The previous World Cup game EA made was so threadbare and mailed-in that I'm not really surprised they decided to go the free update route.

That being said, holy cow they could have totally made this a separate game but they didn't and now I'm totally buying FIFA 18.

inb4 update is free, but then they make you assemble new Ultimate Team cards JUST to participate in World Cup mode.

This seems to indicate that the Switch version has sold at least reasonably well, so hopefully that means we'll be getting FIFA 19 as well and they'll be able to address some of the shortcomings I mentioned in my review of last year's game.

Definitely an improvement considering that even as recently as the 2014 World Cup, they would release the regular FIFA game in the fall and then release a separate video game a few months later for the World Cup (for example, they released FIFA Soccer 14 in September 2013, then released 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil in April 2014)

The standalone World Cup games were more full-featured than this looks to be (the 2014 game at least featured every national team in the world instead of the 40 or so that make it into the annual release), but this is probably the better way to go.