FIFA 12: Player Impact Engine is the next big thing for football games, says EA Sports

In an interview with us, Aaron McHardy, gameplay director of FIFA 12, said that he feels the new “Player Impact Engine” is the next big step for football games, and that it is the biggest change they’ve made to FIFA since building a new gameplay engine for the current gen consoles.

When we asked him what he felt was going to be the “next holy grail” for football games, he said: “Something that we’ve struggled with every year is trying to come up with “what is that new innovation?” And I think that this year we’ve got a few features that are trying to push the boundaries of what can be done in a football game.”

“I think the big one, off the top, is our Player Impact Engine,” he said. “I think it’s probably the biggest change we’ve made for a game since we rewrote the engine for the next gen consoles. It’s a massive change and what it is, is that it’s putting real world physics into the game. The players, when they come together and they collide, they feel like they’re interacting and are understanding the impact that happen on the body, and it gives us a lot more realistic behaviours in this year’s game.”

McHardy also said he feels that more importantly, the Player Impact Engine has built a solid foundation for future FIFA games to follow. He thinks they can build more “cool” new features for future FIFA entries. “, I think what it does is, it builds a new foundation for us to build cool, interesting features for years to come,” he said.

“I think the true injuries features, because we’re harvesting information on physics and contact, we wrote a system that helps us understand how much trauma the human body can take, and that when this stuff happens in the game, the video game player should be injured just like the real world player would. So we’re getting towards this realistic behaviour to take that realm of what’s possible in a video game one step higher.”

In the same interview, McHardy also said that the FIFA development team feels that ‘it’s good to have the Konami guys around’, but that they’re ‘not concerned’ about the new features announced for PES 2012.

EA Sports also recently released a Gameplay Accolades trailer for FIFA 12.

FIFA 12 releases in September end on the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, 3DS, PSP, PS2 and iOS. A Vita release is also planned.