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Recently I got a chance to try out FIFA 16 before it was released. While I only got to try it for a couple of hours, it was clear that scouting has changed a lot and there have been plenty of changes to career mode in general as well. I’ll be releasing a full FIFA 16 scouting guide in the coming days and weeks, but read on for five things I’ve learned from my hands-on look at FIFA 16 career mode.
1. There is no May update
There is no longer a May update in FIFA 16
Yep, you read that correctly. For the past few years, the May update has been a major part of scouting in FIFA games. Unlike promoted players, youth players in your academy would only grow once a year – on 1st May. This meant that if a youth player quit the academy before 1st May, you’d lose an entire year’s worth of growth. Not ideal.
Luckily, that’s now changed and youth players grow month-to-month just like outfield players. That’s got a few positive implications. Firstly, you no longer need to worry about holding on to youth players until 1st May or risk losing all their growth. That alone makes it a great change.
But there’s another benefit too, in that you can now promote your youth players whenever you feel they are ready. You don’t need to decide whether you should promote them in, say, June or wait another whole year (to guarantee that May growth). Instead, you can now promote them in April if you feel they’re ready, something that we would avoid like the plague before FIFA 16.
2. Send your scouts out instantly
In FIFA 16 you can send out scouts instantly
Next up is a small but important change: you can now send out your scouts as soon as you hire them in FIFA 16. In FIFA 15 and earlier, you had to wait two days after hiring a scout before you could actually use them; you were told they were ‘in transit’, which gave the impressions they’d been loaded into a box and shipped by FedEx.
That delay has now been removed in FIFA 16, so you can get scouting as soon as the scout joins your staff (can’t find a good scout? Wait until the next Thursday and the list refreshes with new scouts). It sounds like a minor change but it is certainly a welcome one, and means you can simply get on with scouting as soon as you like, rather than having to hang around waiting for the scout to arrive.
3. Youth player stats are revealed
FIFA 16 lets you see your youth players’ stats as soon as they’re in the academy
In the past, you wouldn’t be able to know your youth academy players’ OVRs until they were promoted. That made it difficult to know whether they were truly ready for the first team (made even more complicated by the aforementioned fretting over the May update). Even if you had a player in the academy for two seasons or more, you still would never know their final OVR until you promoted them.
In FIFA 16, however, you will find out your youth players’ stats and OVRs as soon as you sign them to the academy. This is a fantastic change and makes it much, much simpler to keep track of your youth players’ progress and development. You can now tell at a glance how fast a winger is or how strong a centre back is – and if they’re no good, you can drop them to make room for new players. It’s a much more straightforward way to manage the youth academy.
This also has benefits for player training, which brings me to…
4. Player training works for academy players too
Player training will help your youth players grow in FIFA 16
There was a lot of excitement when EA announced that you would be able to select specific training drills for your players, leading to stat improvements over time. It’s a feature that has been requested for a long time and it sounded like EA really did listen to the community.
While EA’s demonstrations showed training being used on first team players, you can actually also train your youth players while they are still in the academy. This is a great step because it means you can make sure they are even more ready for the first team. Drills range from easy to hard, with players more likely to pass easy ones but getting more stats boosted if they pass harder ones.
However, it should be noted that the number of physical attributes that can be improved is limited. You’re not going to be able to turn a 60 acceleration winger into a 90 acceleration lightning bolt. In fact, it seemed to me in my limited time with the game that you can only really boost stamina and agility. This is useful (although many players will regret that you can’t speed your players up this way), but most of the training drills focus on technical stats – which makes sense, I suppose. However, that’s not necessarily a problem because…
5. You can scout fast youth players
You can finally scout fast players in FIFA 16
It’s been a problem year after year in FIFA games – you scout an absolute gem of a player, then promote him and find out he has 50 sprint speed. Bummer.
Well, no longer. EA have really addressed this and you can now find fast players. In fact, you can even get players with very good pace even when their technical stats are next to useless – in previous games, poor technical stats all but guaranteed poor physical stats.
And as a bonus, it now looks like youth players’ physical stats can grow! This was a major problem in the past, and if you promoted a player after the May update then their physical stats often (but not always) became ‘locked’ and failed to grow, leading to a horrible dilemma: do you promote a player with good physical stats but terrible technical stats, or vice versa? Well, that’s no longer an issue – physical stats will now grow on your youth players, and because there’s no May update, they won’t get locked.
There are a few minor oddities with this – I found a player with 80 acceleration but 68 sprint speed, for example – but the new system in FIFA 16 seems to be a lot better than in previous games, and it’s something we’ve all been crying out for.
Scouting first impressions
So that’s it for my first impressions of scouting in FIFA 16. Keep checking back because I’ll be uploading the first part of my FIFA 16 scouting guide soon, followed by more parts as I delve deeper into the scouting system.
Have you tried FIFA 16’s scouting system? What do you think of the changes? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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