After a year just gone of little change, we entered our FIFA 16 Career Mode play test with some trepidation. But pleasingly its clear that the team are back working features solely for FIFA 16’s premier offline mode and here’s how it’s all shaping up.
Pre-season Tournaments
The first new addition to Career Mode is one we’ve championed as a site for some time – Pre-season Tournaments. Gone are the mundane series of pointless friendly games, and in their place a myriad of exciting tournaments spread across the globe. There are nine different Pre-season Tournaments in total, but you’ll be invited to choose from a selection of three at the start of each season.
Player Training
Another community most wanted feature for Career Mode has always been Player Training, which finally makes its debut in FIFA 16. It’s based around Skill Games (don’t panic, it’s going to be fine) but the whole process can be automated (told you) as well if you wish to do so.
Global Transfer Network
The Global Transfer Network, seems on the surface at least identical to FIFA 15, but under the hood there are some neat changes. As you all know, EA decided to mask the player overall rating (OVR) in many of Career Mode’s menus (which I like for the most part) but that tended to hinder rather than help you when it came to scouting players you knew little about.
Club Transfer Budgets
One of the biggest gripes with managing clubs in the lower leagues in Career Mode is that if you eventually make the Promised Land and gain promotion to the Premier League, you still only have a League One budget to work with. Due to the commercial revenue that comes with promotion these days that’s just not right, so to try and tackle that, EA have made a few changes.
Story of the Season
EA have utilised their Player Stories engine in various guises over the last few Career Mode iterations,with fairly mixed success. Some of the stories are really interesting and engaging, and others not so. But combined with the some of the new audio technology EA are stepping up their game on that front yet again with their newly dubbed – Story of the Season.
Best of the rest
As well as the headline grabbing stuff we also managed to obtain an additional list of foundational changes which EA won’t be publicising as part of their main press release. I won’t cover these in detail, but I know you’ll find them interesting all the same.
This year’s Career Mode offering is perhaps another one or two headline grabbing features away from being truly AAA. That’s not to diminish the impact of the new features I’ve discussed, but had they been backed up by just a few more stellar inclusions like revamped press conferences, the ability to move/upgrade stadiums, or increased transfer depth (buy-out clauses, etc) then it could have been a year to really remember. It seems that after a turbulent 12 months, Career Mode is back on track.