EA Sports is mixing up their bag of tricks for this year’s outing of FIFA. Last year they may have been heavily pushing for playable females in the game, but this year they’re focusing on a story mode following some young kid named Alex Hunter, as well as all new gameplay mechanics and physics running on the Frostbite 3 game engine.

The Frostbite came back into the scene looking like a beastly piece of badaassery with Battlefield 3, and since then EA has been slowly integrating it (and reintegrating it) into their properties. Previously the company relied mostly on third-party engines, especially the Unreal Engine 3.

But after the engineering wizards at DICE managed to turn the Frostbite 3 into what could arguably be the best game engine on the market for rendering near real-to-life scenarios (alongside the Fox Engine), EA wizened up and decided to start making better use of it in more than just Battlefield games. The Frostbite is now an internal proprietary tool used site wide across all of EA’s first and second party studios. This now includes the FIFA franchise.

During the EA Play press conference, it was revealed that FIFA 17 would be exercising its graphical and storytelling muscles when it releases this September for home consoles. They released a new in-engine trailer to give gamers an idea of what they can expect from the graphical prowerhouse that is the Frostbite 3. Check it out below.

They’ve introduced new physical play mechanics and intelligence reaction systems so that players will have to think about how they play and how they react to plays. This also gives more importance to roles like playing defense and actively defending the pitch leading up to the goal post.

The idea that is that there are more ways to attack the ball, defend the ball and interact with the more small but pivotal moments that occur between players that oftentimes doesn’t make it into soccer games. How well this will be implemented and how well this will actually work are two completely different topics of discussion, but at least they’re trying to switch things up. It’s going to be a real battle this year between PES 2017 and FIFA 2017 with the Fox Engine and the Frostbite 3 going head-to-head.

Additionally, they unveiled the new story mode for FIFA 17 called The Journey. It features an up-and-coming soccer star named Alex Hunter who wants to get his big break into soccer (football for the rest of the world) and will face off against the challenges of dealing with fame, the cultural differences, social differences and class differences. There’s also the struggles Hunter will face having to integrate into a team where not every player will want him there. You can check out the trailer below.

I gave up on the FIFA series a long time ago, but I at least have to admit that the graphics and the physics in this latest iteration at least look really good. How well the game actually plays, whether or not it will be a glitchy mess or how balanced the multiplayer is, are all things that will likely need to be addressed leading up to release.

For now, EA Sports is simply promising that they’ve heard some feedback and are attempting to try something new with FIFA 17.

Now if they really wanted to try something new they would have implemented a FIFA bribery mode, where you could bribe the commissioners, coaching staff and organizers in order to get your team ahead. That would have been progressive… but I guess it also would have been a little too realistic for EA’s tastes.

You can learn more about the game and its features by heading on over to the official FIFA 17 website.