FIFA 15 preview

Emotion. That was the word used several times during our first-look at FIFA 15. 

FIFA has gradually gotten better over the years at depicting more realistic action on the football pitch, last year going so far as to adding swerving ball physics after shots and truer player movement. Things on the pitch will always improve, but what about the atmosphere surrounding it? It's always appeared as an afterthought, but EA is trying to change all that for the latest installment in the series.

The key difference here is the addition of technology that manages to track the emotional state of all 22 players on the pitch. In layman's terms: players now have feelings.

If a player is through on goal in the first few minutes of the match and he chooses to shoot instead of passing to a teammate in space, the reaction to him firing wide won't be that upsetting. If the same player does this again later on in the match with the same results, expect to see his teammates throwing their hands up in the air and berating him for being so greedy.

It's an impressive adjustment to player relationships, which can now be judged on a frame-by-frame basis. It works with opposition players too, so if the same pair of footballers are involved in some feisty challenges you can expect to see a cut scene which shows their tempers flaring, and the commentators will even make a comment about what's going on.

The emotions are tracked for the whole match to tell a story on the pitch and bring the game even closer to real life. At the moment the emotion isn't tied to any gameplay, so don't expect to see your player sent off for elbowing a guy when the referee isn't looking. Lead producer Sebastian Enrique thinks that is for the best.

"We feel that we're not ready to create something where a situation is out of your control," he told ArabicGamers. "I can give you a lot of examples why. Imagine playing Simeone and Beckham from that 1998 World Cup. What was the situation? It was, 'This guy will get mad if I annoy him enough'. And he was annoying him, annoying him, annoying him, talking to the guy. At some point there was a bad reaction and then a red card.

"Do you want FIFA to do that? Do you want FIFA to force a situation like that? It would feel kind of scripted so I feel that today we're not ready to do that in a way that wouldn't be scripted and it would be accurate and you'd still feel that everything was in your control. So you don't really want to get a red card for something you didn't do."

The emotions might be purely aesthetic, but they do help to tell the story of a game better. This is also aided by dynamic match presentation, featuring improved crowd animations and team-based chants, so you'll see and hear Liverpool's famous 'You'll Never Walk Alone' anthem sung before big games. Celebrations have also been enhanced, and if you score a last-minute winner expect to see every outfield player run and jump on top of the goal scorer in elation. 

As usual the visuals are also taking another step up, the most impressive aspect being the pitch itself. It now cuts up and leaves footprints and other marks as the game progresses, leading to a totally different look at the end of 90 minutes. It may not seem like much, but it makes a huge difference in terms of presentation. Player's kits will also pick up mud marks if they slide across a wet pitch, hair has been simulated much better this time around, sponsor boards have realistic animations, corner flags can now be moved instead of being walked through while posts will vibrate when the ball makes contact.

We were also shown an image of the world's most expensive footballer, Gareth Bale, and his FIFA player model last year compared to this year. The difference was stark, with Bale now looking like a much more athletic specimen to reflect his real body type. The player models have never really looked like the footballers of today, they were too big and bulky and half of them didn't look like they'd last an hour of running around. That's all changed and you'll be seeing slimmed down players who look like they were built for football.

So we've seen emotion, we've seen better presentation, we've seen a living, breathing pitch and we've seen a sexier looking Bale. But what about the actual gameplay?

The most significant update is a spinning ball. Before, when players touched the ball the spin would be killed and it would have no factor on what you did next. If they went to flick it on they could do so without much worry. Now that's all changed and the spin dramatically alters everything you do. It may not sound like much, but the spinning ball makes a massive difference.

"It was huge," said Enrique. "It was huge and I'm going to tell you a secret: It surprised me as well. Because when the gameplay guys approached me and said they were going to be doing this, I thought okay this would just affect the visuals, the ball will look really cool on the close camera. I was totally wrong. When I started seeing the effect it has on passing, the new type of passes that we can see weren't possible without this.

"So it's not a little thing, people say, 'Okay well the ball just rotates properly', no. The way it affects how the game goes in terms of ground passing, it's amazing." It certainly helps to make games feel faster paced, and to us it plays a lot more like FIFA 13 instead of 14, with quick, attacking breaks and end-to-end football.

The AI is also being reformed so that players are now aware if they're winning or losing, and they'll become more aggressive when a goal down. Likewise if they're a goal up they might run the ball to the corner flag to waste a few more seconds. Elsewhere there're new attacking runs, defenders who are more patient and don't just slide in, agile and quicker turning, players who dribble using the inside and outside of the foot, set-piece tactics from 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil and even shirt pulling.

It's safe to say there's plenty of content coming to FIFA 15 to make it seem like an essential purchase. The emotion is definitely a nice factor but we're more impressed with the presentation than anything else, especially the way the pitch changes over time. Add everything together and by the time you make the step up you'll again wonder how you ever put up with FIFA 14, a great game in its own right. Enrique summed it up best, "You put all of those together and we get a game that is much more fluid, realistic and overall one that's much more fun to play."