It’s been announced that the FIFA 19 VAR, or “Video Assistant Referee”, will not be available in the game this time around. The VAR is a small screen used by referees both in FIFA and in actual soccer in order for referees to see if a penalty is actually needed.
The VAR, however, is a bit of a problem in the actual game; it’s supposed to help keep the game from making bad calls, but if anything bad calls and missed penalties actually increased. The backlash against this has caused EA Sports to take the mechanic out of the upcoming game, though it might be put in other FIFA games in the future.
FIFA 18 got a large amount of criticism for various development decisions designed to make the game more challenging, ranging from better goalies to changed ball physics to a variety of other things. However, there was a significant amount of backlash over this. While we don’t know if FIFA 19 will play the same way, it still doesn’t change the fact that the FIFA 19 VAR won’t be in the game either.
Much like in regular sports, the computer has to keep up with a lot of different stuff at once to see if any sort of offense was committed during the game, and even with the VAR supposedly helping it, it still made a number of bad calls and even missed a lot of them.
EA Sports has said that if the FIFA 19 VAR becomes a part of the real-life game to the point where it would be odd to not include it, then the mechanic would likely be re-introduced later down the road. But in the meantime, players will likely have to deal with the possibility of more missed or bad calls.
FIFA 19 comes out on September 28 of this year for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC.
