What is poised to be one of 2024’s biggest releases, EA Sports College Football 25, is launching officially this week, and the developer is warning players the game will have some issues. The game arrived July 15 through early access, and players quickly noticed a series of inaccuracies related to player likenesses and other parts of the game. Those problems will be fixed, EA has promised.
In a blog post, EA Sports said there would “inevitably” be “some slight inaccuracies at launch” in regards to player likenesses and other elements. That’s in part because it was only just a few months ago in February that EA signed Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals with college athletes for the game. In the time since, EA created “thousands of player likenesses” for the game, and also processed the “massive volume of reference materials” sent to the developer from the 134+ participating FBS schools.
“Certain schools like Stanford, Western Michigan, and Jacksonville State will show with outdated logos, and a small subset of players will have missing or incorrect likenesses initially,” EA said, noting that it will attempt to addresses the issues as quickly as possible.
In total, College Football 25 features about 11,390 real players, along with 5,000 or so player models for coaches, fans, and created players, totalling more than 16,000 character models. EA said it was “never going to be a viable option” to create the characters manually by scanning them all into the game.
Instead, EA used a machine learning toolset to create the character models. EA inputted “hundreds” of head shapes, hairstyles, skin tones, complexions, beards, and brows into the model. Using this data, along with a single reference photo of the athlete or coach in question, EA said it was able to create the player likenesses in the game.
EA has also confirmed that the TeamBuilder mode won’t be available at launch, and will be released at some point later on. Like EA’s other sports games, players can expect regular updates to the game that will deliver new features, as well as fixes and other improvements.
College Football 25 is available now through the $100 deluxe edition or via the 10-hour trial available to EA Play subscribers. The game launches for everyone else on July 19.
According to the in-game player-counter, College Football 25 had more than 619,000 concurrent players on July 15. The game kicked off EA’s annual sports-game release schedule, with Madden NFL 25 to follow in August, and then FC 25 in September, followed by the presumed release of NHL 25 in October. EA’s sports games are popular in their own right, and they also bring in money beyond the initial purchase price through their lucrative Ultimate Team modes.
For more, check out GameSpot’s College Football 25 preorder guide.
