FIFA 23: Release Date, Best New Features and Cover

While FIFA 23 isn't reinventing the wheel, the series is making adjustments for its last hoorah. Before the title change to "EA Sports FC," EA Sports is bringing some new content and quality-of-life improvements to its longstanding franchise.

For the first time in FIFA's history, 23 has placed a woman on the global cover—as Australian forward Sam Kerr shares the Ultimate Edition's spotlight with France forward Kylian Mbappé. And it's a fitting title for that franchise first, with this being the first FIFA to have full crossplay and women's football clubs.

The crossplay feature should yield some possibly unexpected benefits. When the game releases on September 27, 2022, the competitive field and trade market will be available to players across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia and PC. This means it'll be easier for users to play with friends who use other systems, but—likely more importantly—it should benefit competitive matchmaking and the FIFA Ultimate Team in-game economy.

Past the QOL improvement heralded by crossplay, the game is delivering new content as well. The aforementioned women's clubs will expand the series' traditionally available teams to include top clubs from England's Women's Super League and France's Division 1 Féminine. Further, the game is also leaning into its quadrennial opportunity: allowing players to dive headfirst into both the men's and women's World Cups.

Nearly two months before the men's Qatar World Cup and before the women's Australia and New Zealand tournament, users can help their favorite nations virtually compete for gold.

While World Cup play is certainly not new to the FIFA franchise, it's a welcome return every four years. This time around, gamers on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia and PC will also be able to experience the festivities with new technology: FIFA 23's HyperMotion2.

The new gameplay tech is restricted to the title's current-gen systems and is centered around more motion-captured animations than ever before, as well as a new emphasis on machine learning.

With EA claiming to have captured "9.2 million frames of advanced match capture," HyperMotion2's animations are opening the game up visually and mechanically. The former front connotes greater aesthetic realism, with the latter promising new dribbling, shooting and defending mechanics.

Finally, the machine-learning component is an intriguing one. The system's advancements are intended to expand the game's animations even further—rewriting and creating new animations "in real time" based on match capture. If it works as intended, FIFA 23 may continue looking and feeling relatively new to players well into its life cycle.