The next entry in EA Sports' massively popular "FIFA" game series is adding women's national teams for the first time.
The 12 women's squads are: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. They will feature in most online and offline game modes but not in the game's most popular mode, Ultimate Team. The developer says this is due to the limited number of female players in this year's game.
EA uses facial and body scanners that capture motion to replicate how some of the most popular men's soccer players look and move on the soccer pitch for a realistic experience, and it's doing the same for women. But EA's David Rutter told The Guardian that it was not as simple as adding female attributes to the skeletal structure EA uses for its male players. The game developer had to rebuild the animation system to adapt to female proportions, and it had to factor in new animations for certain common female attributes, such as longer hair.
Rutter also told The Guardian how adapting the game to include female animations forced EA to implement scalable player skeletons, which also led to better individual male player animations.
The announcement comes at a time when the popularity of soccer, and of the women's national team, is on the rise in the US. But it also comes during a time of duress for the FIFA organization, soccer's international governing body, which is under pressure from authorities for corruption scandals.
It's not the first time women's teams and players have been included in a soccer game, as they had appeared in some lesser-known titles, and women were added to EA's NHL video game series, too. "FIFA" is EA's biggest worldwide franchise, and we can expect to see a more complete digital rendition of international soccer with the addition of female players and teams.
