For fans of the English Premier League, it's been a rather topsy-turvy time with Leicester City winning the English Premier League in what can only be described as a fairytale season. While no-one could have predicted Leicester's victory, the one football-related thing we can all predict is another FIFA football title from Electronic Arts. During Electronic Arts' earnings call recently, CEO Andrew Wilson made reference to the ever-popular football title, stating that FIFA 17 will bring with it a "major leap forward in personalisation, immersion and competition".
Now, many have taken this as a potential sign confirming the rumours that the FIFA franchise is moving to Electronic Arts' newest game engine, known as "Frostbite". Frostbite is the engine that is powering some of the developer's big-hitter titles, such as Battlefield 1 and Mirror's Edge. It makes sense for the company to use this engine, as EA has poured a lot of money into developing it and has stated it wants as many of its games to take advantage of the technology. What is unknown, however, is how well the engine will apply itself to a sports game like football.
Fortunately, we now have confirmation that Frostbite will be the engine used. Thanks to the Reveal trailer (published today), we can clearly see that Frostpite is up-front and centre, with EA already promoting its new engine. As you can see from the video below, the trailer also reveals a little bit of the game, although most of the footage is behind-the-scenes, showing how motion capture was used. You'll have to wait until June 12th at E3 to see the game for real, with the full reveal due then.
Release date
Thanks to the reveal trailer we also know when the game will be available: September 29th 2016. That's a little later than we originally expected, with the initial launch expected to be a week or so earlier. Still, that's only a month after the start of the Premier League, so you'll be able to pick the game up and play through your team's season in almost real time.
Cover star
Current FIFA Ballon d'Or winner, Lionel Messi, was last year's cover star alongside a player representative of the domestic league for the country of release. In the case of the UK, this was Liverpool's Jordan Henderson. Messi's contract with EA is set to expire and he's supposedly yet to sign on again, so EA may well need to find a new star to grace its box art.
Unfortunately, both Ronaldo and Neymar are contracted to FIFA's bitter rival, Pro Evolution Soccer, ruling out two of the most logical big-name replacements. Gareth Bale, too, is fronting the UEFA Euro 2016 official title from Konami (developer of Pro Evolution Soccer), so that likely rules him out too.
While probably not the lead footballer on the cover, but a player like Jamie Vardy could well represent the English Premier League as the local star. Having a Leicester City FC footballer on the cover would be a nice commemoration of their fairytale season but it could be scuppered if Vardy does indeed make a rumoured move to Arsenal.
What's new
Aside from the obvious team updates, what can we expect from this year's FIFA 17 release? Early signs are pointing that there might be more teams being introduced through the addition of more leagues. A dark horse could be the Chinese Super League being included due to all of the high-profile players being lured to the far east thanks to massive contracts. Last year's FIFA 16 also introduced women's national teams for the first time and we would bet that more national teams are added as the selection was rather limited.
Not a lot else is known as to what features or balancing will be conducted for FIFA 17. EA's title has had somewhat of a 'tick-tock' approach to how it handles and nullifies the influence of pace each year, with some years faster players providing a distinct advantage to other years when their influence is intentionally reduced. We can at least expect some new animations and skills being introduced as we have seen in every release previously. Hopefully, we see some improvements to player AI, as well.
EA will host its EA Play event close to E3 where everyone is expecting to see FIFA 17 in action for the first time so we'll be sure to update with more details.
