Co-Op
The biggest Ultimate Team addition in FIFA 21 without a doubt is FUT Co-Op. If you’ve been wanting to have a friend join you to dominate Division Rivals and increase your Rank for those sweet, weekly rewards then your prayers have been answered.
Players can now invite a friend to help them take on another duo or solo player in Division Rivals, play against AI-controlled teams in Squad Battles, and earn unique Co-Op objectives for more rewards in the process.
Whoever invites their friend will be captain and will choose which of the duo’s teams to use, and what game mode you’ll play. What’s more, both players will earn the coins and score towards their weekly Division Rivals/ Squad Battles Rank. As long as you both have games that count for weekly score.
Playing Ultimate Team in co-op helps to further realize those beautiful visions of play going on in your mind. Being able to tell your friend where and when to make a run through on goal, or to cut a passing lane when defending is far better than hoping the AI does the job for you.
While the AI has improved, it’s no replacement for a trusty friend seasoned in Ultimate Team themselves. You can just blame them if it all goes wrong and you end up losing, too!
Division Rivals Weekly Games Cap
We eluded to this in the co-op section, but we need to dive into this a little more, as it’s a pretty big change.
In the single-player Squad Battles mode, there has been a weekly limit to the amount of games that will earn score and count towards your weekly Rank. This Rank determines how good your rewards for that week will be. This is weekly limit in Squad Battles remains in-place in FIFA 21, and a similar Division Rivals limit has been introduced.
Now, players will only have 30 games that will count towards their Division Rivals Rank for that week. After that, they’ll earn no score regardless of the result of the match.
You still earn your coins as normal during these matches, but you can’t just play 100 games a week, lose 95 and still reach Rank 1 from the drip-feed of a few hundred points per loss.
This also means that those players who don’t have a ton of time to pour into playing Division Rivals find themselves unable to get decent rewards simply because they can’t play as many matches.
You’ll now need to make sure that every Division Rivals game counts if you find yourself often playing more than 30 games a week, to ensure you get the best rewards you possibly can.
New FUT Stadium Customization Options
Every Ultimate Team player will confess to having some pride in their creation. Watching your team evolve over the course of the season is what makes Ultimate Team so satisfying.
Giving your club its own identity, be it one that mirrors your real-life favorite club like Liverpool or Manchester United, or creating your own with the various cosmetics available to you, is all part of the fun.
In FIFA 21, players have even more FUT Stadium customization options available to them to perfect the look and atmosphere of your team’s home ground.
That means your team’s badge, ball, kits, default celebration, home tifo, stadium theme, crowd chants, base paint colors, commentary club names, sound and visual goal effects, and space to place your trophies can all be customized. Yep. That’s a lot!
The more you play Ultimate Team, the more objectives you’ll complete which unlock more skins and styles for each of the customization options listed above.
All of this FUT Stadium customization is accessed easily by simply pressing up on your left analog stick from the Ultimate Team main menu.
Community Objectives
Another new addition to FIFA 21’s Ultimate Team are Community Objectives. These are where players will complete objectives as normal, but contribute to a global XP pool. The more players who complete the objectives and contribute XP, the more rewards the community will unlock.
For the first Man vs. Machine event, there are only stadium customization items available as community rewards, but completing all five of the objectives does net you a Prime Electrum Players Pack, so they’re certainly worth checking out during these early days of FIFA 21 Ultimate Team.
No More Fitness Cards
Fitness Cards have long been a part of Ultimate Team. With each consecutive game a player in your team plays, the lower their fitness will go.
Let it drop low enough and they won’t have any stamina in-game and will perform significantly worse as a result. That meant you kept having to either rest them (weakening your side in the process), or use Squad Fitness cards.
While they weren’t by any means rare, Squad Fitness cards were just another unnecessary and pointless consumable that only really served to drain players of coins or force them into buying more packs if they wanted to play games in Ultimate Team.
It takes us great pleasure then to say they’re finally gone! Not a single fitness gauge in sight. You’ll still need to use Contract consumable cards to keep using your players and they can still pick up injuries, but fitness and its horrific affects on player stamina are no more. And we couldn’t be happier.
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