EA Sports’ annual FIFA series is great and all – after all, it continues to do well critically and commercially every year – but it is growing a bit long in the tooth. The last major overhaul for the games came back when Ultimate Team was first introduced, and that was years ago. Since then, all we’ve had have been minor iterations on and refinements of the same formula and structure.
However, that may change with this year’s entry. According to a job listing by EA, FIFA 17 may have one of the biggest additions to the series yet in the form of some kind of a story mode. According to the job listing, EA want someone who can frame just the right kind of in game cinematics:
“The Cinematic Designer has a background in film and animation and has an eye for quality storytelling. They know how to make a scene feel tense, triumphant, harrowing, etc, just by selecting the right angle and lens. They can recognize the subtle movements that make a character look realistic and believable and strive to capture that in the animation,” the listing reads.
Of course, this can just as well be referring to replays, cutaways, and player victory animations, and nothing in the listing suggests that the cinematics are story related, of course. Still, it is interesting that EA are going out of their way to court a Cinematic Designer for FIFA 17. It’s not an unprecedented concept, either- 2K Sports tried to do something similar last year with NBA 2K16, albeit with generally mixed results. Hopefully EA can do a better job of it.