EA Sports FC getting gacha game pity mechanic, leaker claims

Ultimate Team learning from Genshin Impact and others

EA Sports seemingly learned a thing or two from successful gacha games like Genshin Impact: According to a fairly reliable leaker, EA Sports FC 24, the developer’s upcoming soccer game and successor to FIFA 23, will contain a ‘pity mechanic’ to reward players for opening as many packs as possible in Ultimate Team with guaranteed high-rated cards.

The leaker calls this feature “Dynamic Packs” and claims that the “more packs you open, the more chance you have at packing a high rated card or special card.”

Players will see a percentage icon beside the card packs, he describes, informing them of their chances of pulling a card with a rating higher than 90. This chance will increase if players have a streak of bad pulls, the leaker reports.

In this way players would be guaranteed to pull a high-rated card after a certain amount of opened packs.

This is very much in line with what’s commonly known as a ‘pity mechanic’ in gacha games – titles like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Fate: Grand Order, and countless others. In these games players can invest real money to buy tickets for what is essentially an in-game lottery, which offers characters and items at random. To keep players interested, these games ‘take pity’ on their users by guaranteeing them rewards of a certain value for a specific amount of tickets bought.

Genshin Impact, to name a very prominent example, guarantees players a 4-star character or weapon for every ten pulls and a 5-star character or weapon for every 80 pulls. When it comes to gacha games, this is actually considered quite a fair system.

FIFA players are a bit divided when it comes to this nugget of information. Some users welcome this change and are happy about getting some guaranteed drops in the future, others are worried about FUT becoming completely pay-to-win since investing more money in packs would lead to more guaranteed pulls.

The leaker, who said that the feature has “been tested since January and I can 100% validate it will be in game from launch”, teased some big changes for EA Sports FC 24’s market system in comparison to FIFA 23 as well, which seem to address how the in-game economy copes with those mechanical changes around packs.

EA Sports FC 24, which will be EA Sports’ first soccer game after ditching the FIFA license, is set to arrive in Fall 2023. Official details about the game should become available during Summer 2023.