Changes On The Switch In FIFA 18
Local Seasons
As the Switch allows you to play games on the go, a more expansive version of local multiplayer seems obvious. EA took that idea and added a feature known as Local Seasons, which allows you to play a five-match season wherever you are, with whoever you want, even without Wi-FI.
EA Bucharest Developer Andrei Lazaresco describes it best- “If you have a console and I have a console, even without an Internet connection we can play with each other. We call it Local Seasons. It’s basically a five-match season that we together can play even without an internet connection. It’s sort of local Wi-fi.”
While it’s good to have a unique feature, whether it makes up for the lack of features remains to be seen.
1080p/60FPS
There are of course many similarities between the Switch’s version of FIFA 18 and the ‘real’ version of FIFA 18, such as Career Mode, Ultimate Team, tournaments, and seasons, but the main similarity, or at least the feature many fans have been hoping for, is the fact that FIFA 18 on the switch will run at 1080p in docked mode, and 720p undocked. The truly amazing thing, though, is the fact that game will run 60fps consistently, either docked or undocked.
Although this is a feature that seems to have minimal or no effect on gameplay, at least to people who have never played FIFA before, but, as any seasoned gamer will tell you, a few seconds of lag is often the difference between a win, a loss and a draw.
FIFA 18 releases on Friday, September 29th, 2017, on Xbox One/PS4/PC/Nintendo Switch and legacy versions on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
No Journey On The Switch
Story mode ‘The Journey’ was an excellent feature in FIFA 17, following Alex Hunter’s rise to stardom. And while fans will be happy to hear that the continuation of this story is in the Xbox/PS4/PC version of FIFA 18, it’s not on the Switch. That comes back to the Frostbite Engine not being used again.
There’s also a suggestion that the lack of ‘The Journey’ on the Switch comes down to EA trying to see if porting a fully-fledged port of FIFA will be profitable before adding all features. If sales do well for FIFA 18, there is a high chance that FIFA 19 will too, and will therefore be worth investing more time and resources into.
This makes sense, as when the Wii U port of FIFA of FIFA 13 and the later Wii port of FIFA 15 came out, they did not do very well (thus may be partially be EA’s fault, as they only updated the visuals and player details for FIFA 15, instead of creating a new game).
People have their fingers cross around the world for The Journey to make an appearance in FIFA 19 for the Switch, and if sales do well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t.