Jeff Antwi said that EA Sports isn’t planning launching VOLTA with any microtransactions, and that “right now, anything that you earn is earned through in-game challenges.” There are also no plans to have a season pass, even though cosmetics and challenges in VOLTA will be on a monthly rotation.
The wording of that statement is a pretty dead giveaway of what we can expect- though VOLTA Mode won’t have microtransactions “at launch” and though everything is earnable in-game “right now”, microtransactions will, in all likeliness, be added some time after release.
Publishers such as EA and Activision have often employed such practices in the past with their games, where microtransactions are added to their games after they’ve been out for a while and reviews have gone live on the majority of publications. It’s dishonest, to say the least, but it seems it’ll continue with FIFA 20. I just hope it doesn’t cripple the VOLTA experience too much, especially since it seems to be so reliant on customizations and cosmetics.
FIFA 20 is out on September 27 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, while the Switch also gets a Legacy Edition release (which means it will just be last year’s game with updated kits and squads). Recently, EA Sports also talked about some of the biggest changes they’re making to Career Mode- read more on that through here.