FIFA 18 NEWS, RELEASE DATE, TRAILER, WISHLIST AND EVERYTHING WE KNOW
2016 was a great year for football games. We had the sublime PES 2017 delivering fast and fluid football, with goals consistently worthy of end-of-year highlight reels. At first it seemed like Konami was very well poised to dethrone the king, but EA Sports elevated its game once more and FIFA 17 provided an equally excellent representation of the beautiful game.
Offering a much more tactical affair, with patience, possession and build-up play as well as a greater emphasis on player control taking centre stage, this year finally felt like a more well-balanced affair.
However, now 2017 has rolled around, it’s time to start speculating about the year ahead, and get excited about what the next season of FIFA is going to bring.
TrustedReviews has put together a wishlist of everything we hope EA Sports brings to FIFA 18, as well as all the latest news and rumours. Be sure to bookmark this page as we’ll be updating it as more information comes through.
FIFA 18 RELEASE DATE – WHEN IS IT COMING OUT?
While EA has yet to confirm the existence of FIFA 18, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the game exists. It’s also a pretty fair guess that the game will launch in late September.
FIFA games tend to launch in the final week in September, and with EA games launching on a Thursday in the UK and Europe, that’d have FIFA 18 arriving on September 28, 2017.
FIFA 18 COVER STAR – WHO WILL IT BE?
EA Sports tends to put the decision of who will be the cover star of FIFA to the fans. After whittling the choice down to the final few, fans get to decide who will be the cover athlete.
For FIFA 17 players had to choose between Manchester United’s Anthony Martial, Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, Real Madrid’s James Rodriguez and Borussia Dortmund’s Marco Reus – the eventual winner.
The choice of athletes tends to be based on the previous season, where the best players are often selected for consideration. We’ll leave it up to you in the comments to decide who you think is worthy to grace the FIFA 18 cover.
FIFA 18 WISHLIST – WHAT WE’D LIKE TO SEE
Bring Chemistry to Career Mode
PES 2017 uses team chemistry in its Master League, making every tactical switch even more thought-provoking as bringing in that new summer signing can wreak havoc with the fluidity of your starting eleven.
The best and most popular part about FIFA is undoubtedly Ultimate Team, with the biggest factor of any team being its chemistry. Bringing this across to the Career Mode – albeit in a different form – would really add depth to the mode.
Rather than basing chemistry on nationality and club, but instead having it as something that is based on other stats like preferred formation, time with team, native language and other factors will really help create a greater connection with the team.
Rather than buying 10 players in one transfer window and throwing them all in at once, it will lead to greater fine-tuning to a starting lineup.
New preset tactics
How much longer will we need to choose between the same D-Pad tactics? It’s about time we were about to change these and even develop our own, Football Manager style. Being able to craft our own tactics to make a team press high up the pitch like it was managed by Jurgen Klopp or randomly decide to have a centre back on the left wing like Pep Guardiola said would be brilliant.
Dedicated servers, PLEASE
It’s 2017, lag should not continue to plague the most popular sports game in history. It’s about time EA dug deep and invested in some dedicated servers for FIFA 18.
No longer will we have to be sat in front of a frozen screen, wondering if that shot is about to fly in the top corner or drift hopelessly wide.
Mutual quit in Ultimate Team
If, however, lag continues to be an issue, then EA needs to give players the ability to agree that it’s too bad to play a fair game and be able to quit within the first 5-10 minutes of a match where the result is squashed and our stars don’t lose a match on their contracts or any boosters applied to their cards.
This feature would help make playing FIFA much more enjoyable, as being forced to sit through a 25 minute match which should take less than half that thanks to crippling lag just because you can’t afford to waste the contracts is painful. If both players agree to quit, then neither should be punished in any way, nor should there be any result reflected because of it.
Also, if an opponent quits a match within the first five minutes, it should not cost us a player contract for the starting 11 which it currently does. Not cool, EA, not cool.
Simplified control scheme
Another thing PES 2017 has over FIFA 17 is a simplified, contextual control system. It requires fewer button inputs to do more on the pitch. In PES 2017, if Arjen Robben is on the right wing, and wants to cross the ball low into the box behind the defenders and into the path of Lewandowski, I only have to press one button for this to happen. Robben will automatically do this with the outside of his left foot or inside of his right, depending on what’s best based on the situation.
In FIFA, I have to play finger twister to pull off similarly complex manoeuvres, meaning more time is spent thinking about the controls rather than the match itself.
Fewer skills and celebrations
The amount of skill moves and celebrations has gone overboard for the past few years in FIFA, surely that effort could be put elsewhere in the game? The hundreds of skills and ways to celebrate putting the ball in the net is obscene, and I doubt many will miss having these trimmed back.
Keep the one where the player goes limp though, of course. Oh, and the Robbie Keane special, obviously.
Let us skip all goal celebrations online
Being forced to sit through a slow-motion replay of the luckiest goal on the planet is rage-inducing. It should be possible to skip any and all replays of goals, regardless of who scored them. If anything, EA will be saving many controllers around the world from being smashed into tiny little pieces.
Another story mode
The Journey took us all by surprise in FIFA 17. A surprisingly enjoyable and engaging single player story mode that allowed us to live the life of a professional footballer, it was fun to get to run around in Alex Hunter’s boots.
However, in FIFA 18 EA should go one step further. I’d love to see The Journey end in a run in the international team. With 2018 being a World Cup year, it makes perfect sense to tie the two together and be able to represent your nation on the grandest stage of them all in the story mode.
It would also be great to have greater autonomy over your club career, perhaps being able to play in more positions, or again have team chemistry improve by socialising with your teammates off the pitch.
2K leads the way in this field with NBA 2K17, so that’d be a good example to follow.
Sourse: trustedreviews.com