EA Accused of Selling Last Year’s FIFA in This Year’s Box

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to fully review FIFA 13 this year. We didn’t get review code from the publisher and although I bought the Season Pass so I had it a week early and my preorder arrived on the day of release, I was in London that week so I couldn’t play it enough to cover the review.

I have played quite a lot since, though. It’s a great game. A solid update to the previous year’s release that makes some good moves forward with game modes and AI. At least, that’s what it’s like on the PS3 and XBox 360. I’ve heard people complain that there’s little in the Vita version of FIFA 13 to differentiate it from FIFA Football, which was a Vita launch title back in February.

Now the Wii version is receiving similar criticisms. Wired magazine’s website has posted up a story about how “uniforms and players have been updated to this year’s rosters” but in all other ways, it’s last year’s game with a new number on the box. They picked the story up from Nintendo Gamer who split a parable across three pages, bemoaning the issue.

They’ve got a point though, look at these screen comparisons:

In this shot, the top screen is from FIFA 12. You can see they’ve changed the socks and the guy on the right has another year’s creep on his receding hairline. Aside from that: nothing. Let’s look at another one:

They’ve not really bothered changing this at all. I know: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? But some new icons would have looked nice, at least.

It seems quite obvious that EA is scrimping on resources for development on platforms that aren’t likely to have strong sales – the Wii and Vita (I wonder how similar the PlayStation 2 version is to last year’s?). That is perhaps understandable as they divert budgets into projects to support the rumoured release of the next PlayStation and Xbox hardware, but that doesn’t make this any less of a poor deal for these platform owners who would expect a little more of a change in their yearly football game.