FIFA 13: Dev talks visual upgrades

The FIFA series has always been excellent in terms of visuals, and EA Sport’ Nick Channon, Line Producer of FIFA 13, says the newest entry in the footy sim series will be no different. In fact, it’ll be a huge improvement, as far as visuals go.

“One of our primary graphics features on FIFA 13 was implementing a new runtime environment lighting feature,” Channon told us. “In previous years, time of day, and weather conditions were baked as part of the stadium environment. Many of the environments had a limited number of options for time of day and weather. In some instances, some stadiums had only one time of day. This made it difficult for us to authentically reproduce the varied start times of matches in various leagues around the world.”

“On FIFA 13, the new runtime lighting for environments not only allowed us to add important times of day we were missing, but also allowed us to offer smaller half hour increments to the visual appearance of the stadium environment at kick off,” he continued. “We were able to re-light approximately 80% of the stadiums in the game to take advantage of the new runtime lighting features.

“I think it’s an achievement that we were able to maintain the visual fidelity of our stadium environments with previous versions of the game, while vastly increasing the variety of lighting and weather conditions available for most of the stadiums. It also opens opportunities for future versions of the game.”

He then went on to talk about the game’s presentation and what’ll be different this year.

“Our presentation has always focused primarily on the players and action on the pitch,” he said. “For FIFA 13 we wanted to start extending the presentation visuals outwards, to more accurately reflect the life and atmosphere of a match day around the pitch. As such, we have added animation to sideline characters such as managers, substitutes, stewards, cameramen and photographers.

“This has allowed us to add a lot more authenticity and variety to our intro sequences to every match, and also has a very noticeable impact during gameplay, where you can see the manager walking around the technical area, giving instructions and reacting to what is happening in the match, as well as substitutes warming up along the sidelines or end zones later in the match.”

FIFA 13 comes out on September 25th. Stay tuned for more updates.