FIFA 15

[Fudge]

What's with the Barcelona badge taking up half the screen? Seems like a waste.

[Meacon Keaton]

Tugay.

You are!

[Cymbols]

What's with the Barcelona badge taking up half the screen? Seems like a waste.

Probably for if you're playing against another person, so their team will be on the other side.

[Gazz]

Instructions

A - AI sprints around at random

B - AI runs around at random

C - AI walks around at random

[Dan]

Two posts, one for FIFA and one for FUT...

GOALKEEPERS

In a process that's taken EA 2 years, goalkeeper behaviour and AI has been completely rewritten and keepers are now able to do two things that they couldn't before. Firstly, they can change their mind. Previously if your goalkeeper made a judgement and acted on it, they were stuck with that decision, leading to instances where it looked like they had lost their mind, but they'd perhaps made the correct decision early on and a change in play caught them out. Think of all those clearances your keeper has made when they were in acres of space, that was because once they'd decided to make a clearance, there was no going back. Now goalkeepers will be able to change their mind and react to changes around them.

Secondly they can now break their animations, which is heavily linked to the first change. The test bed examples we were shown featured FIFA 14 goalkeepers diving towards the top corner as the ball passed across their body. Once the animation had started it had to finish so they could do nothing once their arm was outstretched. Now they'll be able to react, and whilst they might still make a fully stretched dive, they'll also be able to throw an arm back towards the ball and try to stop it.

The keeper changes were the biggest concern for me on the day. We always have to caveat this stuff with "it's unfinished", which it is, but they weren't in a great way. We saw numerous awesome animations and reactions that sadly didn't start until the ball was passing them, which may or may not be a simple fix, but there was plenty of cause for concern. Couple that with the history of big rewrites taking 2 years to bed in (impact engine...) and goalkeepers in FIFA 15 may well be the cause of many complaints. That said, Dave has played a much newer build in a much longer playtest than I have and didn't find them as bad.

• Goalkeeper behaviour has been completely rewritten, in a process that's taken 2 years
• Goalkeepers can change their mind and break animations midway through
• Hands no longer committed to animation
• New save animations

ONLINE/PRO CLUBS

Pro clubs has had some pretty awesome matchmaking changes which are more comparable to certain shooters than FIFA as we know it. Now, when a match is finished, rather than returning the entire team to the dressing room the game will automatically search for, and roll you into, another match based on your current settings. If you want to change your matchmaking settings you can obviously return to the dressing room if you want. This feature will also be put into Online Seasons, so rather than returning to the menu's after each game you'll head straight into the next one automatically.

If you're late getting online and your club is already playing a match you can choose to wait in the dressing room and rather than the team having to come back and get you at the end of their match, you'll be slipped into the matchmaking with them seamlessly. You'll also be able to customise your virtual pros a little more, giving them signature celebrations and changing things like their free kick style.

• Shooter style matchmaking lobbies
• Players can enter dressing room whilst team is currently playing
• More customisation for Virtual Pros
• Round based matchmaking also applies to Seasons

CAREER MODE/TEAM MANAGEMENT

Career Mode info was light, sadly, and leaned slightly on other announcements like the recent Barclays Licensing news. Similarly, team management has had a huge overhaul, which will have a big affect on CM but isn't necessarily a CM feature. The layout is much improved and makes far better use of the space available on screen. Basically, nearly all team management tasks can now be done with fewer clicks and there's a couple of new features too. Player instructions allow you to give players specific instructions before a match starts. Each position has a few options, for example telling your striker to play as a target man or telling your wingers to stay wide or to cut inside.

You can now also save groups of settings (finally!) meaning you can actually set up your Capital One Cup starting 11, along with player instructions and settings and enable it quickly. They're called team sheets and you have 6 slots for them meaning you can pre build various setups for various matches and enable them as needed. The process of putting out a squad full of youngsters for less important matches or cup runs is no longer going to be a pain in the ass. For WAY more detail on the new Team Management stuff, check out Dave's post here.

As you'd expect there will also be some more player storylines and the starting player state for players in matches won't necessarily be the default one, meaning that depending on off the pitch happenings you could start with a pissed off player, although we're yet to see what kind of effect that has on anything.

• New Team Management Layout
• Player Instructions - Target Man etc
• New Team Sheets for saving settings - 6 slots
• Player Search more like FUT
• New storylines and presentation

EASFC

Lastly there are a couple of tweaks to EASFC which are worth mentioning. Firstly the messaging will supposedly be better, so you'll get less crap filling your news feed. Presumably this is to allow people to see and make use of the changes being made for FUT. Secondly you can now access the catalog from anywhere, without having to back out of the mode you're in. Plus the catalog is now contextual, so if you're in CM and you open the catalog, you're going to see the CM items straight away, same goes for all modes.

Here's the nuts and bolts of the new features in FUT 15.

We were at EA recently to take another look at FIFA 15 and part of the presentation focused on FUT. Marcel Kuhn walked us through some of the new features, but it should be noted that we weren't able to try them out properly, it was all just video. For a slightly better explanation of some of these features, check out our interview with Marcel.

CONCEPT SQUADS

All new for FUT 15 are concept squads which allow you to populate your squads with players you don't own to see how they fit. You can now access the entire database of players from the squad building screens, dropping players in and tinkering until you find a squad you're happy with. Any players in the squad that you don't own will show as such and with a single click you can jump to the transfer market to start searching and fill in any gaps. Obviously you can't actually play with concept squads, even offline, but it's a neat way of taking a squad from idea to playable without leaving the game.

SQUAD SHARING

EASFC is now accessible from anywhere in the game. Accessing it within FUT will bring a FUT specific EASFC screen down, so you'll be able to share squads with your friends and see squads shared with you. From there, you can "like" or comment, assuming you have a set of friends that actively check their EASFC feeds. One final application for this is the ability to copy a squad at the end of a match. So lets say you play someone and they have a great team that you'd like to try for yourself or maybe they had a standout player and you want to find out more about them, at the end of the match you can copy the squad straight into your concept squads, any players you already own will populate in the squad and you can tinker with it before searching the transfer market to fill the rest of the squad out and make it playable.

• Add to squads from the entire database of players, without needing to buy
• Different card display for players you already own
• One click from concept squads to begin searching market for a player
• Share squads through EASFC
• Copy squads from online matches straight into concept squads

LOAN PLAYERS

One aspect that many players find frustrating about FUT is player prices. If you're not into buying coins and don't have incredible pack luck chances are when you come up against people using expensive players you get a bit green. To combat that and give everyone the opportunity to make use of the prestige players within FUT EA have introduced player loans. As part of your FUT 15 setup you'll be offered the opportunity to take a loan player straight into your starter squad. There's a slight trade off between player quality and available playtime so if you're offered and choose Ronaldo, he's going to be available to you for less games than if you'd chosen say Lewandowski. Each player has a small blue icon that indicates how many games you have remaining to use them.

From time to time EA will make different loan players available through EASFC which you can take on loan by spending your EASFC currency. It's a smart way of doing things as this is the aspect that makes these players truly accessible to anyone. We've all got bags of EASFC currency stacked up from hours of playtime, so it's nice to have something else to spend it on and not charging you exclusively in coins (which you can also use if you don't want to use EASFCC) means you can bring quality players into your FUT squads essentially for free, albeit for a limited period. If you redeem a player loan through EASFC you can't use that loan again.

• Loan Players are only available for a set number of games
• Player Loan items in EASFC can be redeemed only once
• Free loan upon first FUT login
• Redeem with either coins or EASFCC
• 5 game Messi loan with Ultimate Edition Pre Order

FRIENDLY SEASONS

Friendly Seasons make their way into FUT as a way of tracking your progress in matches with your friends. It's unchanged from Friendly Seasons outside of FUT, but it should still be a good addition.

So that's basically what we know about FUT 15 so far. There IS a transfer market, there are 15 new legends and a few nifty new features.

[Baddar]

GK changes sound positive, but the user controlled keeper will still find a way to be an absolute retard in the 90th minute when the AI needs a goal.

[King Ellis]

Damn, thought for a second that they'd brought 'subs' to Clubs, that is to say joining a match in progress with your team. Maybe for 16!

I'm sure the 1% (and the coin resellers) would complain about the 'loan' system but it's pretty cool and nice to see it's not just micro transaction bait. I say that only caus I have a ton of EASFCC laying around, much to Summ's chagrin. I'd be interested to see how it affects the market for players.

[Baddar]

Doubt it'll affect it too much. The way I'm reading it is once you loan a player once, that's it. You can't loan them again. I think there'd be a significant drop in players' value if you could loan them over and over again.

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

Was browsing for new Ultimate Team squad names and decided my name is going to be Pjanic At The Isco because I'm a sucker for a good pun.

[EddieG]

So there's this footy magazine in Holland which at the (I believe) normal price of a 6 month subscription (63 euros and change), will get you a free copy of Fifa 15 on release day.

I love Holland.

[Dan]

FIFA15 on 360 and PS3 will not have pro clubs.

[Gazz]

No sale

[Jimmy]

What a load of wank.

[King Ellis]

Wow.

I was expecting 'Legacy edition' treatment but for them to take features away? lol, EA indeed.

[Rich]

Hey guys, if you want to play the proper game get a proper consol

[DavidMarrio]

That doesn't even make sense. It's not like it's a ground breaking feature that only next gen can handle.

[Baddar]

Is tournament mode back yet? Was taken out of next-gen FIFA 14.

[Gazz]

FIFA15 will actually just be 'Pong' on a green background.

[Arjen Robben]

That is baffling. I can understand not implement certian features with next-gen games that are new that they don't think could be done on PS3 and 360's, but Pro Clubs was already in the game for about 5 years. Just seems like a spiteful decision more than anything.

[Gazz]

It's basically a 'fuck you, you're not worth the servers, get with the times peasants!'.