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FIFA 16 INTRODUCES FEMALE FOOTBALLERS FOR THE FIRST TIME


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EA Sports just announced female football to be in FIFA 16 by uploading the following video to Youtube:

 

The following article was written by IGN (from: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/28/fifa-16-introduces-female-footballers-for-the-first-time):

 

Electronic Arts' football/soccer franchise FIFA is introducing female players for the first time. (You can see new players in action in the trailer over on YouTube.)

The sports game will feature 12 international teams (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the United States of America) when the latest instalment, FIFA 16, launches on September 22. Just as their male counterparts, female players will look and move "like they do on the pitch when representing their country".

IGN caught up with FIFA VP and GM David Rutter to find out if it's the "all-time high" interest in women's football that's spurred this latest addition to the established franchise, or if EA has been playing with the idea of bringing women into the game for some time.

 

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The tools and the technology we have is at a level where you can really do the authenticity of the women's game justice.

 

"It's come about in a bunch of different ways," says Rutter. "We've been chatting about it in the game team for a couple of years now. As you may or may not know, there's been petitions to have women put into the game, and I'm lucky enough to be the father of two amazing little girls, and both of them play FIFA a lot. They consistently pester me [about] why they can't play as women.

"We've always felt that there were things that needed to be done in the game that were more pressing – making passing work, or shooting etc. – but the fact of the matter is that the tools and the technology that we have on the game team now is at a level where you can really do the authenticity of the women's game justice."

 

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And it's not just a matter of laying female skins over male skeletons, either. As Rutter explains, if the team had "just put female faces on male players, it would've been disappointing." EA has implemented a bottom-to-top approach to ensure that the end product looks, and moves, just right – from basic player movement to celebration animations.

"We've flown our head capture team around the world to capture the faces and the heads of the athletes, [and] they've been treated in exactly the same way as Arsenal, Chelsea, Man City. We rebuilt the animation rig to support the different dimensions and proportions of a woman's body [...] and then applied that motion capture skeleton to those very believable bodies to make sure that the standing, walking, jogging, sprinting, passing, shooting, is actually women animation rather than male animation."

 

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"We've even gone so far as to rejig the physics on our hair to make sure that the ponytails are more believable," adds Rutter. "And one of the side effects of that is that it's actually rolled into the men's side of the game as well, so male players with long hair look a lot better now."

During development, representatives from Soccer Canada and the US national soccer team – Sydney Leroux, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe – visited the Vancouver studio to help build new locomotion for women in FIFA 16 including new walks, runs, sprints, and horizontal movement. They also provided 360 degree scanning-rigs and fed back on the development of the game in-process.

 

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This is a very big deal for us, something we wanna do, and do the best we can.

 

"We were incredibly lucky to have the US national team on site in Vancouver for a day. Hanging out with them, chatting to them, playing the game with them [...] getting their feedback was incredibly useful to course-correct on a couple of things," said Rutter.

And though some male soccer players use a visit to FIFA's studio as an opportunity to pin down tips 'n' tricks on how to beat their friends at the game, when it came to female footballers, most were more concerned about the authenticity of their portrayal, feeding back if they felt they were standing out of position, or behaving unnaturally.

If you're less keen on the women's game, however, don't panic – as you might expect, you can still choose from the usual selection of male national and international teams, and you won't be able to play women against men, either.

 

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"It's the same way if you don't like Spanish football, you don't have to go and play with the Spanish teams. If you don't want to play with women players, then you don't have to go and play with women players," Rutter added.

"At the end of the day I'm looking at this in a somewhat selfish way. Finally my kids will stop going on at me, and nagging me about why they can't play with women players. My youngest is a fantastic soccer player and she loves it. It doesn't really compute [for them] that there wouldn't be women in the game."

And if you're wondering why FIFA opted to go with International teams rather than the celebrated Premier League, for example, there's a reason for that, too.

"It really boiled down to trying to give the fairest, broadest appeal. We could've [...] done something like that, but then it would've just restricted it to English fans, and that doesn't really make sense right now. This is a very big deal for us, something we wanna do, and do the best we can."

FIFA 16 launches on PC, Playstation 3 and 4, and Xbox 360 and Xbox One on September 22 2015.

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On the one hand, a big step forward for the series in terms of representing diversity in football. On the other hand, it opens up the internet to a whole new range of gifs posted by giggling, sweaty adolescents of a female footballer's head in the groin of another  :facepalm:

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Can we have guys vs girls? Then Anita can tell us how sexist that is!

All joking aside I think this will be a nice feature! But they really should upgrade the career modes.

 

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN! 

WHITE KNIGHTS UNITE!

 

MIIIIIIISSSSOGYNY!

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Will it have breasts physics like DOA? 

 

I'm not interested in playing those teams, barely play national selections, but hey, if people want it, it's good they have it. Lets hope they keep it up, and add more teams later on.

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I just want a more interesting and in depth career mode, they need to focus less on ultimate team and more on the experience as a solid simulator for true fans. This is a nice feature for the female football fans. I wonder if the womens teams will feel different to use.

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Will it have breasts physics like DOA? 

 

I'm not interested in playing those teams, barely play national selections, but hey, if people want it, it's good they have it. Lets hope they keep it up, and add more teams later on.

 

They can't even make the physics on a single ball work properly, how do you think they're gonna do 44 individual breasts jiggling simultaneously?

 

But in all all seriousness, i'm glad this is a thing. Might even boost the popularity of women's football, who knows.

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Awesome! Most importantly, it looks like it isn't half-assed and they really worked on it. I'm always happy to see that if developers are willing to do things like this that they do it the right way and put a lot of work into it and not just to check off the boxes of diversity simply to appease people.

 

Also, for a sports game, this seems like an actual somewhat meaningful addition to the game, lol most sports games have yearly additions that are like "graphics are slightly better and we've 'tweaked' things, buy the game and DLC now."
 

Can we have guys vs girls? Then Anita can tell us how sexist that is!

 

Lol, you may be joking but you're not too far off, knowing Anita and Jonathan McIntosh at this point, they will just find a way to find this sexist or whatever term they want to call it this time. I'm fairly certain they won't applaud this as being some sort of improvement but will trash it for whatever moronic reason they can pull out of their butts just to get attention again. In fact, I find it funny how they never come out and are proud of improvements for apparent issues that they have been whining about for years.

 

It reminds me of a more recent event with them when the writer of Dying Light wrote about really wanting to drop tropes of female characters and want to make a powerful female character and all that, you could clearly tell they had some sort of inspiration from Feminist Frequency videos and they had a passion to address it. Then like a day after the game released Anita tweeted (without even having any time to play the game) "Dying Light has a Damsel in Distress storyline. Dear game developers, it’s 2015 aren’t you embarrassed by this yet?!" ... I mean, is she serious with this tweet? Nothing is ever good enough for them, they just go in circles and contradict themselves, and Anita and Jonathan have just become a complete joke at this point because of it - I bet the developers were so pissed at that statement as well. You can't please Sarkeesian & McIntosh, and they don't want to be pleased - and it's abundantly clear at this point.

Edited by BlindMango
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