Getting hands on with an early build of the game, it plays a good game of football. EA has also tweaked the shaders and lighting to get the pitch to look as vibrant and colourful as it really should, while also enhancing the visibility of the wear and tear that play puts into the grass. The net, meanwhile, is now more realistic as a physics object – players even have specific animations when running into it. The ball impact on limbs will impart a force to deflect feet, legs, arms and even fingers. Header Battles to give the goalie more of a presence when coming out for a cross, and more.Īll of this leads to an improved feel to the game that’s particularly noticeable in replays – one area that EA targeted was to remove some of the ‘skating’ effect that players had when dribbling. This has all been fed into what EA has branded as Technical Dribbling for individual ball control, ML-Jockey for procedurally woven together animations when guarding against an attacker, Kinetic Goalkeeper vs. Importantly, this has included a full motion captured women’s match, to ensure that side of the game is as authentic as possible. EA has captured another two full matches using the Xsens suits to gather millions of new data points to feed into the machine learning algorithms that translate this to naturalistic looking animations in-game. Obviously you’ll want to get the current gen release if you can, which will feature HyperMotion2 animations. There’s also an expansion of how they represent women’s football with some of the major domestic leagues, an overhaul of Ultimate Team’s chemistry system, in generation cross-play on day one, and plenty more.
Instead they’ve gone all in with a refinement of the HyperMotion animation technology, new iterative gameplay features like Power Shots and redesigned set pieces. You wouldn’t have blamed EA for resting on their laurels for FIFA 23 or for holding back on certain updates so that EA Sports FC could launch in late 2023 and make huge steps forward. It’s take on the sport will be the benchmark to which EA’s new football franchise, and whatever games next receive the FIFA license, will be compared. This is the last EA-made FIFA game, and it will feature not one, but two World Cups. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of sports games that have taken a huge leap forward from one year to the next – leaping between generations with vastly improved graphics engines, making major technical strides for the simulation of their sports – but FIFA 23 will be the last of its kind. If ever there was a sports game that would have an outsized legacy for years to come, it’d be FIFA 23.