Before EA Sports[1] rolls out FIFA 19’s improved green carpet to everyone later in September, it provided a tease in the form of a demo, released Thursday on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Having spent a couple of hours with it — which is far from enough to make any conclusive judgements, mind you — we noticed the biggest changes in the FIFA 19 demo, in terms of gameplay, were how the AI’s style of play is more human-like and the introduction of a new optional shooting mechanism that has the potential to shake things up.
With the former, the AI in FIFA 19[2] demo strung together passes at a rapid rate, much faster than it does in FIFA 18[3] and much like you need to against human opponents. It marks a further shift for EA Sports towards a frenetic style of football, something its rival Pro Evolution Soccer[4] fully embraced a few years ago, though it’s bound to be disappointing for the tiki-taka lovers. Of course, it’s possible this is only true for the big teams — the demo features some of the planet’s biggest clubs such as Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain — who have the players to pull it off.
While we will have to wait for the full game to find out how the other clubs — who don’t have the liberty of players with high passing stats — play in FIFA 19, it was interesting that the AI in FIFA 19 demo still couldn’t find a way to score against us, creating only a single clear-cut chance in half a dozen matches.
That brings us to the new shooting mechanism, which is called ‘Timed Finishing’ in FIFA 19....