As Open As Your Goal, Mate: FIFA World Open Beta

Association football is, in many ways, the greatest real-world PC game. It's a squad-based real-time tactical co-op/competitive multiplayer game with over 150 years of lore and canon to obsess over. It has squillions of characters, each with their own stats, backstory, and internal lives right down to daily routines. The game is still updated, but some rules changes are controversial, and other rules are still often misunderstood. You can collect thousands of cosmetic items. That's a Game Of The Year 10/10 PC Platinum All-Gold Classic if I ever heard of one.

All of which is to say that EA's free-to-kick FIFA World is now in open beta.

FIFA World has various types of ball-kicking with different configurations of men. League mode gives you a real-world team to play through a season, while Ultimate Team is a build-your-own-team collectible trading whatsit mode.

Given how wildly successful Ultimate Team has been at selling microtransaction 'packets' of virtual men in actual paid retail versions of FIFA games for years, it seems a jolly sensible foundation for a free-to-play game. One might hope that it'll be successful enough that EA will kindly avoid squeezing people who fancy playing without paying. Our Graham's had a minor infatuation with Ultimate Team before.

FIFA World has been in open-ish beta for a while, but was limited to a few countries. Now all and sundry from all over the world can storm the pitch. Register this-a-way.