There’s a glitch that is in essentially every single sports video game. It’s one that is ultimately harmless and is really only noticed by the most astute observers. Occasionally, when the action isn’t happening on the screen and players are loitering about, a small group of players will be seen all doing the same thing in perfect harmony. This actually happens in lots of games where there’s a bunch different NPC’s on-screen at once, but it’s most noticeable in a sports game like NBA 2K, Madden, or FIFA.
The reason this happens is that most of these games have a variety of pre-set animations that the game can choose to play at any moment during non-action, and every once in awhile it might choose to play the same animation across multiple different players. The result can be three or four people all doing the exact same thing. It’s a little odd-looking, but it usually doesn’t break the game. However, it does break the illusion of realism, which is something the developers never want.
Since sports games require yearly development, it’s been a fairly slow process to add different animations to each new title. Sports developers usually bring in a couple of athletes and let them perform moves we may see on a pitch, field, or court as an individual. As video games have gotten more advanced those animations have been able to become increasingly complicated, but it was still the same process of only bringing in a couple of people to perform these moves in a vacuum.
“We always have a motion capture in an optical environment where you have, maybe one or two players at just capturing at the same time.” Sam Rivera, EA Sports’ Lead Gameplay Producer told Uproxx. “No more than three, let’s say. And then you tell them, okay, control the ball to the right then shoots to your left. And then they do it, which is good. You get good quality animation, but you don’t get the real football intensity.”
This is why what the developers at EA Sports are attempting with the upcoming FIFA 22 is so impressive. They managed to pull in 22 professional players across the world to play a genuine match and captured it all. These new captures are called “Hypermotion” and they’re supposed to change the entirety of the FIFA experience. Making a sports game is challenging, and while many of them are getting better at making it feel more realistic, the minutiae is often what fails them. That’s not to fault of the developers, because you can only work with what you’re given, but we’re finally approaching a point where the technology is allowing them to clear barriers that once boxed in what a game could be. For FIFA, this has meant reimagining what realism looks like in a soccer game, and diving deeper into the details of movement.
“So the other big part that we did with this data is train some deep neural networks to learn how players approach the ball and create animation in real-time. ” Rivera said. “So basically when you watch football and then let’s say there is a pass that is going going to bounce four meters ahead of you and you’re running to it. How do you make sure you get to the ball with the right angle with the right speed and also at the right moment with the right cadence? So if I am right footed player, and I want to hit with the right like you get a volley or whatever [then] I need to do maybe three small steps and then one longer step between the right motion to hit the ball as with as much power as possible. But if I wanted to do something else — if I wanted to control the ball based on the angle — maybe I can use my left foot. I don’t need a powerful shot. I don’t need my strong foot. So then maybe the way I position myself is different and I do other types of steps and instead of doing three smaller steps and one long one, maybe I do two long ones and one small one. So we created a neural network that learns how players in real life approach the ball…This is something that we really wanted for years because it’s not something that you can easily code.”
Just think about how much detail goes into something as simple as the way a player wants to approach the ball. To make that as realistic as possible there needs to be an incredible amount of data for the developers of FIFA to pull from. With Hypermotion they’re able to pull that data and the result of it is potentially one of the most in-depth animation systems we’re ever going to see. For a long time, it felt like sports video games had maxed out in terms of simulation, that there was no way to truly capture the feel of a match, but maybe we’re on the cusp of new technology pushing them forward yet again.
“Even five years ago,” Rivera said. “Obviously, it was already known how but just knowing the application in FIFA knowing that we will be able to go get 22 players competing against each other, put the data in a neural network and create animation real-time. I would have been shocked. And five years ago I was already doing this job basically. There’s still a lot more and I’m excited about what’s coming next. I cannot talk about details obviously, but there’s a lot of potential.”
It just goes to show that as technology grows video games are only going to get more advanced. Maybe one day the idea of three players all doing the exact same animation at the same time will be a distant memory. When that’s the case we might be able to point to Hypermotion as a catalyst of it.
(@ThonMaker14) 
