FIFA 21 launched on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC early last month and is scheduled to land on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on December 4. The launch will come as a free update to owners of the game on latest consoles and will pack several new features not available on previous consoles and PC. Now, the publisher has revealed why "next-gen" features won"t be making their way to PC platforms.
FIFA 21 on the latest game consoles includes features such as ball compression, a new camera angle, and muscle deformation. However, none of these will be making their way to the PC because EA wants to lower the barrier of entry in terms of specifications. In an interview with Eurogamer, Executive Producer Aaron McHardy had the following to say:
When we looked at what generation to put the PC game on, we looked at our fans and what capabilities they had with the hardware they have. And we have that information to understand what the power of the PCs out there in the world are. And when we looked at that, in order to run the gen five game, our min spec would have been at a spot that would have left a lot of people out in the cold not being able to play the game.
So we made the choice to keep the PC version of the game on the gen four version of FIFA so that we can open the doors and be inclusive to everybody who wants to play FIFA.
Looking at the statement, one has to wonder why EA couldn"t figure out some workaround to keep the gen five features as optional on PC so people with powerful rigs could utilize them while gamers on lower-end PCs can simply switch them off for increased performance.
Given that the minimum requirements of the PC version are quite modest - requiring an Nvidia GTX 660 (2GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2GB VRAM), 8GB of RAM, and Intel Core i3-6100 or AMD Athlon X4 880K CPU - it definitely makes sense to not have "next-gen" capabilities on these machines. But ideally, there should have been an option to enable this for gamers on high-end machines.
Source: Eurogamer