14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts has talked about how this year's World Cup influenced the way the development team approached the development of the upcoming football video game FIFA 15.
"We picked the winner of the Brazil World Cup with our simulation. We do a simulation every year and we actually, before the tournament, picked Germany. I'm not sure too many people agreed with us. A lot of people were looking at Argentina or Brazil as the favorites," Nick Channon, senior producer on EA Sports FIFA 15, begins in his post on the PlayStation blog.
This summer's World Cup had a great impact on how the final game turned out. The main football event of the year took place in Brazil, and the final match between Argentina and Germany broke records for TV broadcasters all around the world, showing the sport's outstanding popularity.
Thus, the development team was heavily influenced by the entire event, and Channon explains which was the one area in particular that drew special attention over the course of the tournament: the goalkeepers.
"Tim Howard from the USA had the record for the most saves in a game. That was something we didn't see coming – just how the World Cup became a story of the goalkeeper. In many World Cup tournaments before, you've seen the story of a specific striker or two that are going for the golden boot. This year it felt much more like the goalkeepers were stealing the show," he points out.
Goalkeepers have been neglected for a long time in football video games, and the producer says that it won't be the case for the FIFA series, starting with this year's FIFA 15.
"We've been working on goalkeepers for two years – it's a very complex position both in the real world and in FIFA 15. We wanted to provide something that felt very different," Channon says.
The key to increasing the importance and bearing of goalkeepers is revealed to be the raw power of the next-gen systems. Channon explains how before the latest generation of consoles was out, the devs had to use more memory when they wanted to add more animations to the goalkeepers.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 opened a new window for EA Sports, allowing them to enable the goalkeepers to evaluate the situation on the playing field much more often and to react more intelligently to whatever is going on.
The processing power of the new systems allows the goalkeepers to constantly process and analyze the gameplay dynamic on the field. In the past, when the decision to catch or punch a ball was taken, the goalkeepers had to stick with it, even if after a split second the situation evolved to where punching would have been more advantageous.
"We can now branch animations at any point. Previously if the ball was heading to the top left corner of the goal, but takes a deflection along the way, the keeper would dive for the top left corner. Now you'll see the keeper try and get back the other way. These are only things that we can do with the power of the new generation of consoles," Channon concludes.
FIFA 15 is coming out on September 23 in North America and September 25 in Europe, headed for both last- and current-generation consoles and PC, with a special legacy edition also making its way to the Nintendo Wii and 3DS and to the PlayStation Vita and mobile platforms.
