FIFA 10 Interview

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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.

So what are the fans telling you?

Rutter: Fans are telling us that the game plays well but there's still stuff that needs to be figured out. They're telling us things like lofted through balls aren't great, that they wanted a practice arena so we put one in. That they didn't want scripted sequences so we took some of those out and we'll continue to do that.

They told us that free kicks were predictable so we started working on that and now we've got our Create a Set Piece editor. They told us that Manager Mode had some authenticity problems and that they wanted some focus on that so we did. There's also some other stuff that I can't talk about.

We hear Manager Mode is a big fan favourite?

Rutter: It is. Outside of me playing someone online or me playing you round my house, it's the most popular game mode. We hear overwhelmingly on our forums it's the thing that people want us to focus on so we're going to do that.

I think if you buy a game and it costs a lot more money - and bearing in mind not many people have got a lot of money these days - you want something that's going to last you a long time.

Manager Mode is our single-player depth mode and so it should be a good single-player, in-depth mode.

You mentioned people being tight of money and how you want to make FIFA play differently this year. Is that something you deliberately go out to do every year - give players a different experience from the previous year, their money's worth?

Rutter: Pretty much. The bedrock of EA Sports has been authenticity. Being able to buy the game because it's got the new Liverpool squad and the new Liverpool kits is one part of it and I think a lot of people buy FIFA just off the back of that.

There's another part to FIFA which is making a really good game - that's kind of what our team's about. It's not just about sports authenticity. That's a really important part of it but I think if you make a really good game then people will come and play it whether they're into sports or not. We're seeing that in North America at the moment, which is pretty cool and makes me happy.

The fact of it is, I want to give people a reason to buy our game because it's good, because it's different and because there's a reason to buy other than the kits.

The Create a Set Piece editor looks fantastic...

Rutter: Yeah it's cool. Our set pieces were a little bit stale, so we wanted to inject some realism in it. We see it every week when we watch the telly; some team will do something totally crazy to do with a set piece and we think 'wow that's interesting, how do we get that into our game?'

Real football is the inspiration for what we do so we wanted to do something similar. A bit like custom team tactics last year - that was an internal tool - it was a case where it was like, 'we've got to get this out and in to people's hands because it's too cool'.

How important is online for FIFA as a franchise going forward?

Rutter: I think online is very important. We have a ridiculous number of people playing FIFA online every day.

When the community guys were over in Vancouver it was during the Champions League final and we went from 40,000 people playing FIFA online to zero in the space of five minutes when the game kicked off.

Then at half-time it went back up again to 20,000, then back down to zero for the second half and then back up again to 45,000 at the end of that match. So we have a TV in the office now so we can spot server outages, see who's playing and where.

We've had almost 300 million games of FIFA played online since launch and it's not let up. It's just constant. That's really nice and yeah, we'd be idiots not to do more online stuff.

Andy Robinson