“EA Sports, it’s in the game.” When people hear the word FIFA, they most often assume that people aren’t referring to the governing body of world football, but instead are referring to the video game that has transcended the sport itself. The video game licences the name of the governing body and has made FIFA a household name amongst the teenagers and not-so-teenagers who follow the world’s biggest sport.
Electronic Arts, the company that created the game, released the first game in the franchise in 1993. Almost 30 years on, EA has sold almost 325 million units, which makes it the highest-selling sports video game franchise of all time. During the pandemic, the demand for video games skyrocketed and FIFA was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this demand.
EA has always looked to create a video game that resembled real football as much as it could. And in doing so, they have completely redefined the standards for how realistic video games can get. The game manages to capture every single one of the beautiful intricacies of football to create an unbelievably marvellous experience. The movement of the ball, the mannerisms of the players and the ripple when the ball hits the back of the net are all impeccably replicated by the game.
So how exactly does the game manage to capture the movements of the players so very accurately? For the making of FIFA 22, the latest edition of the game, the developers got 22 footballing superstars to play a full-scale football match. Each player wore a motion capture suit provided by a Dutch motion capture product supplier known as Xsens, which allowed the developers to capture the natural movements of players. In the previous editions of the game, the developers would have individual players’ motion tracked with cameras in a studio, however this wasn’t nearly as realistic as a full-scale match.
Though the movement of the players in the game is important, the usage of Artificial Intelligence in the game is what really enables the game to actually work. The game uses A.I. for player positioning, which means that players who don’t have the ball don’t simply just stand and watch passively, which is crucial in enabling the team game of football to be emulated on the screen. This positioning is what allows tactics like zonal marking, formations and pressing to be employed in the video game.
One of the most painstaking parts of creating the FIFA game is the mapping of the face and look of every single player of every top club in the world. Sam Mynott and Paul Boulet work at the Motion Capture Studio in EA and they travel the world with tons of camera equipment so that they can get the facial data of all players from all the professional clubs in the world. Find an in-depth interview of the pair regarding this process of scanning players’ facial data here.
FIFA 22 was the first edition of FIFA to feature 11 clubs from the Indian Super League. This was an extremely smart move from the developers as this has increased their engagement with their fans in India, which is one of the largest sections of their audience. One wonders if FIFA could just use one or two default player avatars and run their whole game, but the effort that they take to actually map every single player’s data is what gives FIFA the kind of platinum status it has in the sport video game world.
Audience fatigue is a problem that annual sporting video game franchises like FIFA have to deal with. People feel like they are being given the same product just in new packaging every year. FIFA has tried to deal with this by adding new features and game modes at timely intervals. One can play 5-a-side football, a football match with no fouls or a match where you can only score goals with headers and volleys.
FIFA has created a legacy for itself that most video games can only dream of. And whether you are playing on a PC or an Xbox or a PlayStation, keep enjoying this digital recreation of the beautiful game and play on!
Image : Screenshot from YouTube Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p08CpE5Tzak)
