Earn, trade, and collect superstars like Lionel Messi and Eden Hazard to create your own fantasy team. Choose your play style, formation, kits, and more. Put your management skills to the test with new Quick Simulations. Set up your squad, start the match, and watch it unfold. Make smart subs, tactical tweaks, and gauge team effort along the way. Your match results depend entirely on your ability to manage player skills and chemistry - taking authenticity to the next level. There are, yes, still some irritating and at times infuriating technical issues that follow on from Fifa 14 that will make you wonder what EA’s game developers have been doing for the past 365 days. The ball boy weakly throwing a ball towards your throw in taker is one every player will have experienced, and be experiencing again.
It seems like every new iteration of the franchise has been plugged by the EA Canada crew talking of how much ‘weightier’ players are. How they all carry so much more momentum, and that you’ll really feel clashes and challenges. And as you know, previously this has been bollocks. This time around though, it bears repeating. Players have genuine momentum. Stand perfectly still at a set piece controlling a receiver and flick the left analogue stick quickly, and the player doesn’t just take a perfect step one way or the other. They actually dip their shoulder and head off in that direction, meaning one step is actually followed by two or three little steps as they try to stop. There’s a more even distribution of weight throughout the bodies of players, and it feels amazing.
Another nice change too is that if you have money left in your transfer budget at the end of the season, a percentage of it will be carried across to your next campaign. How much you get back depends on your performance against board objectives, but it’s much better than having ￡10 million wiped, just because you didn’t spend it. So if the right player isn’t available, you can hold on to your cash and attack the market again in the following season, providing you’re doing well. There was no way for us to see it in action, but EA have also added extra logic to boost promoted clubs transfer budgets as they move through the leagues. So if you do guide Yeovil to the Premier League, you should have a budget which at least gives you a chance to compete with the clubs around you. We'll need full retail code to prove it though.
There are some easy parallels to draw between this and the Draft Champions mode in Madden NFL 16, with both letting you quickly assemble a team to play with, but whereas the real world sport of American football has a real drafting system to hire players, it’s more difficult to capture the protracted negotiations of player transfers in football. Instead you’re given a selection of five players to choose from for any position on the pitch and a bunch of additional substitutes to fill out your temporary squad. What concerns me is that the game is still a bit of a chaotic, physical mess. Going with the tractor beam approach of rushing the ball and just going through the man to get it is far too viable still at this point. If you’re going to put so much effort into trying to give the defense more weapons and make it harder to move the ball through the midfield, you can’t then simultaneously allow so much physical play to go unchecked.
And more often than not you’re going to get a chance to play with players (compared to previous games at least) that you may never have been able to afford in FUT 16. We saw Ronaldo, Suarez, Bale, Messi, Roberto Carlos and everyone in between in our time with FUT Draft, and whilst you’ll only get maybe one or two players of that calibre in each squad, it’s still great to get hands on with them. The challenge though, is making them all fit in to your squad. A new item 'tag' system will allow you to tag multiple items within a pack and then 'Send all' tagged items to where ever you like. Leaving the rest of the pack contents in tact. No more, sorting individual items.
A final point I want to make here is that defenders are also opening up and swiveling their hips more easily when backpedaling now. Another reason why users go to double teams so often right now is I think because they feel terrified in one-on-one situations. The dribbler has generally had the advantage, but now defenders are staying more square to the play, which allows you to contain and then strike with more confidence. It’s a nuanced change, but it’s something where if you go from playing last year’s game and then go right to FIFA 16 it will immediately stand out.
