Skip to main content

FIFA 15 Preview: How EA is bringing feelings to the football field

The next frontier for EA Canada’s FIFA series isn’t photorealistic grass or emergent ball physics or convincing fan riots. It’s feelings. In FIFA 15, every one of the 22 players on the pitch has an emotional state that the game tracks and tweaks in real time.

It sounds a little silly, but it makes a certain amount of sense. How many times have we seen a pro sports player — any sport will do — cry tears of joy after a nail-biting victory? React with animal rage to an unfair call? With the help of EA Sports’ Ignite engine and the power of a new generation of gaming hardware, FIFA 15 aims to capture that.

Recommended Videos

At the start of a match in this year’s release, every player on each team starts out in a neutral emotional state. We see this first hand  during a pre-E3 preview session in a series of screenshots snapped in-game, with a debug mode turned on to demonstrate how emotional links play out behind the scenes.

Colored dots over players’ heads give a general sense of how they’re feeling and lines connecting them demonstrate the focus of those feelings. In our video example, the game opens with the ball immediately sent downfield to one of the keepers, who proceeds to fumble the block and help the ball into his own team’s net.

Immediately, a series of red lines snake out to the keeper from all of his teammates, still in mid-field. They’re furious. It’s barely seconds into the game, and their own keeper’s lousy hands resulted in an own goal. It’s an extreme example, but it demonstrates a point.

In another example, one player shares words of encouragement with a teammate who misses an easy shot early on in the game. The same miss in the closing minutes of a losing game would bring a different, more negative reaction. These interactions cross between teams as well, with rival players locking eyes as they pass one another on the pitch.

All of this translates to gameplay. Angry players are less cautious, more reckless. High-spirited players, more in the zone. That’s the pitch, anyway. The promise of new hardware and a game engine designed to utilize the more capable processors. Our brief hands-on time isn’t enough to highlight how more emotional players foster something closer to a real-life experience, but it’s something to watch for later this year.

Our play time was good for highlighting the amped up presentation in FIFA 15. There’s just more of everything. More realistic light and shadow effects. A livelier crowd, with animations and routines specific to the team they’re cheering for. Celebratory 10-player pile-ons.

The added realism extends to the moment-to-moment action on the pitch as well. The ball is now a fully realized object in the 3D space. In previous years, a collision with some obstacle, such as a player, rendered the ball dead on contact. In FIFA 15, momentum is maintained. If a shot ball grazes the backside of another player, its course is adjusted as it continues to sail onward.

Players also just handle more like human beings. The real-life dominant foot (left/right) of an individual matters when it comes to dribbling the ball. They’ll stutter their steps to prepare for an incoming pass, then position themselves to protect it from the opposing team. The play is pure FIFA, same as it ever was, but even after just a few minutes of playing, it’s evident how much smoother everything is.

As with any sports sim, the key changes this year are minor, iterative enhancements, the sort that only invested fans really pick up on. That said, FIFA 15 feels as polished and accessible as it ever has thanks to another year of work on Ignite. Look for it this fall when it comes to PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as — for the first time — PC.

Topics
Adam Rosenberg
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…
NYT Crossword: answers for Friday, November 8
New York Times Crossword logo.

The New York Times has plenty of word games on its roster today — with Wordle, Connections, Strands, and the Mini Crossword, there's something for everyone — but the newspaper's standard crossword puzzle still reigns supreme. The daily crossword is full of interesting trivia, helps improve mental flexibility and, of course, gives you some bragging rights if you manage to finish it every day.

While the NYT puzzle might feel like an impossible task some days, solving a crossword is a skill and it takes practice — don't get discouraged if you can't get every single word in a puzzle.

Read more
The PS5 Pro holds the key to the PS6’s success
The hero of Shadow of the Colossus stands in a temple.

When the PlayStation 5 Pro was revealed, the big buzzword to come out of the presentation was PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). This was PlayStation's "secret sauce" intended to sell the $700 upgrade to new customers and existing PS5 owners alike. Similar to AI upscaling seen in technology like DLSS, PSSR allows games rendered at a lower resolution to be upscaled using AI to appear more detailed. For the PS5 Pro, this means removing the need to choose between a performance mode that prioritizes frame rate and a resolution mode that sacrifices frame rate for a clearer picture.

PSSR is the first time any kind of AI upscaling has been used on consoles ... and will be key in PlayStation's success for its true next-generation console.
Sidestepping the graphical arms race
With rare exceptions, new game consoles have mainly sold themselves based on providing a graphical leap above its predecessor. This was clear as day going from 8- to 16-bit systems, and perhaps at its peak going from 16-bit to 3D, but has since hit a level of diminishing returns. PS5 games are undeniably better looking than PS4 games of the same scale, but the differences are in the margins.

Read more
3 new Xbox Game Pass games to play this weekend (November 8-10)
An alien in armor with a light sword standing in front of a space ship window with a planet in the background.

This is a good week for strategy game fans subscribed to Xbox Game Pass because November's first new additions to the service all fall within that genre. Two of them are real-time strategy game classics from Blizzard Entertainment, and the other is a strategic take on an arcade classic. If you're playing on a console, these additions may not mean as much to you, but for Game Pass subscribers with access to a PC, these recently added strategy game games are well worth your time.
StarCraft: Remastered

The original StarCraft is a monumental release for Blizzard Entertainment. It gave the studio a third pillar franchise alongside Warcraft and Diablo, was one of the first major esports games, and set a standard that most RTS games after it have tried to follow. In 2017, Blizzard released StarCraft: Remastered, updating the classics' visuals, audio, and online features; that's the version of StarCraft that has come to Xbox Game Pass. While there are more approachable RTS games nowadays, PC gamers should check out the original StarCraft if they've never played it before to better understand the foundational building blocks of the RTS genre.

Read more