FIFA 17 offered a significant improvement over FIFA 17 and was fun to play online. The emotional engine intelligence truly shined, as players would react on every near-miss, goal or foul. I am an ardent football fan, almost as much as I am a video game enthusiast, so it's natural that football games will fill a good portion of the time I spend with a controller in hand. Over the past decades, through various consoles, I have jumped between FIFA and PES (or ISS as it was known back in the day), each year choosing one of the two in order to quench my thirst for virtual football.
Since the PS3 era this choice has fallen mostly on the side of the EA Sports simulator, though I always had my eye on Pro Evolution Soccer. The mentality would change from the start to the end of the game when teams are desperately defending a lead or trying to equalize. We saw 10 men celebrations for the first time. Barclays Premier League was presented with authentic television graphics, overlays and all 20 stadiums. One of my biggest issues with Career Mode in general is the lack of interaction available between managers, players, fans, the media and the board.
There really isn't much point in players popping up to say "I want to play in the next match boss" if we can't actually respond to them in a meaningful way. An improved artificial intelligence system named Pro Player Intelligence aims to make AI-controlled players react to the skills and capabilities of other players with appropriate actions. For example, a winger will be more likely to cross the ball into the box when he has a waiting team-mate with aerial ability, whereas he might look for support and play the ball along the ground if that team-mate is less of an aerial threat.
Players will also make better use of their own strengths, so for example a creative player might look for less obvious opportunities such as playing long accurate passes, where another player in his situation would be more likely to play it safe with a short pass. We should be able to tell a youngster, that "his time will come" or try to convince a retiring player to "stay on one more year", or squash media speculation but we can't. And it creates a huge disconnect between us and the digital players we apparently manage. Some huge changes needed in this area.
Ever since FIFA split Career Mode into the player and manager sides, we’ve been dying for a more authentic manager experience. Aside from the occasional press conference, there’s very little else to create an immersive world that makes you feel like the manager of a football club. Give us more options to really role-play the idea of being a manager, complete with Keegan-esque outbursts, butting heads with the transfer committee, and in-depth player management.
The FIFA Trainer would help rookies and experts by guiding what buttons to press as they played each key pass or attempted to score goals. This time, the German Bundesliga got an authentic treatment from EA Sports. The commentary each year also gets a boost with Martin Tyler and Alan Smith — sounding more natural and less scripted each time. The career mode has gotten several new changes such as pre-season friendly tournaments, training drills, and more realistic transfers.
