OS Weekly Wrap Up, Getting You Caught Up on Sports Gaming News (Aug 2 - Aug 8, 2020)

August is the true start of the 2020-21 sports game release season, and Prince is here to walk us through the August sports games and their release dates. It’s a list comprised of multiple sports, and in a couple cases, multiple sports games for that sport.

Overall, I’ve felt like Throwback Moments were a bit underwhelming, but now I’m going to have to change my tune. In that last drop, which they kind of hid in the Super Packs for some reason, 2K blessed us with a loaded pink diamond Chandler Parsons! That’s easily the best card he’s ever gotten in MyTeam, but since he was stuck behind a VC only paywall, I had to pay through the roof for him. But I will happily drop 50K MT at the end of July for a pink diamond player that maybe five people on the planet (including me, and presumably Chandler himself) care about using.

The NBA 2K20 Ultimate Attention to Detail Roster from CelticLG is another one of those all-encompassing beasts that is “complete” but also a work in progress. There is a MyLeague guide, ratings adjustment (work in progress), a Tendencies guide, a Badges guide (on the way), plus fictional draft classes incorporated and more. It is for those looking to get a whole new “feel” for MyLeague on PS4 consoles. There is an Xbox One port of this roster, but I have not kept track of it in recent months so I can really only vouch for the PS4 version.

I finally got my first G.O.A.T. card this last weekend. No, it wasn’t LeBron or Vince. It was Larry Legend, and I earned him the old fashioned way: playing the game. Next up is Kobe, then maaaaaybe Steph, but I’m still not 100 percent sure if I want to endure that grind. Although, I do need some games to play to test out all the other new cards I got.

FIFA 21‘s trailer dropped on July 23 and looks to have a big emphasis on playing as a team or some element of playing together socially. I was invited to the FIFA 21 preview event, which was done virtually this year. After the event, all attendees were provided a code to download the FIFA 21 beta to get some hands-on time with the game. I was able to jump in to the full suite of play now options (and Volta). For now, I’ll fill you guys in on what gameplay felt like in the beta, so let’s jump into this FIFA 21 gameplay preview.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a virtual preview event for the game with members of the HB and 2K teams in attendance, as well as getting some hands-on time with the game on a beta PC build. Here are some of the biggest things I learned from those experiences, my thoughts on how the game has improved upon its predecessors, and areas where it could maybe still use some refinement either before or after the game’s release.

Recently, I’ve been reading Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen’s Future Value: The Battle for Baseball’s Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar, an exceptional in-depth look at the wild world of scouting in baseball. To date, it is one of the most informative and easy-reading baseball books I have ever read, and I would recommend it to any and all baseball fans. But as I read through International Free Agency and how teams handle scouting, I was floored to learn exactly how much is missing from MLB The Show. I have compiled a list of the most interesting opportunities from Future Value that MLB The Show can implement in future titles to improve the single-player experience.

The FIFA Direct Twitter handle went on a tweet onslaught a couple days ago to coincide with the media posting their own initial FIFA 21 gameplay impressions. If you missed those impressions, Joel posted his hands-on FIFA 21 beta thoughts, and we also got the gameplay Pitch Notes from the FIFA developers so there’s a lot of new info out there. The tweets from EA were all in response to Twitter users asking questions in a Q&A format. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing for me was EA being clear and direct in saying there will not be any FIFA 21 DDA, handicapping or built-in momentum in the game — nor has there ever been any DDA in FIFA.

The game offers up a very nice set of tutorials, which if I am being honest, I didn’t give full respect to after firing the game up for the first time. Whether it was flips, tricks, power slides or grinds, the more time I spent in the tutorial section of the game, the more the controls came alive. So much of it was nuanced, and my lack of understanding of the basics is what created the lack of enjoyment in the title.