EA Sports FC 24 Has First-Person Refs — Next Stop: First-Person Harry Kane?

FC 24 has a new first-person referee perspective you may see in cutscenes for bookings and free kicks, but where might this go in future games? Inside the virtual heads of the footballers themselves, EA Sports has suggested.

As you’ll know if you’ve read IGN’s EA Sports FC 24 hands-on, or checked out our 13 Things to Know feature, FC 24’s new first-person perspective lets you see the dishing out of cards from inside the referee’s head. You might even see the referee paint the pitch for free kick ball and wall placement, as they often do in real life.

In an interview with IGN, senior game design director and lifeline Man City fan Matt Prior said EA Sports’ meetings with football broadcasters had led to the developer employing an “innovate versus emulate” philosophy, which essentially means the studio is free to do things the broadcasters never would, such as a first-person ref cam.

“That’s one thing they would absolutely do if they could,” Prior said. “And then looking forward to the future, maybe we play a replay where Harry Kane scores a goal and you see exactly what it was like inside Harry Kane’s head, because they would 100% do that if they could get the tech working.”

Obviously in real-life football a player cam would inhibit movement and playstyle, so a first-person Kane cam is unlikely any time soon. EA Sports, however, is not so inhibited. “That’s an example of where we might want to innovate versus emulating, the dream being that what becomes standard in TV broadcasts was what we were doing two or three years ago,” Prior said.

However, Prior was keen to stress that even as it considers adding unrealistic presentation features to FC, it will never mess with the normal broadcast perspective, which shows the pitch as you see it on telly during the bulk of a match.

“You don’t try and put gimmicks in the gameplay space,” Prior said. “You keep that gameplay twitch experience as clean as possible. Innovate outside of that. Even if they [broadcasters] could put a camera in a player’s head, they would never just show the game from that perspective. It would always be replays or post-match analysis or that kind of thing. So it was interesting to see that they have a similar kind of philosophy around, don’t mess with the core experience.”

While EA Sports FC 24 does retain the standard gameplay perspective of previous FIFA games, it layers on augmented reality-style stats during breaks in play, such as win probability as a keeper is getting ready for a goal kick, and top-five most-fatigued players during a throw-in.

EA Sports FC 24 also adds women players to Ultimate Team for the first time, a change EA is very much proud of. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch version is finally running on the Frostbite game engine, with a full-fat Ultimate Team experience.

Image credit: James Worsfold/Getty Images

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].