EA Sports has revealed a brand-new trailer for this year’s highly anticipated football instalment, FIFA 15, with an emphasis placed on the changes made to goalkeepers.
According to Nick Channon, senior producer on FIFA 15, goalkeepers have been rebuilt from the ground up, and the AI has been greatly refined due to the motion capture of real-life goalkeepers such as Everton’s Tim Howard.
“The goalkeeper position has evolved as football has, and strikers and the midfielders are getting faster and more dynamic and I think as goalkeepers we have to stay lean, stay fast and stay sharp,” Howard said.
“I think that’s what sets the great goalkeepers apart is their decision making. It’s experience, it’s seeing and making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.”
AI goalkeepers have been a constant issue that EA Sports has tried to address in previous FIFA instalments, but this year’s title sees a variety of new save animations added, better judgement being made by the AI of when to come and clear the ball and also the introduction of reflex saves against deflected shots.
Check out the full trailer of EA Sports’ goalkeeping mechanics in FIFA 15 below.
Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus Rift, mentioned earlier this week that FIFA 15 is the “the perfect fit” for the upcoming VR headset. Further details on Mitchell’s discussion of FIFA 15 can be found here.
Along with the visual enhancements to FIFA 15 and improvements in gameplay, EA Sports had confirmed earlier this year that all 20 stadiums from the Barclays Premier League will be introduced for the first time to a title in the series.
EA Sports had already announced that Barcelona’s four-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi will be the global cover star for FIFA 15, but the Argentine forward will be joined by a whole host of footballers depending on the region or specific countries, including Arda Turan (Turkey), Clint Dempsey (United States and Canada), David Alaba (Austria), Eden Hazard (UK, France, Netherlands and Belgium), Gonzalo Higuaín (Italy), Michal Kadlec (Czech Republic), Robert Lewandowski (Poland), Tim Cahill (Australia and New Zealand) and Xherdan Shaqiri (Switzerland).
With strong competition for EA Sports coming in the form of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 2015, FIFA 15 will be released in late September on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, Wii and PC.