The biggest sports franchise in the world has kicked off its 12th iteration and has, refreshingly, advanced the tech to exciting new and cross-game places. Nathan Lawrence grabs a shovel and digs beneath the pitch.
A franchise that follows a yearly release model is often a proposition fraught with danger for gamers; particularly when the series has a ‘12’ in the title. The implication of such a release model tends to suggest that hitting a yearly release window is more important than forging a progressive title that is sufficiently different from earlier franchise entries. Sports games are a tad more challenging in this respect because the real-world equivalents they’re based on aren’t exactly revolutionising their formulas year to year. After all, we’re not really going to see all forms of football merge into a super sporting code anytime soon.
We were armed with this understanding of these inherent design challenges when we visited EA Canada earlier this year. To be honest, we weren’t expecting a whole lot that was different from FIFA 11. When David Rutter, the game’s line producer, espoused the clever marketing design approach of FIFA 12, “revolution, not evolution”, we scoffed. But it wasn’t long before we realised that we’d been far too quick to judge a development team that was fiercely aware of fan feedback; and, more importantly, eager to progress and impress.
Past performance Every FIFA 12 developer we’ve interviewed has made comparisons to what didn’t work in FIFA 11; which was a critical and commercial success. For Aaron McHardy, gameplay producer of FIFA 12, his concerns revolved around the flawed collision handling of the last game. “We had technical limitations in our old system that we were unable to solve feasibly in a [yearly] cycle. Our old system worked such that every time two players collide in the game, we would analyse how they came together on one frame, and try and decide in that one frame what should happen from the collision. So we were trying to take as much context from that situation as possible, but it’s hard for us to extrapolate too long into the future to figure out exactly what was gonna happen.”
For Ian Jarvis, line producer for FIFA 12 on PC, his challenges were a lot more platform specific. “The biggest challenge for us last year was to bring the next-gen engine over to PC. People had been asking for this for such a long time. Maybe one of the challenges was the messaging: how we tell gamers that we’ve brought next-gen over to PC but it’s not quite the same as console. FIFA 11 on PC was a very unique and hybrid experience.”
Revolution: Step 1 The impressive tech offering of FIFA 12 is based on a trinity of innovations: the Player Impact Engine, Tactical Defending and Precision Dribbling. While the latter two items are certainly important to the new way that FIFA 12 plays, it was the Player Impact Engine that was the real game changer for us. Aaron, who was also the lead developer of the Player Impact Engine, broke it down.
“The new Player Impact Engine accounts for every single collision that’s happening on every single frame, and we process that information in real-time. We no longer take a best educated guess at what the outcome will be and try and find an appropriate animation to play. We actually let the two guys collide and let physics tell us what should happen with a little bit of intelligence as far as how the player’s muscle system works to drive their limbs towards where they want to go. Those things put together allow us to do it all in real-time, and it lets a certain amount of time pass where we can actually learn what the new momentum is as a result of the physical interaction between those two players and know that we’re getting an accurate outcome when we play the new animations over top.”
Learning from reality Mike Day, art director on all things FIFA, broke down the importance of advancing the visual aesthetic across the board. “We really wanted to touch on presentation this year. We spent a lot of time on players and models for FIFA 11, so it wasn’t something that we really felt we needed to address this year. We wanted to really freshen up the game immediately when you boot it, so redoing the menus and the look of those was high on our list. But the one must-do thing was presentation, which touches on everything from the menu system to in-game overlays and how we present the game: new camera, new lighting, all of those things.”
While the menu system alterations mark a big jump from FIFA 11 to 12, it was the subtle yet important changes to the camera and lighting that have the most impact on how FIFA 12 plays.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012