It started with blocky players and electronic crowd noise, now it boasts intelligent animation and specific movement capture for the women’s game
E arlier this year, at the famed La Romareda stadium in Zaragoza, Spain, EA Sports organised two football matches, one each for male and female pro players. During these competitive 90-minute fixtures, all participants, including subs and officials, wore advanced Xsens motion capture suits that recorded their every movement, shot, tackle and celebration. Involving more than 70 people it was, according to gameplay producer Sam Rivera, the largest number of players ever motion-captured in a single session.
Every year, the developers of Fifa tell us that their key aim is authenticity. This year, Fifa 23 – the final product of EA Sports and Fifa’s 30-year partnership – is about making key moments more intelligible, detailed and dramatic, zooming in ever closer to the action at pitch level. That grand Zaragoza mo-cap session provided 10m frames of animation – twice as much match capture as Fifa 22 – allowing for more than 6,000 authentic player animations, a wealth of which are female-specific.
That data has also been fed through Hypermotion 2, EA Sports’ machine learning engine, which uses the mo-cap data to create new, highly authentic animations on the fly, seamlessly filling in the gaps between mo-cap moments. This should mean smoother, more controllable movement on the ball. “Dribbling is getting more responsive,” says Rivera. “The personality of the players really shines through. We got the feedback in Fifa 22 that dribbling felt slidey; players were skating sometimes when turning. With the new system, they’re a lot more grounded, turning feels good, and the steps in between every single dribble touch are created by the algorithm. This means every step matches the path, creating better visuals.”
The designers are also enhancing dribbling’s defensive counter-action: jockeying. The machine learning system has been trained to detect which player is between the advancing player and the goal, and then governs their movements. They’ll usually approach the attacker from an angle rather than face-to-face, letting them tackle effectively. “They even put their hands behind their backs when they’re inside the box,” enthuses Rivera.
Players will accelerate differently, too: controlled, lengthy or explosive. This means a player such as Erling Haaland or Vinícius Júnior will burst away at speed, but will then slow more quickly, while someone with lengthy acceleration such as Virgil van Dijk won’t be quite as quick off the mark, but will gain speed. The idea is to break up the predictability of one-on-ones: it’ll no longer be quite as clear who’ll get to a loose ball first, or who will outrun an opponent down the wing.
Another new feature is the power shot: when players hit both bumpers while pressing the shoot button, the game brings up power and positioning options for a controlled, pinpoint strike. “It’s a risk v reward system,” says gameplay design director, Kantcho Doskov. “You can try it at any time, but if there’s a defender nearby, they’re going to tackle you. You really have to carve out that space, and even when you do, you have to aim precisely. Aiming at the top corner of the goal takes a bit of skill! When I try power shots, most of the time I don’t score, but it’s fun to test the keeper. And sometimes, just because the shot is so powerful, he’s forced to parry the goal back to my striker, who taps it in.”
Elsewhere, EA is telling us to expect redesigned set-pieces, with aiming on the right analogue stick, aided by a preview projection line – and defenders can now lie behind the wall to block low shots. And impact physics have been improved, so a player’s foot might be knocked sideways by a ball travelling at velocity, affecting their touch. The virtual grass now has individual blades, and the surface degrades as the match goes on: sliding tackles and knee-slide celebrations will tear up the turf, leaving scars that remain for the whole game. “At the moment, it’s purely visual,” says senior art director, Fab Muoio.” But we’ve had discussions about whether or not it will impact play and that’s something we’ll think about in the future.”
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Muoio talks a lot about drawing inspiration from modern TV broadcast aesthetics. “Just look at the real-world use of drone cameras,” he says. ”I saw some footage from the Etihad of a drone shot going all the way through the concourse and the stadium. It looks amazing, like CG.
“We also reworked our out-of-play cameras to make them look a lot nicer when you have a corner kick, throw-in or goal kick: we’ve adjusted the depth of field and the composition, just to have the player pop a little bit more from the background. It looks more in line with what you see in modern broadcast football, with that heavy depth of field.”
An early beta demo shows all of these new details in action. Playing as Manchester City, you see the fast, insightful runs of Jack Grealish and Kevin De Bruyne and the amazing shot-stopping capabilities of Ederson. Attempting a power shot with Real Madrid’s Marco Asensio gives you a real sense of his strength and accuracy. There’s also a beautiful moment of animation fluidity when Borussia Dortmund’s Marco Reus turns and volleys in a crowded box, arching the ball into the top left corner. A couple of hours of play show up more diversity of movement and interaction between players, and although the pace is similar to Fifa 22, it feels like there are a few more milliseconds available to line up ambitious passes.
EA Sports has some big changes coming to Career mode, including interactive match highlights, which let you play the key moments from important matches instead of the whole game, making for a snappier, more dramatic narrative. There are announcements to come about the ever-popular but also hugely controversial Ultimate Team mode. EA has stated that it will not be abandoning the “loot box”-style random player packs that underpin the mode, even though several countries have either banned or are considering bans on them. Whatever EA does to improve this part of the game, including making it easier to progress without purchasing packs, the ethical quandary of the loot box will cast a long shadow over the entire game.
Work is progressing, too, on EA Sports’ post-Fifa future, which will arrive in 2024 as the awkwardly-titled EA Sports FC. It’s clear that Fifa itself is going to struggle to commission a new football sim that will get anywhere close to EA’s game in quality and detail. The development team views Fifa 23 as a good indication of where things are heading. “You can see by the amount of content this year: we want more, we want to continue going big,” says Rivera. “We’re excited about 2024 and what’s coming. There are a lot of opportunities. Responsiveness, visuals, authenticity – are what will take us there.”
He’ll only give up one specific detail: the use of machine learning animation, currently confined to very specific areas of the game, is likely to expand as EA moves into the next era of its simulation. There is a dedicated AI coding team at EA’s Vancouver studio that have been working on this tech for several years, and if this year’s implementations go down well, we might soon see the end of scripted animations. “I can’t talk about the details of where it’s going because these are huge future features, but the potential that we’re seeing is crazy,” says Rivera. “We can see how machine learning can take over animation in the future.”
It still feels kind of surreal that this is the end for Fifa as we know it. A game that began on the Mega Drive with its blocky, stylised sprites and electronically simulated crowd noises, now features lifelike motion captures taken from genuine matches, and an intelligent animation system that mimics the behaviours of real-life players. Fifa has been loved and loathed; it has seen off one great rival – the Pro Evolution Soccer series – and will soon compete against whatever licensed products Fifa can pitch against it. In embracing the women’s game, it’s doing the right thing at the right moment, while at the same time, its insistence on retaining the loot box lottery of Ultimate Team will ensure that controversy as well as fandom will follow it into the future. But that, after all, is football.
Keith Stuart attended a press trip to Electronic Arts in Vancouver with other journalists. His travel and accommodation expenses were met by Electronic Arts.