After the continental anti-climax that was Euro 2016, for everyone except the Portuguese and keen lepidopterists anyway, it hasn’t taken long for the forlorn football fan’s attention to turn to the club season. England fans, particularly, were most likely to be scouring transfer stories of questionable veracity weeks ago or, in my case, following Watford’s first pre-season game at Woking on a live blog. A 1-1 draw, if you’re interested… hey, it’s better than reliving the ignominy of that Iceland match, right?

And with a new football season comes new football video games. A chance to play out a digital fantasy that your team is a bit better than they are and that, just maybe, you are the front-runner for the England job rather than Sam Allardyce. A pleasant fiction I imagine plenty of us can get behind.

FIFA 17 is the first FIFA game to use EA's Frostbite engine, leading to improved lighting and texture.
The annual sports game is a tricky business. The tweaks and improvements are a labour of love for developers; essential, but often hard to see and even harder to communicate beyond “it’s your favourite [insert sport type here] game but improved, honest.” Which is why we get often blaring bullet-point slogans like PURE SHOT and PRECISION MOVEMENT to describe functional upgrades like 'better kicking'.

But EA Sports has some tangible things to shout about this year for FIFA 17: a new game engine and a headlining story mode. “It’s a big year for us,” Creative Director Matt Prior tells me. And you get the feeling this isn’t just a spiel.

Changing a game engine is no small task and for two years EA Canada has had its ‘brightest guys’ working on transferring FIFA from the incumbent Ignite engine to the more advanced Frostbite. Where Ignite was a bespoke sports engine, Frostbite is the technology that underpins many of EA’s current and upcoming games including Star Wars Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge and Need for Speed. Originally designed by Battlefield developer DICE for first-person-shooters, Frostbite has become a more multi-purpose engine. “We’ve had to make it work with our systems,” says Prior. “But fundamentally it works with any kind of game. With the caveat that we have to bring our own stuff in. The core of the gameplay has been brought over from Ignite, it’s not as if we’ve scrapped all that and rewrote it from the ground up, and then we can build on that with the new feature-set.”

The result from an initial hands-on was a game that was identifiably FIFA (so won’t alienate long-term fans) but with some key changes. It looks better for a start, with fancier lighting and a greater level of detail on the pitch. But more pressingly, there was a significant shift in physics that makes the game feel more natural when players come together. The canned animations that have always made FIFA look great but wrest away control have been reined in. Now physical interaction between players is apparently done in real-time, leading to more varied and realistic skirmishes where players jostle for position and balance.

Such is the enhancement of physical play, EA has made it a core part of the control system, with a squeeze of the left trigger allowing players to shield the ball while dribbling among a host of other physical tricks. You can now nudge into a shoulder-to-shoulder tackles and, this is a big one, choose to stay grounded for high-ball contests. In previous games, you nearly always had to contest high-balls with a header but now you can try and outmuscle your opponent and bring the ball down to feet. Ideal for strong strikers like Romelu Lukaku or Troy Deeney. Goalkeepers also no longer have an invisible forcefield around them when they come to claim crosses.

Much of the on-pitch work has gone into giving the game a more physical feel, including your interactions with the ball. You can now thump shots low and hard, by holding the shoot button and then tapping a second time, rather than letting the power dictate the elevation like in previous games. This new zippy ground play –tentatively introduced into passing last year- extends to through balls now too, with you able to thread a fast ball through the defence with the outside of the boot.

Generally it feels like 17 is looking to give you more options to mix up your play, an idea that extends to the ‘set-piece rewrites’, which gives you a higher level of control over free-kicks and corners. Now you can aim your set-piece, lock-in the kick, but then switch to receiving players to move them into position.

There’s some considerable nipping and tucking going on here then, but Prior says that FIFA 17’s “biggest game-changer” is the improvements in AI. “It’s complicated but in a nutshell: the intelligence of your players is much greater,” says Prior. “They’ll think further in the future. They’ll look for space very differently. They’ll drag players away and move towards you to create space in behind. Some of the feedback we got on FIFA 16 is the changes we made to the defence overpowered them a bit. So there were a lot of 1-0s and 1-1s and it perhaps didn’t have that fun factor that people were after. So that was in direct response to consumer feedback. A lot of more space opens up and there are a lot more opportunities.”

It is interesting to hear a developer talk openly about the previous game’s shortcomings. FIFA 16 wasn’t entirely heralded when it first arrived, particularly in the light of staunch competition from Pro Evolution Soccer. But following a hefty amount of updating is now a highly accomplished game of football. “We did one of the biggest gameplay patches in FIFA history on 16 because of feedback,” says Prior. “A lot of people had issues with the passing. We’re continuously updating the game and refining and tuning the game. Thousands and thousands of QA hours go into testing, but literally one minute after launch there’s been more playing of the game than there has been during development because there are so many people; all with very different playing styles. It’s practically impossible to cover every eventuality in gameplay so that’s why we occasionally do post-launch patches.”

No doubt the promised gameplay changes will be under the same scrutiny on launch day and, as ever, it won’t be until FIFA 17 is in the hands of millions of players that the success of the switch to Frostbite will be apparent.

FIFA 17 The Journey. The Journey's star Alex Hunter will appear alongside the game's best players.
One area of the game that Prior insists could only have been done in the new engine is The Journey, a fully-scripted story mode that follows the career of young Premier League starlet Alex Hunter who finds himself thrust into the first team. You play as Hunter as he embarks on his prodigious career alongside life-long friend Gareth Walker. You get to control Hunter in matches, complete with objectives to fulfil (score a goal, win the match) and also off-the-pitch, making dialogue choices in lavish cutscenes (locker room chats, post-match interviews) that define his character and could affect your place in the team or even the club.

“There’s a core narrative that everyone will see certain elements of,” says Prior. “But outside of that there is a lot of unique choice. Choice of conversation drives personality, so you can be a fiery Luis Suarez or Mario Balotelli kind of guy and that manifests itself on the pitch. Or you can be a calm, Gareth Barry kind of guy.”

FIFA 17 The Journey. You will be able to decide on Hunter's character through dialogue choice in lavish cutscenes, be it the bootroom or the boardroom. These choices will apparently affect the relationship between managers, team-mates and supporters. If you are a fiery type, the fans might warm to you more than if you were a monochrome bore, but the manager might be more wary of picking someone who shoots their mouth off. If you are playing a blinder in every match, that will keep you in the team, but if a player on the cusp disses the manager they could find themselves dropped to the reserves and having to fight their way back into contention through training. Some players might have the option of signing for Chelsea, while others might be shipped out on loan to the Championship and find themselves replaced by Harry Kane (this can actually happen, Kane has done motion-capture for The Journey). And by the way, while the pre-release shots feature Hunter at Manchester United, you can choose any Premier League team to start your career. Especially if you can’t abide the break in realism of Jose Mourinho selecting two home-grown youngsters for the first-team.

It’s a fascinating diversion for FIFA, adding another option to its already bulging selection of modes. EA aren’t discussing the ubiquitous career mode or ludicrously successful Ultimate Team, but say you can expect further upgrades to both. But as ever, the real progress should be measured on the pitch and with EA putting it all on a revamped engine, there is more on the line than usual. A big year for FIFA indeed.