FIFA 13 – PC Mini Preview

July 23, 2012 by Tom Mills

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Also on display during our second day at the studio was the PC version of FIFA 13, running on a pretty beefy rig and a three monitor display. Yes, that does say three.

The setup was certainly eye catching and allowed for a full view of the pitch at all times. Obviously you’d need a powerful PC to run it that way, but the game didn’t really seem to suffer and it allowed you to see things you might otherwise not, particularly when penalties were taken as the wider display allowed you to see the ref and the inactive goalkeeper standing towards the touchline, small details, but it looked incredible.

Sticking with that theme, there’s been work done to the UI to optimise for dual displays, which was apparently a gripe last year, and overall everything in that regard has a much more PC “feel” with icons being updated to be more PC friendly. Work has also been done to get the game running better on lower spec machines and part of that includes the return of “window mode” which we’re told featured in last years demo but was removed because of a potential exploit. That exploit has been plugged and window mode returns.

The game is still a full console parity and will include everything on offer on the 360 and PS3 including FUT. On the pitch everything was playing pretty smoothly and the Impact Engine updates and First Touch Control were present and correct. I’d be lying if I said I could tell the difference between the PC version and the console, especially as we were playing with wired 360 pads.

That isn’t the only way to play though. FIFA 13 on PC now features Keyboard and Mouse support, which also makes a couple of cool new features possible. Firstly on the defensive side of things, you’ve got click to man mark.It’s pretty simple, you hold a modifier, then click on the opponent that you want to man mark and the nearest CPU controlled player will pick him up.

Secondly, you’ve got click and drag runs. When attacking you again hold a modifier, at which point the AI takes over for you temporarily. With the modifier held you click on a player and drag to draw a run out. Simple. They don’t have to be linear runs, they can be curved. For this year at least, those features are offline only for the sake of balancing, but that could change in the future.

We’ll keep this one brief as we’re covering most stuff under the 360/PS3 umbrella, but we managed to have a chat with Ian Jarvis whilst we were there and figured that the PC guys would find these little bits interesting.