To begin with, having the freedom to zoom past defenders is exhilarating. In real life, after all, Raheem Sterling could knock the ball past most left-backs in the league and reasonably expect to outrun them. You needn't even use right-stick skill moves - the new dribbling controls mean even FIFA novices can change direction, at speed, and find themselves easily breaking between lines.
It’s akin to that classic uncanny valley effect - you can’t help but notice these issues all the more because FIFA gets everything else so right. The animation is sublime, while dribbling and turning is more gratifyingly responsive this year, and overall there’s a more palpably organic feel to each game: the loose balls, the interceptions, the deflections all make it more unpredictable and thus more satisfying.
Relearning FIFA each year has become part of its appeal. The mystery is whether or not this is something deliberate on EA’s part, or whether, and I think this is much more likely, their developers are stuck in a holding pattern, balancing and re-balancing between pace and technique each year, responding to community complaints and pressure to deliver annual products of sufficient variance. If I had to put money on it, I’d say that FIFA 16, like FIFA 14, will blunt pacy players and then tell us it's an improvement. But nothing is being improved if there's no clear end point in sight. That, perhaps, is FIFA’s defining contradiction. EA can quite fairly claim to have again delivered the best football game ever made. But every year the developers seem to have less of an idea what that means.
Video game goalkeepers in general have always been a problem. Like the rest of the game you want them to seem realistic, and yet at the same time you don’t want every game to end in a no score draw. But predictably improving the goalkeepers has meant turning them into supernatural agents of goal-stopping impregnability. Despite all the efforts to humanise the game going up against the new goalies feels completely unrealistic and their abilities are, in their current state, seriously overpowered.
Most people put their fate on opening FIFA 15 packs, however the packs are random. That is to say, you have no idea what the packs are. It can be good, or useless. Some of you might ask is there any studies on the packs. Honestly, It isn’t easy to make a reliable study about this subject because it only works with a huge sample. Imagine, for example, that you open packs worth 3 million coins. If you open an extra pack and pull a Ronaldo IF card, your conclusions will be completely distorted. It is not possible for a single person to open enough packs to conclude if it is worth to buy packs or not. We did it but we combined our results with the community experience to conclude that, in a general way, you get back 60% of what you have paid by the packs. The other 40% are EA’s profit, ie, your loss. The same happens in the famous bookmakers sports scores where part of what you bet reverts automatically to the house, regardless of the result. Usually, they keep with something between 10 and 15%, but EA is not satisfied with less than 40%.
The gameplay issues can often be patched. What cannot is the lack of innovation off the pitch. Team Sheets - a brilliant addition where the movement and work rate of every outfield player on the pitch can be altered, offering management-sim level tactical choices - aside, the UI and single-player modes are practically identical to 14.
Different but certainly not better, despite the amazing next gen visuals, FIFA has never seemed so indecisive and lacking in direction.
