FIFA 15: 10 Brand New Features To Make It The Best Ever

4. A More Pressurised Penalty Environment Based On Heart Rate

Is there a more stressful experience in football than watching your team take a penalty? As football fans we've all been there. Whether it's a crucial spot-kick in the last ten minutes of the game or, worse still, a shootout, supporters all share the experience of sitting literally on the edge of your seats with baited breath. For the player actually taking the penalty, the stress must be worse still. Yet the FIFA franchise doesn't adequately do justice to just how pressure-filled these moments are. Sure, you can turn vibration on to make your controller rumble before unleashing your shot, but EA could do a lot more. In the next-gen version of FIFA 14, EA introduced a new feature called 'Living Worlds', which made the crowd come to life like never before with living and breathing sidelines and terraces. We feel this can be incorporated into penalty situations. If you're taking a penalty, for example, the opposition crowd should be whistling and jeering - the noise of it deafening. The kick-taker needs to be more distracted by this environment, and taking a penalty should be anything but calm and composed. A number of videogames in the past have deployed a heart rate monitor which dictates how well your perform in stressful situations. In shoot-em up games for example the reticule of a gun will sometimes sway from side to side to replicate the shooter's heartbeat to make hitting a target more difficult. If EA did something similar, and, say for example made the camera sway up and down to portray the rapid heart rate of a penalty taker as a chorus of boos rains down on him, taking a penalty would be all that more of a challenge. The better the kick-taker's penalty kick rating, the less these stress simulations effect his performance.