FIFA 18 has taken a battering the last few months.
Although it gets so much right, bizarre in-game bugs, ‘scripting’, patch issues and over-powered players are just some of a long list of a complaints the FIFA community have raised with EA.
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But for one professional FIFA gamer, there’s one issue that’s head and shoulders above the rest. Servers.
Ivan “BorasLegend” Lapanje makes a living playing EA’s beautiful game.
“Since I turned pro, I make an average of around €50,000 a year with prize money and endorsements,” Lapanje told Dream Team Gaming.
“It’s my full-time job. It is like all other professional sports.”
The 24-year-old holds a Guinness Gaming World Record for being the highest-earning FIFA player to date.
In 2013 alone, the Swede pocketed £114,000 – most of which came from winning the Virgin Gaming EA Sports FIFA Challenge in Las Vegas, US.
But when it comes to FIFA 18, Lapanje believes the servers ‘completely ruin’ the experience.
“In my opinion this is by far the best game when the connection is perfect,” he said.
“Unfortunately players have been suffering a lot from delay this year due to insufficient servers that completely ruin the experience.”
So, what should be the main priority for the next game? “Servers should be the main priority,” explains Lapanje.
“I would also like to see more player types being playable. Now the only things that matter is pace and physical. Player types like Tony Kroos and Andres Iniesta become useless.”
Frostbite has received mixed reviews since replacing ‘Ignite’ to become the engine of choice in the past two FIFA games on current gen.
EA’s in-house engine, developed by DICE, powers the likes of Battlefield and Need for Speed.
It’s capable of incredible detail, as well as being easily scaled up and down depending on hardware. However, its introduction has brought with it some inevitable teething issues.
Strange bugs, glitches and player behaviour crop up all too often, and while EA works hard to patch the major ones, issues still arise at an alarming frequency.
Lapanje is confident the developer was right to switch to Frostbite but believes more work is needed.
“We always had bugs in FIFA, all games have bugs, more or less, it’s inevitable,” he said.
“Frostbite is more reliable than its predecessor even though I feel it hasn’t reached it’s full potential yet.”
We can expect Frostbite to return once again this year in FIFA 19.
Although there was a noticeable step-up in visuals between FIFA 17 and last year’s game, we perhaps won’t see as big-a-leap this year, given hardware limitations.
Instead, Lapanje believes we’ll see EA focus on content and experience, or at least he hopes so.
“Constant fresh SBCs, more tournaments and more things to do for the players besides Weekend League {are just some of the things I want to see}”, he said.
“Squad battles was a nice edition but not everyone fancies playing against the computer.”
EA, we hope you’re paying attention.