FIFA 16 features Female Football players For The First Time

For the first time Electronic Arts' football/soccer franchise FIFA is including female footballers. The sports title will allow players to choose from 12 international teams (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the united States of America) when the new instalment, FIFA 16, lands on September 22. Just as their male equivalent, the women in the game will look and move, like they do on the pitch when representing their nation.

For each team, the initial 11, along with chosen reserves have been facially scanned using the same method applied to the men's game, so photo realistic variants of world player of the year Nadine Kessler, United States all-time leading scorer Abby Wambach, and England skipper Steph Houghton all are definite to feature.

Wambach also spent some time providing feminine-specific motion capture at developer EA Sports' Vancouver HQ, along with a couple of her American squad members sydney Leroux, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe.



Fifa 16 for sure isn't the first football game to feature woman footballers. In 2000, UK studio Silicon Dreams featured women's football in it's Mia Hamm 64 Soccer and UEFA Dream Soccer titles, although both titles reviewed poorly at the time.

In The Guardian interview, series vice-president and general manager David Rutter claims that his unit has been at work to surmount the technical challenges of featuring females in it's football title for a long period.

Two years ago, Rutter told Kotaku that female teams was an idea the studio had thought about. It's natural to wonder, then, whether the procedure of including them was speeded up by last June's backlash against Assassin's Creed: Unity, which saw publisher Ubisoft rebuked for it's unsupportive attitude for the opportunity to create a female protagonist in their co-op mode due to extra work. Rutter takes a firm stance that this is not the cause.

Instead, he claims, three years into this period of consoles, the unit finally has adequate knowledge of PS4 and Xbox One's development systems to revise critical elements of the match engine for women players.



The fundamental gameplay remains indistinguishable to the men's game, although attributes and traits are scaled to other players of the same sex. You will be able to use 80-rated players in the female teams but they're in no way identical to an 80-rated player in the men's league, explained Rutter.  The cologne team (which manages all player data) has been through a lot of women's matches over the last year or so, assembling information and their sentiment on the players, in order to produce these ratings.

This means that for now there'll be no option to pit male players against their female counterparts in matches (as in real life, the sport itself doesn't allow it, but Rutter said if this rule changed then they would consider making it a possibility.) The woman's teams can be used in friendlies both online and offline, in addition to be a bespoke offline tournament mode.



The studio did consider making an all-female Ultimate Team as well as featuring the female teams from football clubs such as Manchester City, but felt it was too much of a reach in this initiative season.

FIFA 16 is hitting the back of the net on multiple platforms in September 2015.