In real-life soccer, some of the best players in the world are Romelu Lukaku and Robert Lewandowski — big, powerful strikers who score bags of goals. But in the world of FIFA, the best attackers tend to be small, agile, and have an extremely high work rate. It's a series where Wissam Ben Yedder, a lesser-known talent who plays for AS Monaco, is one of the most popular players in FIFA Ultimate Team simply because he can zip manically about the field.
"I gotta say it's quite difficult to balance the game, so it's not all about pace and not all about physical attributes," admits Sam Rivera, FIFA gameplay producer. "The team is always brainstorming on how to make players that are not necessarily the strongest or the fastest stand out in FIFA. So we try to tune attributes for passing, for ball control, for shooting."
Rivera is currently hard at work on FIFA 22, which will be leading with PS5 and Xbox Series X|S this year (PC fans, alas, are stuck with the last-generation iteration). EA's big next-generation push includes some major gameplay updates, with buzz-y terms like "HyperMotion" and animation improvements driven by machine learning algorithms. Rivera says that FIFA 22 will have some 4,000 new animations, which is roughly three times the number of new animations typically found in a new FIFA release.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/07/20/fifa-22-gameplay-reveal-livestream-ea-play-spotlight"]
The new tech will aim to revitalize gameplay that has in some ways grown stale in recent years. While recent entries have differed in their own ways, they've mainly favored the same attributes at every part of the field. Harry Maguire is the captain of Manchester United and an English international in real-life, but in FIFA 21 his low pace combined with balky A.I. basically makes him persona non grata. Rivera hopes updates to A.I. and positional awareness will even the playing field a bit more.
"The positioning system that we are implementing in FIFA 22 is more authentic," Rivera says. "It's more about zonal marking and defending as a unit."
For FIFA 22, EA is touting updated defensive A.I. in which players will return to their shape more intelligently. This should make it harder for defenders to get caught out of position in such a way that they have to use speed to recover. Positional awareness has long been a major point of frustration for FIFA players, to the point that fullbacks will almost always be told to stay back while attacking just so they won't be utterly destroyed by a counter.
Rivera says pace will continue to be important in certain situations — it is soccer after all — but that otherwise slow-footed defenders like Maguire and Angelo Ogbonna should be better able to step in front of a run from a nimble attacker like Ben Yedder. He hopes that will in turn force players to distribute equally to teammates and create something resembling real-world football. In the meantime, the development team is doing its best to balance out the various positions on the pitch.
“We are doing multiple changes to try to promote staying in your position and making sure how your player plays on the pitch makes sense for each position,” Rivera says. “[T]heir abilities should be reflected based on the position that they have. So lots of work is going into trying to make sure each position is valuable."
FIFA’s balance problems were particularly acute in the most recent version. The inherent bias toward agile attackers, box-to-box midfielders, and speedy defenders made the otherwise robust pool of thousands of real-life footballers feel tiny.
In trying to balance these issues, EA faces plenty of unique challenges. Among them, it must contend with the differences between Career mode, FUT, and Pro Clubs — all of which have their own unique needs. FUT, for example, has so-called “Chemistry Styles” like Hunter and Hawk that can be used to mask weaknesses in pace or shooting. This has the effect of making players feel homogenous, especially as the season progresses. I asked Rivera for his thoughts on this topic, but he demurred, suggesting I bring my question to the FUT team instead.
[widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="slug=fifa-22-ps5-and-xbox-series-xs-screenshots&captions=true"]
In the meantime, Rivera says his main concern is fairness. “I want to make sure that if you do the right thing, you get rewarded for that. If you tackle properly, you should get the ball back. We want to create consistency in behaviors."
He continues, “I played a lot of FIFA 21 and I found myself in those moments where I thought, 'This shouldn't be happening.' But it's just the complexity of the game, all the physics and how everything works, it's not simple to basically go and fix everything and make everything fair. Especially because we designed concepts of football, and football comes with those moments where the team that maybe had the most shots and all the possession loses the match. So we have to have a good balance between football behaviors and making a fun and fair game."
Players will get to see for themselves whether EA has made any progress in that regard when FIFA 22 launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4. PC, and Switch on October 1. In the meantime, you can read our hands-on preview of FIFA 22's gameplay, where we share our impressions of the recent beta.
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"I gotta say it's quite difficult to balance the game, so it's not all about pace and not all about physical attributes," admits Sam Rivera, FIFA gameplay producer. "The team is always brainstorming on how to make players that are not necessarily the strongest or the fastest stand out in FIFA. So we try to tune attributes for passing, for ball control, for shooting."
Rivera is currently hard at work on FIFA 22, which will be leading with PS5 and Xbox Series X|S this year (PC fans, alas, are stuck with the last-generation iteration). EA's big next-generation push includes some major gameplay updates, with buzz-y terms like "HyperMotion" and animation improvements driven by machine learning algorithms. Rivera says that FIFA 22 will have some 4,000 new animations, which is roughly three times the number of new animations typically found in a new FIFA release.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/07/20/fifa-22-gameplay-reveal-livestream-ea-play-spotlight"]
The new tech will aim to revitalize gameplay that has in some ways grown stale in recent years. While recent entries have differed in their own ways, they've mainly favored the same attributes at every part of the field. Harry Maguire is the captain of Manchester United and an English international in real-life, but in FIFA 21 his low pace combined with balky A.I. basically makes him persona non grata. Rivera hopes updates to A.I. and positional awareness will even the playing field a bit more.
"The positioning system that we are implementing in FIFA 22 is more authentic," Rivera says. "It's more about zonal marking and defending as a unit."
For FIFA 22, EA is touting updated defensive A.I. in which players will return to their shape more intelligently. This should make it harder for defenders to get caught out of position in such a way that they have to use speed to recover. Positional awareness has long been a major point of frustration for FIFA players, to the point that fullbacks will almost always be told to stay back while attacking just so they won't be utterly destroyed by a counter.
Rivera says pace will continue to be important in certain situations — it is soccer after all — but that otherwise slow-footed defenders like Maguire and Angelo Ogbonna should be better able to step in front of a run from a nimble attacker like Ben Yedder. He hopes that will in turn force players to distribute equally to teammates and create something resembling real-world football. In the meantime, the development team is doing its best to balance out the various positions on the pitch.
“We are doing multiple changes to try to promote staying in your position and making sure how your player plays on the pitch makes sense for each position,” Rivera says. “[T]heir abilities should be reflected based on the position that they have. So lots of work is going into trying to make sure each position is valuable."
FIFA’s balance problems were particularly acute in the most recent version. The inherent bias toward agile attackers, box-to-box midfielders, and speedy defenders made the otherwise robust pool of thousands of real-life footballers feel tiny.
In trying to balance these issues, EA faces plenty of unique challenges. Among them, it must contend with the differences between Career mode, FUT, and Pro Clubs — all of which have their own unique needs. FUT, for example, has so-called “Chemistry Styles” like Hunter and Hawk that can be used to mask weaknesses in pace or shooting. This has the effect of making players feel homogenous, especially as the season progresses. I asked Rivera for his thoughts on this topic, but he demurred, suggesting I bring my question to the FUT team instead.
[widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="slug=fifa-22-ps5-and-xbox-series-xs-screenshots&captions=true"]
In the meantime, Rivera says his main concern is fairness. “I want to make sure that if you do the right thing, you get rewarded for that. If you tackle properly, you should get the ball back. We want to create consistency in behaviors."
He continues, “I played a lot of FIFA 21 and I found myself in those moments where I thought, 'This shouldn't be happening.' But it's just the complexity of the game, all the physics and how everything works, it's not simple to basically go and fix everything and make everything fair. Especially because we designed concepts of football, and football comes with those moments where the team that maybe had the most shots and all the possession loses the match. So we have to have a good balance between football behaviors and making a fun and fair game."
Players will get to see for themselves whether EA has made any progress in that regard when FIFA 22 launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4. PC, and Switch on October 1. In the meantime, you can read our hands-on preview of FIFA 22's gameplay, where we share our impressions of the recent beta.
[poilib element="accentDivider"]
Continue reading...