EA Sports has announced FIFA 14 as this year’s annual refresh to the football series, revealing a bunch of new features, improved gameplay and loads more.
The new title will launch this autumn on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Interestingly there was no mention of a Wii U title, although with last year’s FIFA 13 coming out on the new Nintendo console we can imagine ’14 will hit later in the year as well.
Of course, those who aren’t into football and FIFA will moan “yet another yearly update with hardly any changes”, but EA won’t have you believe that. There’s new features like ‘Tactical Defending’, ‘Protect the Ball’ and brand new real ball physics that will make the game even more realistic than ever before.
With real ball physics, the ball will react much more naturally when struck. As such, shots can really swerve, dip or drop mid-air. We’ve always wondered why we can’t do those dipping, bouncing shots that evade goalkeepers before, but now EA has stuck that into FIFA 14. From the initial demo video below it’s easy to see that shooting is about to become much more fun.
EA’s Vancouver team has spent the last year researching ball physics and came to the conclusion that the way the ball reacts in FIFA 13 just isn’t right. As a result we’ll see much more natural ball physics in FIFA 14, which should eliminate that feeling of “I’ve scored that goal a few times before”.
Defending has also been tweaked and tightened up. EA says that the defending in FIFA 13 is too loose, so in the new game defenders will stick closer to attackers, forcing the attacking player to become more inventive, bringing in the midfield players or trying some tricks to get past a player. It’s not all going to be in the defender’s favour though – you’ll be able to back into a defender when receiving a pass, then roll the shoulder and flick it past with brilliant realism.
FIFA 14 will be out on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in autumn, and although a date hasn’t been set, it’s most likely to land in September, as has become the trend. Check out the new features below, courtesy of Eurogamer.