FIFA 07 Q&A - Joe Booth Feature

Realising its own reputation for releasing formulaic annually updated titles, EA has signalled its intentions for the FIFA series with the appointment of franchise debutant Joe Booth as Producer of the current-gen version. Formally working at Ubisoft Paris on titles including Ghost Recon 2, Booth aims to refine the FIFA experience with a range of new features that will be tested this year on the original Xbox, PlayStation2, GameCube, and PSP, before helming the next-gen versions of FIFA 08.

Recently TVG caught up with the Leeds Utd supporter (explaining Booth's near obsession with creating emotion in a football game) to discuss his ideas for the series, and whether individually rendered blades of grass are all that important...

FIFA 07 will be the fourth FIFA title from EA since the release of FIFA 06 in September last year; how difficult is it to innovate when a franchise is that prolific?

Personally I find it easy because I'm fresh, and I've come in with new ideas and I've chosen people who have ideas. I haven't had to worry about the other [next-gen and handheld] releases so I've been able to do my own thing. So I think we've made the biggest jump that we've had in the series for a long time.

"I think we've made the biggest jump that we've had in the series for a long time."

FIFA's main rival at the moment is Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series; with that franchise due to make its next-gen debut towards the end of this year, how important is it that FIFA 07 - both current and next-gen versions - delivers this year?

I think that it's always important when you have a strong competitor. If you follow what's happened in the football videogame market in the last eight years, its grown by a huge amount, and Pro Evo and FIFA have driven that. It means that we can't be complacent otherwise we'll lose market share, and we'll lose people over to them. At the same time, as well as improving the game, we're also out to improve the market as well; as development costs go up we need to get more revenues to justify the cool stuff that we want to do.

The ideas that we have just this year online, they're really expensive to do, it takes a lot of people to do that, and a lot of effort. This is the first year that we'll be supporting the title in the studio after launch, doing the podcasts with the community, so that's changing what we think of online, and all that costs money.

FIFA 07 will see the introduction of Interactive Leagues; can you explain what they are and what they mean in terms of gameplay?

It's an interactive version of the premiership where you and other fans of your clubs play, and directly affects how well your club does. You can be the hero for your club, or you can be the villain and concede goals at the end of the match.

Can you go into how the Interactive League feature will work in greater detail; will the points be awarded to a single multi-platform league or will there be separate Premierships for Xbox, PlayStation2, and PC?

The way it works is that on a PS2, you'll only be playing against other PS2 gamers, and you only see the Top 100 for your club on a PlayStation2. Microsoft and Sony don't want you to play cross-platform, and they don't want you to talk about the other platforms within their game. We worked with them and said that we wanted to combine the scores so that there was only one Premiership, and they were fine with that.

So it'll take the results of all the PS2 games, the Xbox games, and the PC games, and it will add those up and then the team that gets the most wins will get the three points.

We're still working on the what the formula should be in terms of how many percentage points would be for a draw and that kind of thing.

EA has mentioned a number of new innovations for FIFA 07, including the Interactive Leagues; which do you feel is key to evolving FIFA from here on?

The gameplay is the backbone to it, that's the real depth to it, and I think that Interactive Leagues is the innovation. I think that that's something people will think is cool and a new idea, it's something that gives people an idea as to where we go to and how we can interact with videogames differently - buts it's the gameplay that's got to keep them entertained for fifty hours plus that we need to nail down, be good at, and deliver on.

Presenting FIFA 07, you spoke about adding a strong sense of emotion to players through art direction and crowd noise; can you explain more about that?

What I wanted to do was to bring a level of emotion back to the player, the highs and lows of football. You'll notice that in some of the close-ups that we use filters, so if we want to increase a sense of shame, we use a downwards pointing camera and decrease the amount of colour, whereas in a moment of glory it adds highlights and uses an upwards camera - really subtle stuff. So I try to use camera angles and art direction as my tools of giving emotion back to gamers. It's the same with the players, that's where I'd like to give players a sense of emotion because if you make a film, your actors are the main thing along with the sets, the lighting, and the weather.

Weather makes a huge difference; we have dynamic weather in FIFA 07 so when it's overcast it might begin to rain - it does affect the ball physics a little bit, but it's more about the affecting the mood. Weather is one of the big things that impacts living in England so it's all part of the game.

And can you explain about how the audio has been developed for the game?

So there's a ton of work there, it's really a layering approach so that there's a crowd there. We've got a sense of home and away crowds, and then there's the chants and the shouting that we've added this year. That's all controlled by this little motion engine thing that looks to see whether the crowd is in a glory state or a frustrated state. It's a nice little system and that also affects the replay system - if the ball goes out and it's a tense moment it won't show the guy going to pick it up, but if you're two one up and it's towards the end of time it'll show your guy running up slowly.

It's really all the sort of things that help show emotion. We didn't apply that to the gameplay because we wanted to get away from the idea that FIFA felt scripted.

EA announced recently that they were closing down a number of servers to some of its older titles, such as NBA Street V3; are there plans for the same to happen to the likes of FIFA 2005 and FIFA 06 in the near future?

I'm not aware of what our actual strategy is on that; I don't know any specifics, but I think there's a good two years given for a title to remain live - and we're always talking to our community. Online gaming is in its infancy, and it's growing. We're trying to nurture it, we're not trying to milk it. I've been spending a lot of time talking to some of the pro-gamers who play FIFA for a living and try to understand what they need, and how to grow that as a virtual sport. It's not that we're trying to exploit FIFA, we're just trying to manage the effort in the same way that Microsoft stopped active support for Windows 98.

"Online gaming is in its infancy, and it's growing. We're trying to nurture it, we're not trying to milk it."

You have to invest your money in the right areas and keep that relationship with your consumer.

The big thing in the next-generation of systems is online play; with that in mind, what moves are EA taking to improve the experience for gamers? The company does have something of a reputation for having lagging online gaming so are there plans to make it a more robust system?

Yeah there are all the time, we have a lot of investment in online; we have some of the best servers - talk to the Battlefield community. We have some amazing technology in all of that. We're number one in terms of sports games online with Madden in North America and FIFA in Europe, so we do have some good technology.

Never underestimate how complex it is, and maybe because we've taken our own path we haven't shown all of the advantages to the consumer that we're going to get to - but it will happen and it will be of the consumer's advantage that we have our own technology and have invested in that.

You're going to move over to the next-generation team for FIFA 08 as Producer; what are you hoping to bring to that?

Yeah I'm going to be moving over to next-gen for '08'; as for what I hope to bring, I'm still working on that. I'm still working with the team to see where they're going to this year is amazing, and amazingly complex because they're re-engineering a lot of stuff and building the foundations of what's going to leapfrog us in terms of quality.

"...we have a lot of investment in online; we have some of the best servers - talk to the Battlefield community."

Obviously I'm going to be focusing on the pitch and online; they'll probably continue to be my two areas.

Keeping next-gen in mind, one of the features pointed out by EA for Xbox 360's FIFA Road to World Cup, was the individually rendered blade of grass - that didn't feature in the console version of 2006 FIFA World Cup. Is that level of detail something that you feel is important in describing a title as 'next-gen'?

Not particularly, it's like 3D crowds and all that kind of stuff. I think people want to look at games and say "Wow, that's next-gen", but I want to focus on the field and the experience, and with the stuff that we're doing this year I want to try and find ways of doing new things with the technology. I'll probably be focusing less on the grass and the crowd.

To be honest, I actually believe it's a matter of finding the right art direction. We recently held an event in North America and people were coming up and saying "Wow, this is great" because they thought it was the 360. When you're in the gameplay camera, the first time you see it you can't really tell - and that's all down to art direction, and the use of colours and filters. I think that's as important as doing blades of grass; unless we can get it to affect gameplay I don't see the point of focusing that kind of stuff.

It's like people going on about having the referee in or having the linesmen in, or having things around the pitch. I guess that it adds to the authenticity, but I think there's a bunch of ideas that I'd like to add before I focus on that level of detail.

Well that's it, thanks for that Joe.

That's alright, cheers.