Cricket, it’s an iconic and historic sport, and one that manages to consistently fuel hatred for the Poms every time The Ashes roll round (5-0 clean sweep FTW!). It’s about the baggy green, the pride of representing your country in the ultimate ‘gentleman’s sport’. And, come March, it’s going to be all about the ICC World Cup.

Ricky Ponting International Cricket 2007 (RPIC 07) has been taken under the wing of developers Codemasters, who have brought the game completely in-house (RPIC 05 was out-sourced to Swordfish). This has allowed them to do some truly awesome things. How do I know all this? Well, I was lucky enough to be invited to their studio in England, where I spent a lot of time getting to know this new beast. Straight of the bat (tee hee), Codies are completely aware of the faults of RPIC 05. The entire game engine has been stripped back and remade – the lighting system is completely new and allows for real-time effects such as haze and glare and seeing each stadium during different daylight conditions is very cool. You can almost imagine being there.

The game itself is being presented to complement the televised coverage of the World Cup, so the front end of the game, all the menus, logos and branding will be presented just like you’ll see it on TV, including the voice of Tony Greig as commentator. There’s also one huge improvement this time round: fully licensed names, uniforms and teams. No more delving into sub-menus to try and actually get a real life cricketer (although some of the made up names in RPIC 05 were quite funny).

Another major update has been made to the AI of teams. Much of the frustration of RPIC 05 happened when trying to tease out the opposition – all they ever did was play it safe, even if they were 50 runs or more behind in the closing moments of the match. For RPIC 07, there are many improvements to elements such as training, field settings, deliveries and ball detection. But perhaps more importantly, the opposing team will now actually start to take risks if they’re down in runs (just like in real life). The quote we were given for the new AI: “In this new game, the AI will really take you on!” And we can’t wait to test that out.

Diving straight into the game itself, the amount of options threaten to overwhelm you. There is of course the option to play a quick match but there’s also the fact that full tournament play will be available for up to 16 players. Yep, you’ll be able to have all the teams from the World Cup playing and vying for a virtual victory. Then there’s Coaching Mode, which focuses strongly on tactics and getting you to start at the basics of cricket and work your way up. Codies were very vocal in their admittance that this was a feature sorely lacking in the previous title, and that many new players felt a little confused by this whole ‘cricket thing’. But not only that, coaching should also be beneficial for cricket experts, as it will give you a strong idea of what the game is capable of and how to pull off a lot of the new moves.

Every single game mode will be available over Xbox Live and the leaderboards will use the same ranking system as the ICC – so you can see that there’s a real partnership going on here. Additionally, you will now be able to save multiplayer matches between overs – so you can keep those rivalries going as you break for lunch or even days at a time.

Whilst perusing the massive studios, I managed to catch sight of some pretty cool stuff. First up was the facial animation and head model area, where Ricky Ponting and Brian Lara were subjected to some hilarious facial poses. Codies have scanned over 500 heads and faces in the need to cover as many heads as possible in readiness for whichever teams are included in the World Cup. These realistic heads have in turn been linked to a much more realistic animation system that is actually very contextual.

For the animation of individual players, many small pieces of animation are able to be connected together so that each situation can yield a different result. I saw a fielder quickly scoop the ball and return it. On another run, he paused slightly as the player decided which end to throw the ball to. Yes, you read that right – you can now throw the ball to both ends and this is controlled by the player, which promises to give you even more options and minute control over how games progress. But back to the animations – they just look incredibly smooth and realistic, and this carries over into the unique ‘back patting’ congratulatory cut scenes for particular moments in the game (bowled out, won the match etc.).

Another cool addition is the fact that the stats for your team (and individual members) will actually fluctuate throughout each match. If you’re consistently awesome, your confidence will increase and so will your stats for things like speed, accuracy and the like. Concordantly, suffer from a bad slump and you’ll find your confidence and stats take a nose dive. This happens to the opposing team as well (even if CPU controlled) which gives us hope that matches will be real nail-biters and much more like in real life.

There’s a heap more that RPIC has to offer, and the above features only scratch the surface of what I managed to discover about the game.

Continue onto part two of this preview, where we go hands on with the game and talk about achievements, the new fielding system and much, much more...