EA is trying to make FIFA 19 less confusing

EA's on a drive to demystify FIFA, which is a long time coming.

The publisher has published the second post in its new "Pitch Notes" (nice pun, EA) series, which is designed to take the confusion out of FIFA.

The subject of this second pitch notes post is FIFA Ultimate Team chemistry. Anyone's who's fussed with FUT will know how important chemistry is to the performance of your players, but most people don't understand how it impacts players - because EA hadn't put the information in the game.

As previously leaked, in FIFA 19 changes in individual player chemistry can now be viewed in the attributes section of a player's bio when he's in a squad. You can see the exact changes that will be applied in game for a player based on the current team and individual player chemistry ratings for the style you have applied.

In FIFA 19, you can also see the base player attributes unmodified, and beside the unmodified attribute a + or - to the attribute is displayed, which shows how chemistry will change the player's attributes.

This information has never been in FIFA before. Prior to FIFA 19, the game did not show the player exactly how chemistry boosted player stats. All you could see were boosts to bundled stats such as "shooting", not boosts to actual attributes within the bundled stat. So, you'd know your player had a boost to shooting, but you wouldn't know which exact attribute, such as Finishing or Long Shots, were boosted. That meant it wasn't clear, for example, whether you'd want the Sniper or Finisher chemistry style applied to your striker.

Here's the level of information you can see on a FUT 19 player (Juventus forward Paulo Dybala has an 84 finishing base rating, but it improves to a 94 rating because of individual chemistry and the Marksman chemistry style):

There are new icons for chemistry styles, too, which will make it easier to see which one has been applied to a player at a glance. Here's how it looks:

In the blog post, EA revealed exactly how to calculate chemistry for FIFA 19 (warning, there's maths involved).

It also confirmed that once a FUT match has started, team management has no effect on chemistry, So, if you change formation, for example, chemistry will not be affected.

Once again, physical attributes are affected by a player's stamina during a match in FUT. EA revealed the attributes affected by this, as it has done before, but it failed to reveal exactly how they're affected. So, while EA is on a demystification drive, it's still keeping some cards close to its chest.