Yeah that does seem different, maybe they introduced a bug in 2016 that you just got used to :expressionless: If you want original 2016's functionality back, you just need to change the Select faces with setting to Whole face and then just have Face Centers turned on under the Display > Polygons menu.
In maya 2016 when selecting polygons preselection highlights works fine. But after last update it seems like there is some blind spot. How to fix that?
What are your viewport settings? OpenGL Core (compatibility mode)? Actually, VP 2.0 is very sensitive to videocard and drivers. In 2016 I had enormous amount of selection problems of such kind. Fortunately, in 2016.5 they're gone - at least in my case.