What FIFA 13 Wii U does and doesn’t have
Compared to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, FIFA 13 on Wii U is kind of a mixed bag. You won’t be getting the First Touch system and the FIFA Street skill system, among other touches made to features such as the Player Impact Engine, tactical defending and precision dribbling.
According to producer Matt Prior:
“Some of the later improvements on 13 we weren’t able to get into the game. So we’ve got version one. They’ve got version two.”
The team took around fourteen months to build FIFA 13. 80 percent of the time was spent on building the game’s foundation, while the other twenty was used to add in new features. That’s why the Wii U title is lacking compared to the other console release.
“It was a challenge. Because it’s something that’s been written for a different machine there’s a lot of work getting it to work. There are different processors, CPUs and different libraries. One of the challenges is we have to pick a point in time where the code base is stable and bring it over. That’s probably the most challenging thing.”
“We can’t take a feature they’re working on because we get it working and they change it. We get it working and they change it, alongside all the challenges we already have. It’s not technically feasible. Looking forward we could probably get parity now. But year one is always the most difficult because you’re laying the foundation. In terms of the game, if we’re making FIFA 14 on the 360, we’ve got a solid platform and we know what we’re working on. We can devote most of our time to new features. There’s nothing that needs doing. You can just build on top of it. With us, the vast majority of our time was building that foundation.”
Another element not included in FIFA 13 Wii U is the “FIFA Ultimate Team” mode, which allows users to trade virtual cards with each other. Unfortunately, this couldn’t make it in since the system’s online is in its “infancy”.
“We don’t have Ultimate Team, purely and simply because Nintendo’s online is in its infancy. It’s building. FUT took five years to appear on 360 and PS3. They’re very complex features. It’s potentially something we could do further down the line. But in terms of initially getting the foundation set, that wouldn’t have been technically feasible, because it is such a complex mode.”
These points are definitely a collective downer, but it should be noted that the Wii U game does have its strongpoints. It looks and runs well at sixty frames per second, uses the GamePad in a number of ways. The controller sees interesting utilization in the Manager Mode, for instance, which can be particularly helpful for casual gamers.
“We know there are a lot of casual gamers out there who love football, and by virtue of loving football are into FIFA. I mean, gone are the days when you had to be a gamer to appreciate games, right? Messi looks like Messi now. Anyone who loves football can relate to it. But if you’re a non-gamer up until this point you haven’t been able to interact with it because you got on and your son or your brother hammered you eight nil. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience. Now, they can hop on and by virtue of Manager Mode have fun but not that pressure of twitch. We’ve seen a lot of games for the new console, they just throw inventory on there. It’s not really a game changer in what they’ve done with the GamePad. Ours is, particularly for a more casual demographic.”
Good news: even though the GamePad doesn’t have any processing power, using the controller in FIFA 13 won’t hurt the engine’s performance in any way.
Prior explained how the team made this happen:
“When we first saw the device we thought, okay, twin screen, we can do different views, maybe a player’s eye view of replays, that kind of thing. One of the challenges we have is there’s no processing power in the actual GamePad. So if you’re showing two screens, you’re rendering it twice and that would hit frame rate. It’s okay to show an exact replication on the GamePad. That’s when you see our game gameplay view. That doesn’t hit the frame rate. But if were to do a different view, then it would, so you’d half the frame rate. One of our key things is we wanted to retain that nice fluid 60 frames a second gameplay experience. That was paramount. We didn’t want to sacrifice that under any circumstances. That’s why we’ve got the same view on the GamePad for the gameplay view and then the other tabs are more tactical, like the radar and the subs. That’s why we couldn’t do a completely different view. We wanted to retain that gameplay.”
Prior also confirmed that even though you won’t be able to have two people playing on different GamePads in local multiplayer, it’s something the team would like to consider for future iterations:
“You can play GamePad GamePad against each other online. But unfortunately it’s technically impossible to have GamePad GamePad on the console together because the console doesn’t support it. Nintendo doesn’t support two GamePads currently. It’s something they’re looking for in the future, but right now you can’t do it. Potentially for the next version it would be good.”
To wrap up, Prior stated:
“We’ve done a great job of building features that change it with the GamePad. I don’t think if you looked at this you’d think it was an 80/20 split. That’s one of the pressures of working on new hardware. You really have to be buttoned up on features and make sure you make decisions you believe in and you know are game changers. You don’t have the ability to do something and then, oh no, that doesn’t really work, let’s revisit it, which you do when you’re building off of a solid foundation. There’s a tonne of stuff you can do on the Wii U you can’t do on PS3 and Xbox 360. Yes, we don’t have some of those later features, but by the same token, we’ve got Manager Mode, the new set piece, touch screen shooting and passing. So it balances itself out in may respects.”
