The best version of FIFA 22 won’t be on PC

The PC version of the upcoming FIFA 22 will be missing certain features available on the latest generation of consoles and Google’s Stadia streaming platform. The PC version will be comparable to the “last-generation” console versions on PS4/Xbox One.

Promotional materials for the newly announced game highlight “groundbreaking new HyperMotion gameplay technology,” which purportedly “combines Advanced 11v11 Match Capture and proprietary machine learning technology to deliver the most realistic, fluid, and responsive football experience… unlocking the raw emotion, passion, and physicality of the world’s game.” Unfortunately for PC players, though, that AI-powered animation is available “only on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Stadia,” publisher EA says.

The missing features for PC players are somewhat reminiscent of last year’s FIFA 21. For that release, console players got a free update on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S that added advanced features like ball deformation and special camera angles. Those updates never came to the PC version of the game, though, a situation Executive Producer Aaron McHardy told Eurogamer was part of an effort to keep the PC minimum specs down “so that we can open the doors and be inclusive to everybody who wants to play FIFA.”

“When we looked at what generation to put the PC game on, we looked at our fans and what capabilities they had with the hardware they have,” McHardy told Eurogamer last year. “And we have that information to understand what the power of the PCs out there in the world are. And when we looked at that, in order to run the [PS5/Xbox Series] game, our min spec would have been at a spot that would have left a lot of people out in the cold, not being able to play the game.” The same situation likely applies to the PC version of FIFA 22.

But FIFA 21 was in a bit of an awkward position last year because it launched on PC and consoles just over one month before the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S were available. This year, all versions of the game will be launching simultaneously on October 1, but the PC version will lag well behind its current-generation console counterparts released the same day.

This lack of feature parity between PC and console FIFA players has happened in previous generations, too. Back in 2013, the PC versions of FIFA were missing many features found in the Ignite-engine-powered PS4/Xbox One games (2014’s FIFA 15 would fix this state of affairs). Before that, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions were ahead of the PC until 2011’s FIFA 12.

EA says that FIFA 22 requires an Athlon X4 880K / Intel Core i3-6100 or better, Radeon HD 7850 / GeForce GTX 660 or better, and 8GB of RAM.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1779590