Footballers Wearing Body Cameras Looks Like FIFA From The Future

1. FC Köln vs. AC Milan | Highlights | Innovation Match with Body Cams and Mic’d Up Players

Maybe I have simply played too much FIFA, but everything about that—especially the pumping arms—made me think, hey, this is surely something that we’ll see one day in FIFA, even if it’s just in a singleplayer game mode.

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It wouldn’t be a radical departure for the series; the game’s ‘Pro’ camera settings have been around for years now, and were created to provide a more ‘realistic’ experience. You can see it below and compare it to the footage above (especially when the player sprints, drawing the camera angle in close), but note that controlling an entire team using the ‘Pro’ camera like this is madness, and that it’s most useful when you’re only controlling a single player at a time:

Fifa 17 online highlights (3rd person pro cam)

You may be thinking, how can you hope to play a sports game in first-person mode? Surely playing a video game on a 2D screen can’t possibly recreate the experience of playing a sport that makes full use of your peripheral vision and 360-degree hearing? And would indeed make playing the game much more difficult?

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To that I would say, you’re right! You’d need all kinds of complex indicators to indicate passes and crosses, and football has so much running and looking away from the ball that it would make positioning a nightmare. I would also say that I don’t care, because NFL 2K did it and as hard (and even broken in parts!) as it was, it also a huge amount of fun, and one of the features fans remember most fondly about the series, even after all these years:

NFL 2k5 (2k17) First Person Football mode 60fps 16:9 1440p on PC PCSX2 (PS2 emu)

Sure, a first-person mode would make runs and a lot of defending almost impossible, and even make me slightly sick with all that head wobble and pumping arms, but if a FIFA game can ever add a first-person mode like that—dragging us away from its usual TV-presenter viewpoint and into the field itself—it would still rule, if only for the spectacle.

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