FIFA 22 is intriguing and angry at the same time. We are talking about the new system of animations and artificial intelligence and are indignant at the restrictions.
For all
In order not to detain those who do not have and do not plan Playstation 5 or Xbox Series, I’ll tell you first about what the owners of PCs and old consoles will get. The story about this at the presentation was kept within exactly 15 minutes and four points. Let’s go in order.
To begin with, we were promised to rewrite the goalkeepers. Actually, they complain about them, probably, in every part of FIFA: goalkeepers do sometimes behave completely unnaturally. But, for my taste, there is a logical explanation for this: after all, whether the ball goes in or not is probably calculated somewhere at the level of characteristics and hardly at all depends on the animation in any way. One way or another, in FIFA 22 we are promised a slightly more naturalistic behavior of goalkeepers – they will update the animations and add new movements. During the presentation, they did not say whether this would affect the number of goals reflected or conceded, but, as it seems to me, it is unlikely. It’s just that the goalkeeper’s movements will become a little less ridiculous in controversial situations.
More than me, in fact, I care about the fact that EA promises to revise the physics of the ball and even named a new system True ball physics… It is very difficult to say what exactly this means, because at the presentation it was explained literally as follows: “We took a real ball, looked at how it behaves in life, compared it with the behavior in the game and tweaked the parameters of spinning, resistance to air and ground. And this is amazing “…
I personally hope that this is a disclaimer and the developers have decided not for the first time in their lives to look at a real ball. But, judging by the presentation, we are talking about the fact that the balls will no longer jump in a straight trajectory, like pebbles on water, but will bounce off the ground, taking into account the spin. That is, the ball sent by the goalkeeper “to the exit” may well flop on the center of the field and change the trajectory of some kind of 90 degrees, and then do the same again at the next bounce. In general, there will be more randomness in FIFA 22.
The next novelty is a slightly revised sprint. If in the current FIFA you press the run button, and the ward linearly switches from a step to a higher speed, then there will now be a stage of sharp acceleration and subsequent leveling of the running speed. And, judging by the first frames, it will be a plus for the attack: the player with the ball will be able to accelerate sharply and leave from under protection.
In my opinion, the decision is controversial: the defense line has been limping on both legs for two years now, and the next advantage for the attacking side looks, to put it mildly, strange. But, alas, there was not a word about the corrections of the defenders at the presentation. So do not hope: competent positioning, apparently, is with us forever. Well, at least on PC and older consoles.
More gameplay updates promised several new tricks, deeper analytics after the match and slightly reworked old modes, which we cannot talk about yet. Actually, the owners of PC, PS4 and Xbox One can disagree on this.
Not for all
Now information for those with a PS5 or Xbox Series. It was much more fortunate: EA redesigned the graphics, animations and behavior of the players. And for this she invented a whole system called Hypermotionbased on machine learning. If earlier EA recorded the movements of football players in the old fashioned way, using Motion Capture, and involved no more than three players for this, now it goes along a different path, which is called Xsens Motion Capture…
It works like this: all 22 players enter the field in special Xsens suits and just play football. The whole process is recorded on the camera and fed to the neural network, which analyzes the actions of the players, their movements and interactions with each other and not only records possible combinations and reactions, but also reads animations from them.
As a result, more than 4,000 new animations will be added to FIFA 22, and the connections between them will become much smoother and more realistic, since the developers no longer need to combine many small movements together. Plus, such a system allows the player to be deployed in advance to the desired positions to start a new animation.
The next interesting consequence of the new technology is enhanced artificial intelligence. Since he is now studying at full-fledged matches with all the players on the field, it is easier for him to imitate the real behavior of the team. As EA itself says, computer dummies think six times faster – and this will finally touch the line of defense.
On the new generation of consoles, they promise to make it much smarter. At the same time, the developers emphasize that the defense will now work as a whole team and, for example, will be able to move the entire line into the ball control zone. Thanks to this, there should be fewer free zones, and the attackers will have to strain much more often to get out of custody.
EA also promises to completely overhaul player interactions in horse wrestling. Whether it concerns exclusively animations, as with goalkeepers, or the mechanics itself, it is not yet clear, but the fight for the second floor looks really beautiful.
Well, the last moment. EA in the new version of the game will try to slightly humanize the players. This again applies to animations: the players will talk on the field, resent the actions of their opponents, hug the coaches, etc. Here we will also write down a slightly tightened facial expression: it has become much more detailed.
That’s all. Once again, we remind you that the second part of the text related to new animations, artificial intelligence, defense and player movements applies only to the new generation of consoles. Officially, EA explains this by the fact that only PS5 and Xbox Series are so powerful that they can pull all the innovations of the series.
Theoretically, we could believe it, but the new version of the game will go not only to the really productive PS5 and Series X, but also to the very weak Series S. And at this moment, personally, I am really offended: at first glance, the graphics did not grow so much that be afraid to display it on past generations, and with a PC there shouldn’t be any problems at all. But the fact remains: this year, those without new consoles will get almost last year’s game.
More on review
