EA’s “dream” idea for FIFA’s future is to involve live synching with real-life matches as they’re played out, allowing players to replay action as they’ve just seen it. Apparently EA Sport’s marketing man thinks they are close to overcoming the technical hurdles currently faced by the company.
“The dream will be that you can watch that Sky Sports replay, you’re watching it through your Xbox 360 and at half time or during the game you press the controller, dive straight into the game and actually then play out what you’ve just seen,” marketing boss at FIFA Matt Bilby told Eurogamer.
This has been done with EA’s Madden games, though the company claims it’s much more difficult challenge with football due to the unpredictability of the formation players could be in at the point of action.
“[There’s] 22 players, 22 AI running around on the pitch at the same time,” Bilby stated. “Madden benefited from the fact that it’s very stop-start and the players line up in a formation that you can create straight away and there’s only a certain amount of things that could happen.
“With football there’s randomness with 22 players, and if you don’t replicate every player in the right position at the right time, facing the right way with the right movement of legs it just looks inauthentic. That’s the biggest challenge – actually being able to recreate it in a way you as a football fan would believe it, and it is a real analysis tool rather than just something that looks nice.”
Bilby went on to discuss the future of the FIFA franchise.
“We have outstanding meetings now where we’re not talking about FIFA 12 or FIFA 13, we’re talking further out and we’re being very thoughtful about what we need to do now so that we continue leading and creating the games we want to play, you want to play,” said Bilbly.
“There’s 300 million people in the world that paid to interact with a football game last year. We don’t sell 300 million copies of FIFA, so until we’re at that level we haven’t got to the biggest potential of this franchise.”
Take a look at our hub for more info on the soon-coming title.
Published: Sep 23, 2009 11:00 pm