The first trailer for FIFA 22 was shown and, as usual, almost nothing was shown. Still, the news seems interesting, at least from a technical point of view. The main new feature of FIFA 22 will be the so-called Hypermotion Technology. This is a new system for animating the movements of football players in the game, which will be used for the first time in the history of games.
Until now, the animations for the game have been filmed individually – a few footballers would come to the studio, record their moves and that would be it. Now, EA Sports has organized the filming of 22 footballers in the match – they invited partner clubs Real Madrid and Paris Saint Germain, who played the match behind closed doors, wearing Xsens suits.
Xsens suits have already been used to animate games such as Hellblade and the VR title Creed: Rise to Glory, but this is the first time they have been used on such a large project like FIFA. In short, EA Sports collected 8.7 million frames from a private game and then fed that data to its own machine learning algorithm which then turns it into new real-time animations. In particular, FIFA 22 should have more than 4000 new animations of footballers movements.
Other innovations include better intelligence of teammates who are more aware of their environment. EA Sports says the new consoles have allowed virtual footballers to have up to six times more decisions to make on their own. In defensive gameplay, the AI should take special care to act as a tactical unit and to retain the shape of the formation they are playing.
All of this will only apply to FIFA 22 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Google Stadia. Unfortunately, this confirms that PC gamers will get an inferior version of the game, as will owners of the PS4 and XBO consoles who will not see improvements in the new animations.
Standard edition of FIFA 22 will be released on October 1, 2022, and the Ultimate edition gives you earlier access to the game from September 27, 2022.
