Fifa 15's improvements to the atmosphere of matches and crowd development
“Feel The Game” was the message FIFA wanted to push this year and much has been made of their improvements to the atmosphere of matches and crowd development. Although it may sound quite gimmicky, the combination of your team's song echoing from the terraces once you’ve scored and improved in-game commentary, really does enhance the realism. Another creation with the authenticity in mind is the role of player’s emotional intelligence during games, with shoves of frustration and negative reactions occuring when things aren’t going so well. This is a pretty pointless mechanic at the moment and just reminds us of why we hate modern footballers, although trying to link the players emotionally to games could have some potential moving forward.
The game engine has clearly been improved this year, graphically I was very impressed. FIFA now looks like a next gen game, last year looked good on the PS4, but it did feel like a re-skinned version of what was released on the PS3. The football pitch shows gradual wear as the game goes on, make a slide tackle in the middle of the pitch and the mark left will still be there come the end of the game, added wear and tear that you would normally see when watching a game live.
The emotions are tracked for the whole match to tell a story on the pitch and bring the game even closer to real life. At the moment the emotion isn't tied to any gameplay, so don't expect to see your player sent off for elbowing a guy when the referee isn't looking. Lead producer Sebastian Enrique thinks that is for the best.
"We feel that we're not ready to create something where a situation is out of your control," he told ArabicGamers. "I can give you a lot of examples why. Imagine playing Simeone and Beckham from that 1998 World Cup. What was the situation? It was, 'This guy will get mad if I annoy him enough'. And he was annoying him, annoying him, annoying him, talking to the guy. At some point there was a bad reaction and then a red card.
I’m not sure it matters. If you could create a system that perfectly interpreted your actions at every point, it would certainly eliminate a great deal of frustration and anger from the lives of millions of FIFA players. That seems like a blanket good, until I begin to wonder if it would dull the other joys the game provides. Aside from impotent rage, there lies in those errors of interpretation moments of serendipity and grace and providence. Success is made exhilarating by the sheer unlikeliness of success, and two-dozen physics objects bounding and bouncing around a pitch can start to make goals feel like miracles.
These emotional outbursts aren’t reserved only for fans. The players themselves will react to taking a dirty tackled or scoring a goal. There was one instance where I made a not so clean attempt on Lionel Messi and our teammates had to separate us after some words were exchange after the play. Consider this icing on an already yummy soccer cake. Now while FIFA 15 manages to capture the excitement of watching a real-life football match, it does a poor job of sounding exciting at all. The commentary falls a bit on the dry side. The plays are competently called but there just isn’t much gravitas in the delivery of those lines. Despite this drawback, seeing the grass on the field getting the messed up as the game continues and seeing players tug on each others shirts all add up to really sell the immersion.
To be sure, those events do also occur outside of the World Cup, such as Bayern Munich's 90th-minute victory over Real Madrid in the semifinals of the 2011-12 UEFA Champions League. But the World Cup is a global event like no other, and accordingly, the stakes don't get any higher. "When you get to those extraordinary moments, it's hard to find anything that's been pre-recorded that can match that moment," Jaramillo explained. "So we can get 70, 80 percent there, maybe, but there's 20 percent of that emotion, of that drama, that only living it in real life — or real time, rather — can produce. "And it's really hard to get all the pieces together — how the crowd behaves, how the commentator talks — and put it all together when it's all pre-cooked. That's a big challenge."
Due to these AI changes, proceedings appear more believable, with defenders checking the runs of strikers, and wingers overlapping their opponents and bending their sprints so that they're not caught offside. Just by sitting back and watching two computer controlled teams, it's clear to see that this is the closest FIFA has got to the real world sport.
