PX360: Is this the best version of FIFA ever made? If so what makes it so?
I think so and judging by the success the game is having in Europe with over 1.2 million units sold in Week 1 a lot of consumers think so too. We have a team of passionate people who worked hard on this game and this year we focused on making over 250 game play improvements that collectively have made a huge difference to the gameplay. Instead of focusing on one big feature we decided to make all of the subtle improvements that consumers and media have been requesting and this has resulted in a very authentic and fluid gameplay experience.
PX360: Tell us about the insane online play where you can go head to head with 19 other online gamers.
We established 5 v 5 last year and the plan has always been to create a virtual 11 vs 11 football game for the World Cup in 2010. While that has always been an ambitious project we felt this year we could push pretty hard to reach 10 vs 10. Alan Poon and Wilson Venhola, who together form the core team of our online team on the PS3, were adamant we could achieve 10 vs 10 this year. So we gave them a bit of a free rein to go into uncharted waters to try to accomplish something that’s never been done before in a sports game. This is quite an achievement. It feels like Be A Pro: 10 vs 10 Online Team Play is the next great frontier in sports gaming.
With this feature we wanted to make sure that we supported the two types of players who we believe want to experience 10 vs 10 –-Casual players who just want to go out and tear around the pitch like school kids and have a lot of fun without taking it to seriously, as well as those people who want to get together in groups of friends regularly, within the discipline of having to play a position and have regular games. Our vision for Be A Pro: 10 vs 10 Online Team Play long term is to create a structured, organized system to support user run clubs within FIFA. Longer term I see the time when you have managers, an economy system whereby you might be able to buy or sell real human players online and have contracts with clubs, where playing FIFA becomes an alternate reality to the real world of football. The day will come where there are virtual equivalents of David Beckham or Ronaldinho, from different parts of the world, who are expert FIFA gamers and clubs are clamoring to recruit them to represent their side, just like the real world.
PX360: From the demo we know that FIFA 09 looks amazing, can you explain the process you went through to get the game so graphically impressive?
Our art team does great work every year and continually improves the look and feel of the game. This year the team did a lot of work on regionalizing stadiums and crowds so that every stadium and crowd felt different from the next one. Based on feedback we received from the community we added a lot more star heads of popular players so more and more players look true-to-life. We put in a larger variety of body types for the players. We felt like our players did not look athletic enough so we put a lot of effort into making our player model look more physically accurate. So now Peter Crouch looks like a tall, skinny player on the pitch in the game. A lot of work went into night lighting. The self shadowing of the players and night lighting really gives the game that electric feel, and you feel in the moment when you are playing night games.
