The life of a football manager is as varied as it is cut-throat. With the opportunity to start a job from scratch with clean expectation slate, a real rarity in the modern game. Just this season Big Sam has picked up a hapless Sunderland side on the brink, as has Remi Garde at Aston Villa. There’s some considerable nipping and tucking going on here then, but Prior says that FIFA 17’s “biggest game-changer” is the improvements in AI. “It’s complicated but in a nutshell: the intelligence of your players is much greater,” says Prior.
They’ll think further in the future. They’ll look for space very differently. They’ll drag players away and move towards you to create space in behind. Some of the feedback we got on FIFA 17 is the changes we made to the defence overpowered them a bit. So there were a lot of 1-0s and 1-1s and it perhaps didn’t have that fun factor that people were after. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone so smoothly for Lira since.
The Brazilian confirmed that the main reason for his early retirement was due to a longstanding struggle with recurrent injuries, and if he routinely attempted goals like his Puskas Award winner, we can certainly understand why his body might feel pretty battered. While most players follow their soccer careers with coaching licenses or backroom staff roles, Lira states he wants to ‘become FIFA world champion’ on the digital front – a lofty ambition for anyone, but even moreso for someone new to eSports entirely.
So that was in direct response to consumer feedback. A lot of more space opens up and there are a lot more FIFA 17 game opportunities. Offer up eternal praise to whichever god you worship, because yes, finally you can throw the ball to your own man without the AI stealing in to intercept it 80% of the time. Other set-pieces have been reworked entirely. There’s an aiming reticule for corners now, which specifies where you want to put the ball (accuracy is dependent on player attributes and your power bar timing, as ever).
While you can move freely ahead of free kicks and penalties to change the taker’s approach angle. Truthfully, however, getting to grips with the new set-pieces during my hands-on is something of a struggle – I fail to hit the target once with a free-kick throughout the day! – but the clamour for change has resulted in EA taking action, and that alone will be exciting news for many.
In a neat touch, you can also move a few yards left or right along the touchline before taking the throw, to better position the thrower or improve the angle of whatever you’re trying to do. But those scenario's are what make football management great, and it's about time Career Mode captured some of that to compliment it's very clean approach to taking the reigns at a new club.
