A More Beautiful Game

One thing that FIFA ‘09 does struggle with on a graphical front is, it has to be said, the depictions of some of the footballers. While the likes of Rooney, Gerrard and co. are well rendered and easily recognisable, other pros are more generic. I swear in one match I saw a pair of footballing twins dance in celebration after a goal.

It’s an understandable problem of course – there are so many footballers that not all likenesses could possibly be incorporated, but it doesn’t make the only approximately correct faces any less disappointing.

Below we take a look at the effect of shaders in FIFA ‘09, before doing a quick round up to show the cumulative effect of all the graphical settings in the game.

Shaders

Shaders can control a variety of things in a game, often massively effecting the lighting in a game or altering the depth of field. With FIFA ‘09 there’s no explanation of the slider though, just three position on it labelled as Zero, One and Two.


The differences between the first two settings, Zero and One, are pretty negligible. The pitch looks more like neon Astroturf than real grass and there’s very little in terms of depth or detail given to the scene.

Bump it up to high though and the game suddenly looks a lot better, with plenty of tone and detail splattered on the pitch. The effect also hits the characters, making them look less bland and plain. The difference between High and Medium (sorry, One and Two) is pretty small from a performance front too, so pushing for the top is definitely advised.

Overall

As we said before, the actual impact of these settings individually is very, very small and it’s a lot better to see the combined effect of the settings. Thus, though it isn’t something we’d normally do, you can see exactly that below. The ‘Worst’ picture has all the settings set to low, while the opposite is true of the ‘Best’ picture.


Here we can see that it isn’t only the grass which changes with the different setting, and the amount of shadow being cast on the pitch can also have a huge effect on the game. By pushing all the settings up to full in fact, you can actually make FIFA ‘09 look quite good for the most part.

It is a little disappointing that the look of FIFA ‘09 is let down in a few key areas because there are other parts of the game which really quite good. The physics and player collisions are really top notch a lot of the time for example, so to see that ruined by some dodgy DOF effects and crowds flatter than a lame super hero can kind of knock FIFA’s appeal a little, well, flat.