EA Sports brought a surprise to E3 2016, even though they weren't on the showfloor, and didn't introduce a new game. Instead, they introduced a brand new full story mode for FIFA '17, with "The Journey." FIFA 17 Trailer Showcases New Story Mode. A trailer for this year's FIFA 17 has been released by EA. The trailer showcases what looks like a new story mode, which follows character Alex Hunter as he makes his way into the English Premier League. You can check it out for yourself in the embed above.
The FIFA 17 trailer revolves around Hunter's rise to playing for Manchester United. Some of the cutscenes show Hunter meeting managers, looking at expensive living spaces, and standing in the locker room before a game. FIFA 17 will follow the story of a character named Alex Hunter as he makes his way up the English Premier League. Last year's outing fell to the lower end of the recent spate of releases, and a large part of that was down to Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series – which released one of the finest football games ever. PES 2016 exposed Fifa 16, highlighting its faults.
Where FIFA 17 felt free and precise, playing FIFA 17 felt like a battle against both your in-game opponents and the game itself. For starters, the whole thing is being built upon the EA DICE developed Frostbite engine – the same framework upon which the likes of Mass Effect: Andromeda, Battlefield 1 and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are created. Moving away from an engine dedicated solely to the building of football allows for a more diverse range of visual highlights to be created, opening the door to something that looks more like the real thing.
EA has switched from the Ignite engine that was used in FIFA 14, FIFA 15, and FIFA 16. Considering how good Need for Speed and Star Wars Battlefront looked, especially on a powerful enough PC, it could spell the end of shoddy PC versions of the world's most popular football game. It remains to see if FIFA 17 loses features in the move to Frostbite, what with development cycles for the series being extremely short and time sensitive. A video purporting to show multiplayer gameplay of an early version of FIFA 17 from E3 is doing the rounds online.
Although the footage is attracting some scepticism in the YouTube comments, with some speculating it could be a heavily modified PC version of an older entry in the series, there are certain hints that this is indeed the real deal - not least of which being the Battlefield 1 banner visible in the screen's reflection. On top of that, there are a number of subtle gameplay tweaks that haven't appeared in recent FIFA games. We found FIFA 16 to be an interesting beast in our review. The core gameplay veered towards simulation with thoughtful ways that retool some of its most basic actions and your approach to a match.
