This year marks the 30th anniversary of EA Sports creating football games, and after 30 years there’s no denying that football is a part of EA Sports’ DNA. Despite this impressive milestone, this year is a new beginning for EA, with the first entry in its newly-branded EA Sports FC 24 series set to launch on September 29 (early access for Ultimate Edition owners on September 22). Last week I attended the EA Sports FC 24 Showcase in Sydney, where I was able to chat with the game’s Senior Producer Samuel Rivera about the exciting technology powering EA Sports FC 24 and what the move to a new brand has allowed them to achieve.
If there’s one thing that stood out from my chat with Rivera, it’s the team’s relentless pursuit to give players the most authentic and realistic football experience, and the core of that in EA Sports FC 24 is HypermotionV. It would be easy to pass off HypermotionV as marketing spin or a buzzword, but understanding what HypermotionV allows the team to do is exciting, and Rivera’s energy while discussing its potential was infectious.
Thanks to the ever-advancing world of technology, HypermotionV is built on the use of volumetric data – data acquired from thousands of hours of footage of real matches featuring the best players in the world. No longer does EA Sports need to bring athletes into the studio to perform traditional motion capture. Instead, the team can go right to the source, allowing them to bring football to life in ways that haven’t been done before.
“Not every year do you get to put the motion from the best players in the world directly into the game,” says Rivera.
So far my sampling of HypermotionV has been limited to Manchester City and PSG from the men’s leagues, and Chelsea and Lyon from the women’s leagues. Certainly, players like Haaland, De Bruyne, Mbappe and Sam Kerr all handle great and if you follow football you’ll definitely notice their own personal attributes, such as the way Haaland runs. But as a Burnley fan, how does HypermotionV affect playing as The Clarets? How does HypermotionV work when playing at lower leagues or if I wanted to play as my A-League team Melbourne City?
“Our goal is to have the data for every single player we have in the game,” answers Rivera.
“If we have a player in the game, at some point, our goal is that everyone will have their unique movements from real life. We’re starting with some of the best leagues in the world, like the Champions League, English Premier League and La Liga.
“Right now we have 1,200 players that have specific motion from real life through an artificial intelligence algorithm, which understands the details of the motion of those players and applies those details live into the game.”
A couple of weeks ago, the team held an EA Sports FC 24 event in Amsterdam, which cover star Erling Haaland attended.
“He was playing with his own character and scoring many goals, and you could see how surprised he was to see himself and the way he moves in the game,” shares a smiling Rivera.
It’s clear that Rivera and the team at EA have a lot of pride in the work they’ve done and how realistic the players look and feel.
When asked who his favourite player to use in the game is, Rivera gets the nod of approval from this Australian, and hopefully all reading this.
“Sam Kerr,” he answers.
“So agile, so good at shooting and finesse shots – I just love how she plays in the game.”
“Our goal is to have the data for every single player we have in the game”
PlayStyles is another new feature that has been made possible thanks to HypermotionV. Rivera confirms that PlayStyles has been designed to work with every mode, including Career Mode, and PlayStyles will be able to be applied to all player-created players. The feature will use real player data to tailor your own play experience, giving you access to elite styles of play.
“You will be able to grow and customise your player based on what you prefer – what PlayStyles you want.”
When it comes to EA Sports FC 2024, mechanics that have been harder to master in previous years, such as free kicks, will be more accessible thanks to PlayStyles, especially when playing with players specialising in a certain category. During the Product Showcase, I managed to curl one into the back of the onion bag, I have no idea how I pulled it off – I’m sure De Bryune did most of the hard work, but damn it felt good.
Players like Lione Messi (maybe you’ve heard of him), who some would consider a dead-ball specialist, will have the PlayStyles + for free kicks, which allows players to better visualise the trajectory of the ball and be more likely to score a free kick.
Based on hands-on time with the game so far, the action on the pitch feels a little slower and heavier than last time, and it seems like EA is really leaning into features like PlayStyles that will see a special moment or player unlock a game’s potential. Rivera acknowledges that the game is still in development and may change between now and release, however, the senior producer insists that this wasn’t a deliberate design choice, and says that the game will play differently for different players and play styles.
“What we’ve been hearing is that a lot of the new animations and features are making the game feel more authentic,” explains Rivera.
“When you change the game, the experience is going to change. Some things may feel or may be slightly slower, but some things may be faster. So it depends on the balance and what exactly you’re looking at – is it the passing animations, the shooting animations or the acceleration of the players?
To help make EA Sports FC 24 as authentic as possible, Rivera says that the team has been working with a lot of people and observing leagues from all over the world, as well as having deep discussions with experts within the team. Rivera also reveals that the development team features some ex-professional players who have been instrumental in bringing the game to life.
The game’s authenticity isn’t limited to how the players look and play, it’s also about how the ball reacts in various situations, with bounces and ricochets all feeling natural thanks to HypermotionV.
“In the past, it used to be a manual tuning of the parameters,” says Rivera.
“So someone, a producer and an animator would look at the data and manually tune the parameters to be as similar as possible. Now, artificial intelligence can go through many more examples than a human can and then tune those parameters to be like real life.
“It’s something very important, in terms of technology, and talks to the level of detail we can get to, and how artificial intelligence can save us a lot of time tuning the game, and it can make it much faster and more accurate.”
“What we’ve been hearing is that a lot of the new animations and features are making the game feel more authentic”
Rivera has been working on EA’s football titles since 2009, and you’d think that after working on the same series for so long fatigue would be starting to settle in. However, the brand refresh has re-energised the team and opened up new opportunities and partnerships, such as with Nike, although Rivera doesn’t clarify what exactly this is.
It’s a journey that EA and Rivera are very proud of, but one element that Rivera is extremely proud of is responsiveness.
“You can change your mind at the very last minute,” says an excited Rivera.
“So even if a player started an animation to control the ball, but you press pass, the player can transition out of the controllable animation into a passing animation, the visuals still look good and you get what you want. That, to me, is the key of what we’ve been trying to develop for many years in terms of gameplay with the goal of authenticity.”
While football leagues around the world are starting to kick off, EA Sports FC 24 is still a little over a month away. Much like Burnley’s return to the Premier League, it’s hard not to be excited about what’s to come from EA Sports FC 24. If my chat with Rivera proved anything, it’s that off the pitch there’s a lot of love and care going into making the best and most realistic football game possible, and it looks like on the pitch it might just live up to those expectations.
EA Sports FC 24 is set to hit PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC on September 29, while Ultimate Edition pre-orders will secure early access on September 22.
