A significant EA Sports error seemingly allowed some early buyers to play FIFA 23 a full month in advance. As a result, the upcoming addition to the FIFA franchise leaked everything from its player ratings and soundtrack to some still-unannounced club kits.
A weekend's worth of early access has been a staple FIFA pre-order bonus for a long while now, but FIFA 23 wasn't scheduled to become playable before September 27, three days prior to its global launch. Either way, this is going to be the last fully licensed soccer game from EA Sports in the foreseeable future. Following three decades' worth of collaboration with the world's top soccer organization, EA lost its FIFA license earlier this year and promptly announced plans to rebrand the series as EA Sports FC.
Earlier today, an oversight from EA allowed some Xbox gamers who pre-ordered FIFA 23 to play their preloaded versions of the game for a short while. Though the company reportedly addressed the issue almost immediately, the mistake still resulted in one of the largest game leaks in recent memory. Enough users were apparently even able to access the newly revamped FIFA 23 Ultimate Team mode that its FUT service started returning in-game errors, prompting players to try logging in later due to "a high volume of server traffic" that it was experiencing.
According to the leak, Messi, Mbappe, Benzema, and Lewandowski will be the highest-rated players in FIFA 23, with all four of them boasting a 91 rating. They will be followed by Mane at 90 and Neymar at 89, while both Donnarumma and Marquinhos will be rated at 88. Atlético Madrid and Liverpool's third kits were also prematurely revealed as a result of this inadvertent access period. The same goes for the FIFA 23 soundtrack, whose song list is as varied as one would expect from a modern FIFA game, with EA once again opting to license work from relatively unknown artists over global hits. Still, out of the 56 leaked tracks, some might recognize songs such as Rosalía's "Saoko" or "Ojitos Lindos" by Bad Bunny and Bomba Estereo.
Overall, this certainly isn't the prelude to the FIFA 23 launch that EA was hoping for. It is also not the first major blunder that the company made in preparation for its release; earlier this month, some fans managed to pre-order FIFA 23 for just over a nickel on PC, with EA subsequently vowing to honor all such purchases.
FIFA 23 is set to release on September 30 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
Source: Eurogamer, Sorare 180/Twitter