EA Sports Removes Toxic Celebrations From 'FIFA 21'

Shortly after revealing PSG’s Kylian Mbappé as FIFA 21‘s cover star, EA Sports is now shedding more light on the game by giving fans a feel of what to expect from its gameplay experience when it comes to community standards and guidelines.

As most fans of the game would know, when a player scores a goal during online multiplayer modes, they can select preset celebration sequences to play to their opponent. Sometimes, these sequences can drag out and and be abused for toxic purposes. In hopes of fighting this toxicity, EA Sports has now announced that it will ban and remove certain celebrations which are or become notoriously used for unfriendly behaviour, the first two to go including “Shush” and “A-OK.”

“We were told by the community that there are toxic behaviors in the game and we wanted to make sure we removed them,” EA Sports said. “So we removed some of the celebrations that people thought were not the best idea to have in the game. The flow is shorter, which is to try to keep you playing most of the time instead of just waiting. All together the intention there is just to keep you playing instead of doing other things that may not be necessary in the game.”

For the football fans out there, FIFA 21 will launch globally on October 9 for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Elsewhere in gaming, Fortnite developer Epic Games is now valuated at $17 billion USD.