Riding on the coattails of its best footy instalment in years, EA's taking a new, admirable stance on FIFA development.
By
the looks of things, this year the publisher's not just sticking a new
number on the box and including the latest kits, but it's inviting fans
to the studio, asking for feedback and basically doing a visibly
determined attempt at topping PES once again.
We recently sat down with FIFA's British producer David Rutter, who shared his enthusiasm for the new game.
Which aspects of 09 did you want to address straight away for FIFA 10?Rutter:For me there are three things - well, four actually. One is to get rid
of all of the little frustrations that are in the game; goalkeeper
errors, trapping errors, some positional weirdness, the odd
miss-pass... all those kind of things just to get a good quality game.
The second thing I wanted to do was make sure the stuff that mattered
most to the people that play our game was addressed as much as
possible. So we spent a great deal of time engaging with our community
members, flying them out to Vancouver, getting them in front of early
builds and asking what mattered to them.
Thirdly, we wanted to
do some really cool work with dribbling. So we've done 360-degree
dribbling this year, we've done skill dribbling and then new physical
play system.
We wanted to give people the ability to express
themselves on the ball better, but we didn't want to obviously break
the game and turn it into FIFA 10: Super Dribbling Year.
Lastly
as far as stuff that we wanted to address from last year, we've started
to really improve Manager Mode, which for me was a little bit
disappointing last year.
I think adopting a strategy like we
have done with our gameplay over the last three/four years, doing a
similar thing with Manager Mode I think we'll start to see some serious
improvements this year and in future years.
Can you elaborate a bit more on the "frustrations" you'd like to get rid of?Rutter:Sure. The frustrations were things we encountered that were repeatable
and annoying. A great example would be lofted through balls, which were
almost an exploit if you knew how to play them.
Imagine your
defenders have gone up for a corner. The corner breaks down and a good
player in this situation would be able to ping a really long ball over
the top of the entire midfield, land it perfectly at the feet of a
striker who'd basically be able to get into a one-on-one situation with
the keeper.
People learnt how to do this in our online ranked games, they'd adjust
their formation and team tactics to support that style of play.
We really needed to figure out how to fix that and it required a
multiple of things. You should be able to make a ball like that but not
100 percent of the time. So we had to incorporate more error into those
type of passes for players who weren't good enough. Also if you're
under pressure it should be harder to do it.
Secondly we needed
to work on defensive priorities. So if John Terry goes up for a corner
you need a kind of Michael Essien hanging back to cover his defensive
duties to make sure it's not possible to have a lone striker left there
to have a field day on the pitch.
Lastly we needed to make sure
that the goalkeepers were better able to cope in those one-on-one
situations. So keepers now come out a lot more aggressively, they make
themselves big and they'll try and get at the ball in those situations.
They can also now tip the ball over the bar better and also scramble
back and scoop the ball off the line if they're chipped.
So a lot of work went into solving that one issue. We're doing a lot of work to solve the online griefing as well.
Exactly how much difference does the 360-degree dribbling make to how you play the game?Rutter:A huge amount although when we first started playing with it it
moderately freaked us out. We're playing it a lot now so it's pretty
natural.
You don't notice the difference as much feel the
difference; it's a lot more fluid, you can get to where you want to get
on the pitch without having to zig-zag there.
So you'll see a
lot less of the switch in-between the turns. It's a lot more
responsive, it's a lot more fluid, it's a lot more natural.
As
an observer it looks nicer too. It's a much more natural, human way of
moving with the ball rather than this diagonal weirdness. It's just
nice to spot a gap between two people and just go to it rather than
zig-zaging.
We've had a couple of guys already have a quick go and able to flick
the ball from one foot to the other, which is pretty cool.
Not
many game companies embrace their fanbase so openly, flying the
community over to play early code etc. What led you to be so hands-on
with the community?Rutter: I've only been with EA
for a couple of years so this for me is normal. I spend a lot of time
on our forums and I think historically EA's probably got a bad name for
itself, pushing out games and not actually engaging with people. We
were a very marketing-led company in previous years I think.
The idea that there are people who play our game a ridiculous amount -
we've had over 25 million games of FIFA played online - to not listen
to those people would be criminal.
So 70 percent of our
effort this year went on refining the gameplay and responding to
feedback. I'm proud to be able to say that, rather than 75 percent of
our effort went on a marketing gimmick that nobody's interested in.