FIFA 10 - Q&A Feature

Every September FIFA and PES jostle for supremacy of the football market.  Until recently, EA's FIFA, despite its considerable licenses, came second best to Konami's PES. However since FIFA 08, the winds have been changing. No longer content with resting on the laurels of their superior licensing,  FIFA began to become the footballer's game of choice, luring scores of fans away from the PES franchise.

With a clear passion for football and strong eye for detail, David Rutter the lead designer together with his team in Canada, have managed to turn around the FIFA in the space of a few short years An even more remarkable considering the title's abbreviated development period.  We got to talk with Rutter about how he's managed to make FIFA the benchmark it is today.

TVG: Football games have such a short development period, how does that affect your job, and the game itself?

I don't take holidays. It's weird; we have very little time to celebrate FIFA when it's launched. Afterwards, we already know what we're going to be doing in terms of major innovations and new features for next year. They all get stacked up from the last game. Then the feedback from the community doesn't really land until after Christmas and getting on towards Easter time, at which point we see what we need to fix for next time. It becomes 30% innovation and 70% responding to feedback. Because we have to gather the feedback and because we can't get the feedback early enough we don't get to talk about those improvements until late in the day. But as a development studio, EA Canada has got very, very good at making games on time. So within the framework that we have, we have periods of time where we know what we can do. And we just work on that and get it done.

How much in terms of improvements and features gets put off to the next game?

I know already what the major new features will be for FIFA 11 and 12.

I don't suppose you could tell us any?

Um, unfortunately no. I know what didn't make it this year and will go into next year because we weren't happy with the quality of it at this point. In the same way that features that weren't ready for last year has made it into this year. So it's a very interesting life.

How many games ahead do you plan?

We have rolling three year plans, sometimes longer. We know where we want to get to. Some things are very far away and are just a tenuous vision. Other stuff, like goalkeeper rushing which wasn't so good last year, needs to be worked on sooner rather than later, so we improved it this year. So we have a strategic, tactical plan for the future depending on what's most important.

Does it ever feel like you've finished a game?

Right now, in this period where we are tweaking, tuning and fixing the things that aren't quite finished properly, we know more or less what the game will be like. We were staying in Paris recently and there was a copy of FIFA 09 in the hotel on a pod, and I picked it up and I just hated it. I just ripped it to shreds because we're now at 10. And the same thing happened the year before that. We don't have any time to celebrate the last FIFA because as soon as you're done you're on the next one. It's kind of depressing.

Is there a honeymoon period where you are actually happy with the end product?

Of course we enjoy it, and there's a period of time where we do enjoy playing it at work. That said there are things we are not happy with and we'll be working with right up until the end to get them fixed. I've been making football games for 13 years now, and I've never made one that I've been happy with.

You've mentioned reacting to feedback from online games. How do you go about fixing these issues?

When we talk about improvements to this FIFA such as the defensive coverage, positional priorities, urgency of the players and the goalkeepers - it's all part and parcel of the AI. Let's take the lofted through balls, which were annoying in last year's game, as an example. We fixed three parts of the AI to fix just that one issue. One part is the actual error on the passing. We adjusted the error rate to make sure that when your player is under pressure you shouldn't be able to make ridiculous passes that lead to a one-on-one with the goalkeeper. The second part is to make sure that when defenders go up for corners, a shorter defender like a Michael Essien will hang back for a John Terry in that position until John Terry gets back into place. Lastly, we have to alter the goalkeeper AI to make sure that the goalkeeper is more aware of a one-on-one situation and will be more aggressive in rushing. As well as making sure he will also behave appropriately for that one-on-one situation.

What about manager mode, how have you improved the AI there?

The manager mode has gotten a lot of attention this year. The match results are a lot more realistic now. They take the squad that's playing and calculate match-ups between the two AI teams. They calculate it on a per player, per position and per line basis on a minute by minute calculation to make sure it's accurate. For the transfers, the player that you're trying to buy will look at your team to try and decide whether he feels like he'll feel at home there considering whether he'll be pushing for a place, or whether he'll be benched and not playing. He'll also have an idea of how much he is worth, how much he wants to earn and where he thinks his career is going. Eventually, he will sign at your club based on those kinds of considerations. For player developments, similarly, we make calculations based on where the player should be getting to and how closely you're matching their development. For the atmosphere of it, squad's AI managers will rotate their squads based on match importance. There'll also be transfer rumours based on who they're shortlisting and who they want to buy, among other things.

What about in the Be a Pro mode?

We've done a few things to it, but we're not talking about those yet.

The teams feel more authentic than ever before, each team seems to have its very own identity how have you pulled that off?

Last year we did custom team tactics so we can actually set different playing styles on a bunch of different parameters. For the vast majority of clubs we've now got authentic playing styles in all our versions of FIFA. If you want to have a short passing game you can do that so I spent a lot of time last year trying to explain that if you're playing a specific tactic when you're playing FIFA and the team that you've selected plays in a different style, it's going to be hard. So that was last year's feature that we've improved this year.

Is that mostly a function of AI player positioning?

We've done a lot of work on positioning. In our game if you set up a short passing game, it's not that the players on the pitch will do short passes; it's that they will expect short passes. It affects the players around you. It's basically to support your style of play, or the AI style of play. So Arsenal, who are set to a short passing build up - run the ball into the box rather than crossing -will have a style that does that for the AI and the players that you're not in control of will expect you to play like that.

What's actually been changed this time around?

There are still four different styles defaulted to your team which you access via the d-pad and if you want to edit them you can. You can have up to 30 different styles saved to your hard disk. So we had a lot of grief online this year with this. Where people where setting up really ridiculous tactics and using them to win. So we've been doing a lot of work on eliminating that. We're now hopefully fixing the unrealistic exploits that spoiled online play.

How did you go about identifying the character of each team?

We have a massive team of people who gather all the data for the players and the teams. We have ten people internally. We actually have 100 people who actually enter the information about the teams and the players, and then we have about 1,000 people that reality check that, to make sure that it's not incorrect or that people are boosting it with their own bias. I get asked a lot how many people work on FIFA and I can't really answer.

TVG would like to thank David Rutter, FIFA 10's Producer for taking the time to speak with us about the next instalment in EA's much-loved footie series.