Home College Football 26 – Will EA follow up on last year’s smash-hit return and what can we expect?

College Football 26 – Will EA follow up on last year’s smash-hit return and what can we expect?

A decade away in gaming is a risk. To be absent from gamers’ hearts and consoles for ten years or more must have led to questions about College Football’s viability for a return. And yet it smashed it. Turning out to the best the best-selling sports game in North America in history and up there with the best-selling games of the year, College Football paid back its devs’ faith and then some.

EA Sports likes an annual release of its games. EAFC, Madden and NHL will all be getting worked on as we speak ready for their arrivals later in the year but what about College Football 26? It must be coming, it would be madness for it not to be, but will it just file in alongside the other EA sports games that see small, incremental improvements, or is it still in enough of its infancy to see a raft of new additions implemented?

For the past few weeks, YouTubers and influencers have been discussing a survey, allegedly sent out to players of the latest iteration of College Football, asking them to rank the importance of features in the game.

Recruitment could be bolstered for sure, and Road to Glory will probably make a return, although these story modes don’t tend to last too many years in EA Sports games, one or two at the most, we feel there’s probably enough scope for another crack this year.

Updated rosters obviously – EA paid its college stars a few hundred dollars each to appear in the game last year – will that be repeated or was it a one-off signing away of your rights? Of course, there will be a new batch of stars that will need to sign up for the game too so it will be interesting to see how the publishers deal with that. It’s slightly more complex than the other EA Sports games due to the new incoming numbers who aren’t all generally covered by a deal with a league or player’s association we’d imagine.

As for a release date, something around the time of last year’s offering will be nailed on if the game is to make an appearance. It makes sense to get the game out there in time for the start of the new season. Week Zero is penned in for the 23rd of August so expect it before then.

So that doesn’t leave much time before we will start to hear about the game if indeed it does exist. We will have our ears firmly to the turf to see what we can pick up in the upcoming weeks and months.

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Paul McNally
Gaming Editor

Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title published by IDG Media. Having spent time as Head of Communications at a professional sports club and working for high-profile charities such as the National Literacy Trust, he returned as Managing Editor in charge of large US-based technology websites in 2020. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine,…

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