FIFA 16

[TCO]

I admire that they've almost become meta with their bullshit. They usually make an effort to sell new gameplay features, I really appreciate the cutting out the middleman and just using buzzwords now!

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

Various bits of news have started coming through, so here's what I've seen so far!

New Stadiums

El Monumental (River Plate)

Carrow Road (Norwich City)

Vicarage Road (Watford)

Vitality Stadium (Bournemouth)

Fratton Park (Portsmouth)

BORUSSIA-PARK (Moenchengladbach)

Stade Velodrome (Marseille)

CenturyLink Field (Seattle Sounders)

King Abdullah Sports City (Al Hilal, Al Nassr, Al Shabab)

 

New Legend Players

Deco; Limanen; Gattuso; Zanetti; Best; Baja; Giggs; Nesta. Legends remain Xbox exclusive.

They've also changed how Legend chemistry works for Ultimate Team. All Legend cards now get a default weak link with anyone.

 

New Ultimate Team Card Designs

As normal, the Non-Rare cards look fairly naff, but the rare cards, particularly the in-forms, look awesome this year in my opinion.

 

EA Conference is at 9AM GMT, so more news is likely on the way then too.

[Baddar]

Oooooh, new cards. Take my 50 quid! :/

[METALMAN]

FRATTON PARK?!?!?!?!

[9 to 5]

Oooooh, new cards. Take my 50 quid! :/

You are getting ripped off if you pay 50 quid for any game. :P

[Adam]

We're al getting ripped off these days then, aren't we? I mean, we actually are. 50 quid is seemingly the going rate on the new consoles these days. I'm buying a PS4 soon and I think the only game I'll even have for the first few months is FIFA.

[9 to 5]

If you shop around you always get better deals. I buy games at the 40 mark or thereabouts. Would never approach 50.

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

On phone so can't link, but they've announced a big load of career mode changes in the Gamescom EA conference. Might actually use it next year now.

 

Also, whilst we're debating prices, I agree with Niner. £40 is usually my upper limit, but more often than not I Trade-in/use store credit so I never pay that much anyway.

[DavidMarrio]

Will goalkeepers actually be able to save near post shots on the new game. That's all I want to know. 

[Adam]

It's still a mark of how it's changed that you can get them 'lower' at around £40. That always used to be my upper limit for buying a game, and I used to frequently get new release games from certain places for just under £30, including FIFA.

[9 to 5]

http://www.best-game-price.co.uk/Product-300703/B00KHJLGNY-FIFA+16.html

You can get it for 40 quid now if you have it. Yes prices rise, but that is life. Still no reason anyone ever should be paying 50 quid for Fifa or any other game.

[TCO]

It's still a mark of how it's changed that you can get them 'lower' at around £40. That always used to be my upper limit for buying a game, and I used to frequently get new release games from certain places for just under £30, including FIFA.

Inflation and the Euro being in the toilet will mean that FIFA will be €75 in every shop here on release day.   

That's not including the  In-app purchaes or 'Ultimate' edition that they somehow manage to flog to people.  

[METALMAN]

As a general rule: the more expensive a game is, the worse it probably is

[Dan]

It's £26.60 on cdkeys for PC (after the 5% Facebook discount)

Anyway:

http://news.futhead.com/posts/fifa-16/32056-fifa-16-fut-draft-mode-preview

A new year, a new mode for FIFA 16 Ultimate Team. 

 

It's taken EA a while, but finally after years of waiting we now have a genuinely new mode to enjoy in Ultimate Team. It's going to take skill, luck and a whole lot of squad building creativity. Which makes us very pleased to introduce FUT Draft mode!  

What is FUT Draft Mode?

FUT Draft is a brand new mode for Ultimate Team where you’re tasked with building a squad from selections of random players presented to you in groups of five. Think Hearthstone’s Arena mode, but for Ultimate Team.

 

Once your squad is assembled you’ll face-off against other FUT Draft teams (offline and online modes available) where your aim is to win four games in a row without being beaten. Each time you win, the potential rewards increase. So the more games you win in a row, the better your prize at the end will be. If you lose, you’re out and claim the prize at which ever win level you were at.

How do I enter?

It costs 15,000 coins or 300 FIFA Points to enter but FUT Draft tokens can also be found in FUT 16 packs, in the same way you might find a token to redeem 1,000 coins or a free Gold Pack. But don’t worry, even if you enter FUT Draft and lose your first game, you’ll always get back at least what you put in. It may not be in the form of 15,000 coins but it will be a prize of equivalent value.

What can I win? 

The rewards will always be different, but we picked up Jumbo Gold Packs, Premium Gold and Silver Packs, coins, Standard Gold Packs and everything else in between. As soon as you get past one win, you'll be walking away with more than your entry fee, so there's plenty of reward on offer in FUT Draft.

 

How does it work?

Choose your match difficulty

First (if playing offline) you choose your match difficulty. This won’t affect the types of rewards you receive for winning, but playing on Amateur will reduce the amount of coins received per game. This step is not applicable to Online. 

Choose your formation

Next you’ll be presented with five formations to choose from. The selection of formations will be different each time you enter FUT Draft mode, so if your 'favourite' formation isn’t available, you’ll need to choose a similar variant, or try something totally new.

 

Choose your captain

The first player to pick is your captain, which will be from a selection of five players as we mentioned. From our experience of FUT Draft, there are normally some very, very, very good players on offer for the Captain spot. You’ll be spoilt for choice.

 

Build the rest of your squad

Now it’s entirely up to you which position you choose to fill next. Select a position in the formation and you’ll be presented with five players to choose from who will fit that role. Keep picking until your first eleven, substitutes and reserves are chosen. You can auto-complete the process if you wish.

 

Will you try to build for chemistry, or just pick the best players? That’s completely up to you, and sometimes if the selection of players on offer isn’t quite what you were looking for, you’ll maybe need to make the best of a bad situation. Be creative. 

 

Choose your manager

Lastly you get to pick your FUT Draft Manager which is your final opportunity to boost Team Chemistry should a Manger with the right nationality or league links be available.

Play some matches

Jump in at the deep end and start your first FUT Draft game, hopefully getting to that magic four wins which will yield the best prizes the mode has to offer. Once you're knocked out you claim your prize and then start all over again, building a new squad, and going on a new FUT Draft adventure. 

Other things to note

• Player fatigue and injuries reset after each game, meaning your FUT Draft squad will always be fit and raring to go.
• Even if you lose your first game, you’ll always get back at least what you put in, in terms of reward.
• You can preview how a particular player fits in to your squad before actually committing.
• You can save and export your FUT Draft squads to Concept Squads should you come across something particularly brilliant you want to build for real.
• Over the course of the year all In Form, TOTY, TOTS and MOTM player versions will appear in FUT Draft. You could still pick up a Week 1 In Form in FUT Draft 10 weeks after their release for example. 
• You won’t permanently own any of the players you play with in FUT Draft. They’re used in FUT Draft and FUT Draft only.

Our thoughts

So what did we think of FUT Draft mode? Well in short, it’s brilliant.

 

As varied and as interesting as squad building can be in the main Ultimate Team modes, there is still an alarming regularity in which you'll come up against the archetypal Bundesliga and BPL squads. People love solid green links, and get that but it doesn’t always make for great matches, or great squad building. FUT Draft turns that notion on its head but in a short, sharp format which is really easy to pick up and put down as you need.

 

Being played over just four games means you could quite conceivably build a squad, play the matches and collect your rewards in an hour and a half. And the great thing about it, is that all the coins you’re getting by completing matches, and anything extra you win in FUT Draft mode in prizes is all contributing to your main FUT experience, so it’s far from wasted effort.

 

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. 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.

 

One particular occasion we managed to get a bit of a Bundesliga theme going with Lewandowski, Reus and Kagawa creating some nice link potential. But then on literally our last pick Gareth Bale popped up. Putting him in the team completely destroyed our chemistry on that side of the pitch, but we did it anyway because he was better than what we had. And that’s the joy of FUT Draft, you never know what’s coming next, and as a result you'll end up using player combinations and formations you never would have tried before.  

 

EA seem to have the quality and rarity of items received well balanced right now too. (we’ve played a few versions over the last few months) We were normally getting mostly Gold’s, one or two very special players, a few silvers and maybe the odd bronze too now and again in an average squad. It’s pretty hard to get 100 chemistry and I think we only managed it once. But if building 100 chem squads was easy in FUT Draft, the whole mode would be rendered fairly pointless.

 

Myself and Tom had an absolute blast with FUT Draft, whether it was playing individually or building a squad together. During which we probably spent more time arguing about who to pick, than actually playing matches. But that’s the essence of why FUT Draft mode is fun, it’s about football opinion, a bit of luck, a lot of skill, and the Ultimate Team squad building we all love so dearly. All wrapped up in a very accessible four game format with the chance to win a whole lot more than you entered with. Sign us up for day one. FUT Draft is excellent. 

Other Changes to Ultimate Team 

As well as FUT Draft there have been a whole host of other changes across Ultimate Team which have centred on community feedback, and making the mode easier to navigate than ever before. 

 

• 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. 
• When you want to apply a consumable to a player,  FUT will now suggest items based on the players needs. If they have an arm injury, and you have an arm heal item, it will bring that to the top of your consumables deck. The same goes for players without a contract, etc. No more trawling through consumables.
• You can now search specifically for In Form versions of players on the Transfer Market.
• FUT has a brand new in-game broadcast presentation pack.
• FUT story lines have been added to the in-game commentary, with Tyler and Smith now able to discuss your top scorers, new players and much, much more relating to your FUT squads. 
• The new In Form's look unreal. Seriously. 

So what do you guys think of FUT Draft? Hit us up in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you might have. 

 

 

After a year just gone of little change, we entered our FIFA 16 Career Mode play test with some trepidation. But pleasingly its clear that the team are back working features solely for FIFA 16's premier offline mode and here's how it's all shaping up. 

 

For those who despise reading, here are the highlights.

• New Pre-season Tournaments
• New Player Training
• Updated Global Transfer Network
• New Club Transfer Budgets
• New Story of the Season
• And much, much, more...

Pre-season Tournaments

The first new addition to Career Mode is one we’ve championed as a site for some time – Pre-season Tournaments. Gone are the mundane series of pointless friendly games, and in their place a myriad of exciting tournaments spread across the globe. There are nine different Pre-season Tournaments in total, but you’ll be invited to choose from a selection of three at the start of each season.

 

 

The stature of your club will affect the quality of tournaments available, with Chelsea in our play through invited to the Asia Elite Trophy also featuring the likes of Bayern Munich and PSG. As well as altering the quality of opposition, the stature of the tournament will also affect the amount of prize money on offer. Which, you’ll be pleased to hear goes directly in to your transfer budget should you be victorious. For that reason alone, pre-season is now well worth playing.

 

The tournament format consists of a 4 team group stage, where you play each team other once before moving on to a Semi-final and Final should you be successful. But even if you find yourself knocked out in the earlier rounds, you’ll still receive a portion of the prize pool to go to towards your transfer war chest. So all is not lost either way.

 

The presentation of the new Pre-season Tournaments is excellent, as we’ve come to expect from EA these days. And it extends way beyond pretty menus too, with custom ad-boards, commentary, in-game overlays, and even unique trophy celebrations all designed and styled to represent the region and tournament you've entered.

 

 

Another small but incredibly significant change to the pre-season format is the much demanded inclusion of unlimited substitutions. You can now make as many as you want. It’s so minute but in terms of the realism and immersion of pre-season, being restricted to three substitutions in previous FIFA’s was a real killer, so it’s great to see this long standing issue finally rectified.

 

What Pre-season Tournaments add to Career Mode above all else is a reason to play. I used to (like most of you I’m sure) simulate the majority of my friendly games, because they were nothing more than dead weight before the season started proper. Now you have a potential transfer fund boost on offer, varied opposition, locations and potentially your first managerial trophy too. Pre-season Tournaments are a very slickly integrated and very welcome new addition to the Career Mode family.

Player Training

Another community most wanted feature for Career Mode has always been Player Training, which finally makes its debut in FIFA 16. It’s based around Skill Games (don’t panic, it’s going to be fine) but the whole process can be automated (told you) as well if you wish to do so.

 

You have five player training slots in total, which you can assign to anyone in your first team squad. That includes youth players also, providing you’ve signed them to a permanent contract. After that you select an area of focus for each player to work on during that week. For example as Chelsea we put Diego Costa on a finishing drill, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek on to passing.

 

 

Once assigned you can either manually play the Skill Games yourself, or ‘simulate all’ to see the results in seconds. For me, the latter is by far the most attractive option long term. The player’s performance in each drill (rated A-F) will then start to improve the stat areas the training focusses on. Over time, it will slowly increase their overall rating too. You can only train your team once a week in an aim keep things balanced, and we saw some pleasing results with that in mind when comparing the benefits received from training by established players, compared to upcoming talent.

 

We trained Diego Costa for about 15 weeks consistently on his finishing and he went from 90 finishing up to 91, which probably isn't a difference you’ll notice in-game. His overall rating didn’t progress at all during that time either. Ruben Loftus-Cheek however, over the same duration gained +4 for his through passes and his overall had jumped +3 too. As you can see, a much larger net benefit from training a ‘promising’ player, rather than someone already at the peak of their powers. Balance is always key in features like this, so it was nice to see the training logic working in the way we’d expect. There are rating caps as well (based on potential growth) so at a point, certain players won’t grow any more regardless of how much you train them.

 

 

An example of the training automation screen below...

 

 

As your players skills improve over time it also affects their transfer value and this is shown on the training screen as a percentage increase. We trained Courtois as well over the same 15 week period and the game listed a 10% increase in his value. That only represented an extra £3 million on top of his asking price, but it’s nice to know that your time investment in player training is paying off in more ways than just improved stats.

 

As I mentioned previously, you only have five training slots per week, so you’ll need to be very selective about who you want to focus your attention on. The game will remember your last training configuration too, enabling you to reload the same schedule from the previous week and run it again. That makes Player Training incredibly quick and easy to manage. Based on our time with it, to see genuine benefits you're going to need to train the same players consistently over a number of weeks, rather than chopping and changing all the time. 

 

 

Will I ever play the training Skill Games myself manually?

 

I doubt it. But the fact that you can now control the development of your squad is absolutely huge for Career Mode. If you’re a big club like Chelsea, focussing on improving youth players is probably a good way to go. But as a lower league club, focussing on making your existing star players even better, may be the preferred tactic. Perhaps, you have a great winger who can’t cross for toffee. You might never turn him in to David Beckham, but you can at least target improvement in that part of his game. Or maybe you want to create the next La Masia, and bring through a new era of home grown success? It’s all up to you as the manager, and it's that freedom I think I like best about Player Training.

 

Another very welcome, and very well integrated new feature. 

Global Transfer Network

The Global Transfer Network, seems on the surface at least identical to FIFA 15, but under the hood there are some neat changes. As you all know, EA decided to mask the player overall rating (OVR) in many of Career Mode’s menus (which I like for the most part) but that tended to hinder rather than help you when it came to scouting players you knew little about.

 

Now, when you take the time to scout a player in detail you’ll be rewarded with extra information, like their current transfer value, wages and the unmasking of their overall. These are small details, but they’re incredibly useful when you need to make quick transfer decisions about players your own football knowledge perhaps doesn’t cover. These new details are all displayed on the main GTN screen too meaning you don’t need to click on the player and filter through all their stats to see it.

 

I’d love to see this go much further with scouts also providing an indication of a player’s future potential (that is their job after all) but it seems I shall be waiting another year at least for that to come around. For me the Global Transfer Network still has lots of untapped potential, but at least this time there’s actually a reason to use scouting, because you will at the very least get back the key information you need to make better transfer decisions.

Club Transfer Budgets

One of the biggest gripes with managing clubs in the lower leagues in Career Mode is that if you eventually make the Promised Land and gain promotion to the Premier League, you still only have a League One budget to work with. Due to the commercial revenue that comes with promotion these days that’s just not right, so to try and tackle that, EA have made a few changes.

 

The first is around the balance of transfer budgets in general which have been tweaked somewhat across the board to provide more realistic starting positions. EA have analysed the amounts spent by clubs over the last few seasons in the real world, and have tried to match Career Mode to that benchmark. That change in conjunction with the chance to boost your transfer fund as part of Pre-season Tournaments, should leave you in a much better starting place than in previous years.

 

 

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.

Story of the Season 

EA have utilised their Player Stories engine in various guises over the last few Career Mode iterations,with fairly mixed success. Some of the stories are really interesting and engaging, and others not so. But combined with the some of the new audio technology EA are stepping up their game on that front yet again with their newly dubbed - Story of the Season. 

 

Now as well as the general comments about your next opponent, you'll also get deeper routed discussion about big transfers happening in world football (even outside of your league at times), notable player or team performances and should you find yourself in a title or relegation scrap, they'll debate that in some depth too. Things have gone yet another level down in terms of depth essentially.

 

 

Some of that stuff we've perhaps seen or heard before, but normally it's in isolation or the odd comment here and there. Now Career Mode feels like it remembers, and plays more prominently on those key story lines as they develop and it does so almost seamlessly. Story of the Season also brings with it a suite of new overlays for transfer news to really enforce the things Tyler and Smith debate. This stuff is subtle, without doubt, but it's great to see EA continue to push the envelope in terms of overall immersion of the Career Mode experience.  

Best of the rest

As well as the headline grabbing stuff we also managed to obtain an additional list of foundational changes which EA won’t be publicising as part of their main press release. I won’t cover these in detail, but I know you’ll find them interesting all the same.

 

• You can now sign free agents outside of the transfer window.
• After scouting a player, reports are available for an entire calendar year before they expire (previously they lasted 3 months).
• Short loans have increased from three to six months and there is now an option to issue two-year loans.
• While the transfer window is open, the number of ‘high-profile’ moves by big players has been tuned to better match the number that typically happen in the real-world.
• EA have addressed values of players to better match the real-world transfer market.
• Transfer Improvements: When the user receives a scout report update, we will recommend him three players based on the weaknesses of the team.
• Global Transfer Network: We added a detailed tab to the GTN screen where the user can filter all the players that are fully scouted.
• Auto Transfer Budget: If you have enough money to buy a player the budget will automatically adjust instead of having the user go back to the budget screen and adjust the slider manually.
• Season Target: There were several complains of people being fired even if they performed well, we did some tuning to ensure this doesn't happen.
• Team Management: Adding extra info for the Formations. Right now we can have 3 different types of 4-5-1 formation without any distinction between them, we will add some extra info, such as Wide, False 9, etc to help differentiate them.

Summary

Personally I think this year's Career Mode offering is perhaps another one or two headline grabbing features away from being truly AAA. That's not to diminish the impact of the new features I've discussed, but had they been backed up by just a few more stellar inclusions like revamped press conferences, the ability to move/upgrade stadiums, or increased transfer depth (buy-out clauses, etc) then it could have been a year to really remember.

 

But from our FIFA 16 Career Mode Community Wish List we drew up together some months ago, EA have knocked items 1) Training 2) Pre-season and 3) Licensing out of the park, with the Bundesliga now sporting its own broadcast pack to rival last year's Premier League deal. So looking at Career Mode through that lens, EA have hit our top three and improved many other areas on our wish list too like 6) Scouting. Perhaps not in full, but it's quite clear that they've really listened to community feedback and that's not something to be down-played.

 

Last year (through no fault of their own) the Career Mode team ended up working on a lot of shared tech, like the new Team Management system, and much of the updated presentation and audio systems which we all simply take for granted. But because that was all shared with the rest of FIFA, it felt like Career Mode didn't receive any exclusive development aside from tweaks. Even though the new Team Management system was perhaps one of the most important changes to FIFA in the last 10 years - that negative perception still lingered.

 

Now though, it seems the team are back to developing features exclusively for the core Career Mode platform with Pre-season Tournaments and Player Training really strong additions to the existing formula. All things considered I think this year’s Career Mode is something we can all be really positive about and it’s great to know that anything we as a community do suggest from now onwards, will be taken in to serious consideration by the team.

 

It seems that after a turbulent 12 months, Career Mode is back on track.

 

We also grabbed an exclusive interview with Lead Career Mode Producer Santiago Jarmillio where we go even deeper on the new changes to this years mode, and how the team have tackled last year's frustrations. Make sure you check that out.

[Baddar]

Career Mode sounds good, particularly player training. Could be handy for the youth players. FUT Draft sounds shit though. So, just because we come up against duplicate players at times in UT, apparently coming up against one of 5 (a significantly higher chance of playing against a duplicate) is more fun? Nah.

[Gazz]

We're al getting ripped off these days then, aren't we? I mean, we actually are. 50 quid is seemingly the going rate on the new consoles these days. I'm buying a PS4 soon and I think the only game I'll even have for the first few months is FIFA.

Are we though? How many hours of entertainment do you get from a game like FIFA in comparison to buying a 2 hour long movie on DVD/Blu-Ray or a hour long album on CD that you might watch/listen to 3 or 4 times at most?

[Dan]

Career Mode sounds good, particularly player training. Could be handy for the youth players. FUT Draft sounds shit though. So, just because we come up against duplicate players at times in UT, apparently coming up against one of 5 (a significantly higher chance of playing against a duplicate) is more fun? Nah.

The 5 are random each time though, everyone doesn't pick from the same 5 players each time. I think it sounds good!

[Baddar]

Well, that's better. Still can't see me touching that mode.

[DavidMarrio]

But more importantly...what about pro clubs?!! 

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

I like the sound of it. Want to know more about the reward system though.