“We have 12 international teams,” said Rutter. The studio did discuss making an all-female Ultimate Team, as well as including the female teams from clubs such as Manchester City, but felt it too much of a stretch in this inaugural season. “Our Cologne team has been through a ton of women’s matches over the last year or so, gathering details, information and their opinion on the players, in order to create these ratings.” “You will get 80-rated players in the women’s teams but they’re not the same as an 80-rated player in the men’s game,” explained Rutter. The underlying gameplay engine remains identical to the men’s game, although attributes and traits are scaled to other players of the same sex. “Again, that enables us to improve the look of male players with similar hairstyles.” “A large number of female athletes have long hair, so we’ve had to focus on improving that element too,” said Rutter. There have been more obvious visual challenges too. The cool side effects are that we now have scalable skeletons, so we can also support different body types in the men’s side of the game.”
“Now we’ve had to implement a new system that allows for the hips to be moved, the shoulders to be moved vertically, and the width of those bones and joints to be a factor too. Rather than manipulating the proportions between joint and bone, it was like stretching an elastic band. “Our underlying animation system was universally based on height and build. “The big change we’ve had to make is rebuilding the animation rig, in order that the skeleton underneath each player works with different proportions,” said Rutter. Rutter insists that’s not the case.Įngland captain Steph Houghton. It’s natural to wonder, then, whether the process of implementing them was expedited by last June’s backlash against Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which saw publisher Ubisoft lambasted for its negative attitude to the prospect of a female protagonist. Indeed, two years ago, Rutter told gaming website Kotaku that female teams were something the studio had considered. It’s been on the to-do list for a while.” Plus, we had to factor in the time and effort required for travelling around the world to scan faces and heads, record motion capture, etc. “We needed to have tools and technology in place that could differentiate between men and women. “It’s been in the pipeline for a few years, and really it was just a case of making sure that the game was in a good enough state for it the work properly,” said Rutter.
#FIFA 12 PC 2015 SQUADS SERIES#
Series vice-president and general manager David Rutter claims that his team has been working to overcome the technical challenges of including women in its football sim for a considerable time. In 2000, UK studio Silicon Dreams included women’s football in its Mia Hamm 64 Soccer and Uefa Dream Soccer titles, though both reviewed poorly at the time. Wambach also spent a day providing female-specific motion capture at developer EA Sports’ Vancouver HQ, along with USA team-mates Sydney Leroux, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe.įifa 16 certainly won’t be the first football sim to include female players.
USA forward Sydney Leroux provides female-specific motion capture at EA Sports’ Vancouver HQ for the Fifa 16 game.