FIFA 12 preview: new features are radical and unexpectedly game-altering

We're playing FIFA 12. It’s a pre-alpha (translation: very early) version of EA Sports’ annual football jamboree and we’re restricted to Chelsea or Arsenal. This FIFA 12 is on PS3 and Xbox 360, although we’ll mostly concern ourselves with the PS3 version. This is a very exciting moment: if FIFA 12 follows the form of previous games, it won’t be out until late October. By then the world will be fully ready and waiting for the seemingly small but actually quite radical and unexpectedly game-altering new FIFA 12 features we’re hands-on with.

The ball breaks to Fabregas at about the half-way line. He’s in space so turns neatly, using L1 and the left stick. Looking up he sees Walcott wide (we always look wide first) but the winger is marked. Nasri, though, is in space, but quite central. No matter, Fabregas slots a pass into his feet. And that’s when it gets interesting. Nasri collects the ball under pressure but manages to get it under control, shielding the ball briefly with a hold of L1 and then, lightning fast, turns and switches direction, all the time moving the ball at his feet under close control.

He drops a shoulder and John Terry, who had been standing off him, tracking his move, lunges in with a sliding tackle. Narsi pokes the ball wide of him into space. Terry’s momentum takes him into the Frenchman and with no ball there he takes out the Arsenal midfielder’s front leg and up-ends him spectacularly, leaving him on the ground, sore but happy to have picked up a free-kick in a dangerous position.

The changes from FIFA 11 to FIFA 12 demonstrated here seem pretty minor – close control (‘precision dribbling’ in the EA Sports’ FIFA 12 marketing speak), real-time collisions (‘player impact engine’) and a new defensive system that enables you to track and time tackles (‘tactical defending’). But they aren’t. They give you the freedom and control over FIFA that if you’re anything like us you’ve spent years screaming at the screen for.

The new ability to control the ball at your feet in tight situations builds on the ‘360’ control brought in with FIFA 09 that added multi-directional dribbling. And while that was a quantum leap for football games it still meant a frustratingly wide turning circle. This new, smaller, change finally makes it actually work, giving you the ability to turn on a six-pence. No longer do you have to push the ball into space or continually work it out wide to get enough room to do a trick or put a cross in. Now you can take the ball – Barca-style – within a group of players and keep control, shielding (if your player is strong enough), dribble (if he’s good enough) or simply shift it away from the opposition and get a pass in.

This adds real control and, believe us, will change the way you play FIFA. To start with we did nothing but knock the ball into feet, twisting and turning and enjoying our new ability but squeezing the game into the centre. But gradually you start switching up and adding in wide runs and crosses as well, or using the close control to work the ball wide much later.

This works especially well with Chelsea where the beast that is Drogba can hold the ball up, shielding it from defenders, and wait for a late-running Anelka or Lampard to slip the ball to. As FIFA 12 producer David Rutter told us in our exclusive FIFA 12 interview, “It’s opened up areas of the pitch that weren’t there and because it’s satisfying and nice you want to explore them."

This freedom has now been extended to defending as well. Our brains have been slowly hard-wired from long years of FIFA-PES-FIFA into a certain way of defending – running headlong about the pitch, switching players and holding down ‘sprint’ and ‘tackle’ to laser-guide a player into the opposition and win the ball. It’s clumsy and has always felt wrong, especially as the games themselves have improved and added features to make it unnecessary or potentially foul-ridden. But it’s always been there and it’s always worked. And, let’s face it, even the best players spend time just be trying to get close and stab a tackle button repeatedly to get the ball.

Defending has certainly never been an art, just a way to steal the ball back. Well there’s a new system now and while it isn’t perfect yet it has the potential to make defending a much more interesting part of the game. The idea came from EA Sports ice hockey games, where defenders were free to wait and track a player with the ball before making the tackle. Translated into FIFA 12 you ‘lock-on’ to the player with the ball and can track him, judging and altering your distance from him before attempting to time a tackle.

While we’re not sure how well we were doing this (and David Rutter is promising a quick tutorial at the start of the game to make sure everyone ‘gets’ it) it did cure our need to sprint around, saving energy (which we’ll need – see ‘and the other FIFA 12 preview features’) and making it a more tactical and tense game. Making this new style of defending part of the fabric of the game – advanced players have been using a version of this way of defending anyway – will be a challenge. But right now the feeling of  getting it right – waiting and timing a tackle - is satisfying in a way that barging in and running away with the ball magically at your feet never was. Once you’ve played like this there’s no going back.

The sheer liberating enjoyment that close control and ‘tactical’ defending bring to FIFA 12 are amplified, and arguably made possible, by the much-trailed new ‘player impact engine’. EA Sports has built into FIFA 12 a physics engine that tracks where a player is on the pitch. “All the time every part of a player is being harvested by the engine and it knows where every limb is at any time.” Simply, this means the end of player animations ruining the flow of the game (those button smashing-inducing moments that David Rutter compares to continuity errors in movies where you see someone in a hat in one scene and without in the next).

It also means a much more physical, visceral experience on the pitch. So now when you knock a ball past a player and they take you out you’ll go flying, or stumble or ride-through it or whatever it is that a player of your height and weight should do under that challenge. And while there are some problems to iron out (players have a habit of running into each other a falling over off the ball which can be quite amusing) and some balances to get right it gives you much more control and adds to the fluidity of both how the close control and the defending now work.

It also has knock-on effects to injuries (the engine enables FIFA 12 to track the various knocks a player gets, knowing if he keeps knacking his knee) and fatigue levels – although in our FIFA 12 hands-on we found that the new defending and close control systems reduced our fatigue levels hugely because we weren’t holding sprint down half-the time.

While the game doesn’t on the face of it look or play any differently (in the sense of you press the same buttons to make the same things work) these three changes taken together really do radically alter how you play and how you feel about playing. It’s moves FIFA 12 even further away from its ‘arcade’ roots, creating a more tactical and realistic version of the game.

And while we’re promised lots more FIFA 12 revelations to come (see 10 more things we want from FIFA 12) these will be the backbone to gameplay: to what you do with pad in hand game in, game out. And while we don’t want to overstate this, or get too giddy with praise – EA Sports still has work to do to bed-in and tweak the impact engine and make the defending fundamental to play – it’s hard to see how FIFA 12 can be anything but the best football game ever made. Again.

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