FIFA 15, like The Sims 4, is all about emotions

News
By published

This might be the first trailer to make me give a football game a curious glance since the days of the Mega Drive, and it's all thanks to EA's current obsession with emotions. Not content with turning The Sims into an emotional melting pot, they're giving each player in the noble game of football their own "emotional intelligence", which will visibly change over time depending on how the match is progressing. While players won't sit cross-legged in a huff after someone misses a goal, their reaction animations will alter in both positive and negative ways to proceedings, according to this latest trailer. See what this entails after the break.

Basically, each player's mood will elevate or sour depending on the outcome of the match, and this good/bad mood will progress throughout the game, revealing itself in reaction animations and in enthusiastic goal celebrations like that big pile-on up there. There's also talk of more dynamic crowds, meaning that spectators will now have their own distinct group personalities based on the team they're rooting for.

Sure, it's all surface stuff, but given that EA has spent the last couple of decades working on the mechanics of video game football, it's nice to see some thought spared for the drama and atmosphere that comes with the sport. FIFA 15, contrary to the name, is out this September, and unlike the previous game, the PC version will be based on FIFA's 'next-gen' engine .

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.