My 250 game FIFA 16 impression

So, I'm out of town this weekend. Off to a new city for a job interview. Related, as a grad student living his last semester in a town of 7,000 people. I've had some time to play FIFA.

I was going to do another FIFA guide, but honestly I can't at the moment. While enjoying a record nearing 4x as many wins as losses and I'm still figuring out some things about the game. But I would like to share my thoughts on what I feel EA got right, and what I feel could be improved on.

More Potential than FIFA 14 Anthony Martial: I play a bit of career mode, as Ultimate Team doesn't always satisfy my love for the real game. If you remember FIFA 14 Anthony Martial you could develop him into a 99 Pace, 99 Agility, 99 Stength monster. And all-in-all I love this game and what it could be. Huge blips in terms of glitches/bugs/game abuses hold it back, but I mention it in a few threads that this is the classic transitional game year. Some new mechanics are ushered in and there's a lot of rough spots to smooth over. Doesn't make it a bad game. Again I love it.

Dribbing and passing skill curves are perfect: When I'm on my game, get out of my way. Constant 88%+ passing (risky through balls occasionally get in my way), 65% possession, over 10 shots on target (fut16coin takes the Pep Barca approach of don't shoot unless your sure you can score so it's a ton). I can play some absolute beautiful football. My opponents can't. That's not to say they find ways around it, it's just you can only really dominate a game in a real world sense by knowing really what you're doing. And I think it's awesome.

No-touch dribbling, adjusted sprint, ball pushes: A lot of "well Terry is faster than Ronaldo" around these parts, and I just 100% disagree. Similarly some complain about "zig-zag" abuse. Here's a small fact, zig-zag abuse this year needs a lot of skill to pull off. You need to learn to alternate between LB (no-touch) and RT AND you need to touch the ball the right way every time. Pushing it just behind your opponent. It's hard. However I feel sprinting is quite realistic. You can't just have the ball 3 inches from your feet and run, but if you can utilize space you can succeed at playing with pace. My only real major issue is sometimes when a player grabs hold of you on a ball push, it's over. No more running, but I like the feel of pace in this game majorly.

Manilpulating space is the key to success: they joke in Germany sometimes that Thomas Muller is an aerospace engineer because he can manipulate space on a pitch. And I love how this year's FIFA is all about manipulating space. Finding spaces of grass to push the ball into, putting the right weight on the ball for pass. It's great.

CONS.

It's said all the time, but refs: I'm not going to beat a dead horse, but the refs suck. And I'm going to throw a new wrinkle on the conversation. Obviously bad slide tackles that make no contact due to player jumping need to be fouls. Bar none. Intent needs to be brought in on those because for as long as it isn't, people are going to try to abuse the jumping offensive player's poor touch.

Going on defensive/ultra defensive/park the bus is too strong: I've gone on defensive exactly one time when I was up late to prove a point to a dick, but that's it. 95% of my opponents... Play on defensive for 90 minutes. Why? It's strong. I actually don't think the defensive AI is too strong. Quite the opposite. 1-on-1 tackling is hard, and often times on really shoddy through balls of 40 yards they don't pick up either the pass or the attacker (seriously, I've seen really bad AI moments here). However there's a way around it, and furthermore that way around it makes the AI look really, stupidly good. 

Defensive, ultra defensive, whatever. My average opponents attack will look like 1 or 2 of his guys in the box to 2-to-3 of mine. My average attack looks like 5 of my guys to 6+ of his. There's defensive strength in numbers in this year and its god awful to play against.

Offensive AI is so badly outdated: this is coupled with this problem. PES has a far superior offensive AI it's not even funny. It's the one calling card for that series however with some other issues. This offensive AI feels a lot like the same offensive AI I played on FIFA 11. Except new coding folds such as the "have to pass it to the offside player" glitch and the "your player doesn't care about getting out of the way of your shot for 20 yards of running" mechanic. EA has given us an amazing amount of tools to play beautiful on the ball, I hope eventually they give us the tools to play beautiful with teammates. A driven pass isn't the only thing I want in the way of getting my teammates the ball.

The minor defensive AI bugs: Poor marking on some crosses, poor job picking up the middle (THE MIDDLE) man a three man counter attack, inability to turn around on long aerial through balls. The defensive AI is tuned decently well, but while there's ways to abuse it on the strong side, you can pick up on and exploit the weaknesses.

And there we go, I feel like inevitably I influenced someone to try these game abuses on their own and I'm sorry for whoever they play, but that's my impression.

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