FIFA 15: Continuation of the Norm or a Break from the Norm?

FIFA is getting on a bit… it has been around for nearly twenty one years. The first incarnation of the FIFA football game was created in 1993 and was available on Amiga and Sega’s MasterSystem. The game has grown and morphed into a franchise on a plethora of different platforms from mobile, console to PC. However, with EA’s E3 announcement of FIFA 15 yesterday, has the game changed or is it more of the same? Now bear with me here… It’s a football game and the rules have been the same for over a hundred years. That’s not the issue, what I mean by change is that the game needs to change and morph with time – the 2D top-down gaming of the 90s was changed completely by the 3D experience of the early noughties. What is required is something different – from emotive to visual flair in order to help bring FIFA 15 into the realm of next-gen greatness!

In the Los Angeles Convention Centre, EA did just that! EA announced that the FIFA 14 technologies and code changed that have yet to yield results – from the in-air ball physics engine, the changes to the Ignite EA engine and the wider principles of uncertainty which were part of FIFA 14 that just didn’t quite work – have all been re-engineered by EA in order to make a true break from the past. FIFA 15 will bring football gameplay into the next level by incorporating more fluid and dynamic playability modes – think two step dribbles with ‘stuttering steps’ before shooting a goal which is ‘doable’ on FIFA 14 but it will become a more fluid part of gameplay on FIFA 15. This is the issue – you watch FIFA 12, 14 or FIFA 2002 and you know you’re playing against a computer or that your multiplayer opponent could never do that on a real pitch. This is what EA wants to change by making fluidity in game play more realistic and this is what EA have announced at their epic E3 conference.

FIFA 15 will bring ‘reality’ onto the pitch once more. It will create real-life dynamism in terms of spinning and arcing the ball’s movement on the pitch and in the air and will help re-define how the contact between player and ball is crunched by the Ignite engine. This is a massive change – one that some doubt is doable. The next-gen consoles have yet to ignite the passion of the masses in terms of epic visual output. However, FIFA 15 needs to be something different – not a step change but a wholesale change in one of the gaming calendar’s most successful annual launches. So we are looking forward to FIFA 15 to see if we can bring to an end the curse of the ‘oh, he’d never do that on a real pitch’ mentality of FIFA gameplay?