When rumors that the EA Sports’ College Football series was being revived began circulating during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in NCAA vs Alston (which gave student athletes in college sports the ability to make money for themselves using their name, image and likeness), fans of the series rejoiced for a new entry in a series that hadn’t seen a new release since 2013. The reason the series originally went dormant was the class action lawsuit O’Bannon v. NCAA, where former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a suit that challenged the NCAA’s use of the name, image, and likenesses of its former student athletes for commercial purposes since those same student athletes were not compensated. Three years after the NCAA vs. Alston decision, EA Sports released College Football 25, which was a solid return for the dormant game franchise.
So after their third entry in the revitalized franchise, you would think that EA and EA Tiburon/EA Orlando studios would continue to build on the things that made their fans clamor for a new CFB game. Sadly, I think that corporate management shot College Football 27 in its foot due to their meddling.
EA Sports College Football 27
$69.99 
$69.99 
$69.99 The allure of CFB games are two offline game modes that have existed for years: Road to Glory and Dynasty. In Road to Glory, your goal is to create your own player, earn a starting spot at a college program of your choice, play through your avatar’s college career in order to win awards (primarily the Heisman trophy), and take your school to the college football playoff in the hopes of playing for the national championship and eventually becoming the greatest college football player of all time. Not only do you have to perform on the field, but you also have to keep up with your grades, earn your coaches’ trust, motivate your teammates, keep your player physically fit so you don’t get injured throughout the season, and up your player’s popularity off the field in order to earn Name Image and Likeness (or NIL) deals.
The other important piece of the puzzle is Dynasty Mode. Here you create your own coach and choose from any of the 138 available schools in CFB 27, recruit new players, win games, and try to build a program that consistently competes for the national championship. Your enjoyment of the game depends on how you want to play it. Do you choose programs like the Georgia Bulldogs, Ohio State Buckeyes, or the reigning champion Indiana Hoosiers that are already the cream of the crop? Or are you a sicko (like me) and choose to take over a team from the Group of 5 (like the New Mexico Lobos, UL Monroe Warhawks, or Sacramento State Hornets), and try to build that program from the bottom. The choice is yours. In my case, I find the most fun comes from picking a bad team, and making them unstoppable, and the only way you can become one of those top tier teams is to win games and recruit.
Recruiting in CFB is the most important phase of Dynasty mode. The more you recruit newer and better players, the better your team becomes in later years. The better your team is, the more games you win. The more games you win, the higher you climb in the Top 25 rankings and the better bowl games you play in, and so on and so forth.
In order to get a new recruit to sign with you, you have to treat the game like a dating sim, and spend “hours” on them: you’ll research them online, DM them on social media, contact their friends and family, or “send the house” in order to woo them. The more you invest time into them, the more likely you are to make it higher onto their Top 10 list of schools, and when they cut their list down, you can schedule a visit to your school. When you get to that stage, you must coordinate your visit to their “dealbreaker,” which is the most important stat for them in order to consider attending a school. Playing time, system fit, proximity to their hometown, pro potential, and brand exposure are examples of dealbreakers. The higher grade your school has, the better chance you have of influencing the player. Afterwards, you must attempt to sell that player on why your school is a good fit for them.
All of that is complicated. Now imagine doing that with 20 different players, of different position groups, different dealbreakers, and also competing against other schools for their affection. All with only a limited amount of hours to use each week. Yes, this is for sickos.
I believe the moment to moment gameplay is as good as it’s been since the relaunch. Animations have improved, so you don’t see the same tackle animation consistently, for example. In previous entries, lighting was improved so that if you were playing an afternoon game, the time of day would change after each quarter. In this entry, there is a dynamic weather cycle. So if you’re playing during a cloudy day, it might start pouring rain after the first quarter, and by the end of the 3rd, the rain has stopped. The first time I noticed it was when I was taking my Road to Glory QB through the CFB playoff against the Kansas State Wildcats, and after the first quarter, it started to snow.
This is the end of the positive things I have to say about CFB 27.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I believe that EA upper management meddled in the latter part of the game’s development cycle. My reasoning for that conclusion is that prior to the launch of the game, YouTuber Bordeaux put out a video where he mentions that there were microtransactions added to the aforementioned Road to Glory and Dynasty modes; both of which are entirely OFFLINE. Historically, the Ultimate Team mode, which encourages you to buy card packs of different college football players through the ages with real money in order to build your ultimate team (get it?) to play online against other players. But since the majority of the playerbase only focuses on Road To Glory and Dynasty, EA doesn’t make any additional money from that.
I imagine the goal with adding these microtransactions was to bleed the playerbase for more money. CFB 27 was also given an Ultimate Edition called the MVP Edition that included a copy of Madden NFL 27, and gave players CFB points in order to level up their avatar’s stats past their initial level cap. On top of that, content creators that previewed the game at EA’s Creator Program stated that the microtransactions that eventually made their way into the final game were not present in the early builds they previewed.
Making things worse, the game’s experience sliders were altered so that you can no longer modify your players and coach to earn experience faster. Additionally, if you are upgrading your coach, and you don’t own the MVP Edition of the game, you are locked out of two skill trees, gating content that is already in the game from players who didn’t shell out the extra money.
In response to these changes, Bordeaux created the hashtag #CFBPlayDontPay on social media for players to protest and voice their frustrations. EA responded to the criticism at launch by announcing plans to add new experience modifiers to Dynasty mode in a future update, as well as announcing on July 10th that they would remove the paid progression options in Dynasty and Road To Glory the following morning.
As for what it means for the future of the series, one can only assume after the sale of EA to the Saudi Public Investment Fund, that these types of microtransactions will be implemented in future installments, and players will continue to be pressured to spend more money after the original point of purchase.
It truly is a scumbag move made by executives that ruin an otherwise good video game.
