It's not just some throwaway mid-year instalment
This spring's FIFA World Cup tie-in for Xbox 360 isn't just a quick cash-in, producer Matthew Prior has assured OXM. The inevitable FIFA 15 will build on its revisions and experiments, presumably including the 'Story of Finals' challenge system, which offers objectives based on the progress of the tournament in real life.

This isn't the first time FIFA has offered such a feature, but the developer wants to deliver challenges at a much faster rate this time round. "We'll have a producer monitoring the games, setting the scenarios, and we'll have data collection guys providing the squads, QA guys testing it and online guys propping it," Prior explained.

"We're aiming to have [challenges] ready around an hour after each game finishes. We had this feature in the last World Cup but it was a day later, which for me meant that it lost that passion and emotion."

Though largely the same game as FIFA 14, the new FIFA introduces a handful of new gameplay features - corner tactics, for instance, allow you to set up a team mate near the goal posts. Dribbling is allegedly more responsive and penalties, simpler to perform. There are over 100 new animations, new cutscenes that show crowd reactions, and a new online mode, Road to Rio.

Read about the additions in full here. A demo is available, should you need any further convincing.

"We take FIFA 14 and we build on top of it so when we come out we are the best FIFA game out there, and then any future iterations of the game would take us as a starting point," Prior added. "So the intention is that it all evolves into future iterations. However, we'll obviously monitor feedback, perception and reaction to what we put in, and if there is some universal negativity to something then we'd reassess based on that."