FIFA Online Interview

05 Feb 2010 at 14:35:37 by Andy Alderson

Following a demonstration of EA's upcoming free-to-play football title, FIFA Online, we sat down with EA Sports' Adrian Blunt to find out a little more about the franchise's new direction. Having seen the impressive one-handed mouse control system in action, we were keen to know just how much depth football fans will find in FIFA Online.

We’re intrigued by the one handed mouse control system, why did you opt for something so different from previous FIFA PC titles?

Adrian Blunt (right): It was accessibility – we want people to be able to come and intuitively pick up the game. Either an existing football gamer or somebody who’s never played a football game before.

The two billion football fans that Peter Moore wants to get playing FIFA?

AB: Exactly, the two billion people. We also wanted an intuitive game control and one which would adapt with the player. It’s very simple to pick up  - easily pass, easily shoot – but there’s a lot of depth in there. There are a lot of modifiers and little things that you can do, even just using the mouse. So we spent a lot of time refining that and we’re gonna keep refining it. We’re just getting up to closed beta now – we’ve got four months of closed beta testing where we’re going to be refining the gameplay.

Beyond that, it’s going to evolve as the community requests.

Will the more advanced moves and skills have to be unlocked?

AB: It’s really available from the start. We’re not locking anything out but it’s really ... I always think of the game as an onion and we’re peeling away the layers of the onion, getting deeper and deeper. When you first download the game from our website and start it up and go through the simple controls – that’ll get you through a couple of matches and as you start to get better and beat teams, the difficulty will slowly ramp up. If you say that you don’t want to go beyond that difficulty level then the game will adapt to you. If you want to push yourself, then the game will adapt to that.

There are lots of controls – we have an in-game control list showing you all the different moves and eventually we will add more advanced tutorials as well to educate you as a player, but the idea is that you evolve with the game.

Presumably the notion of accessibility applies to PC hardware as well. What kind of rig will you need to run FIFA online?

AB: To give an indication, we are focused on laptops with integrated chip sets for graphics. So, really average PCs. We’ve worked very hard on bringing back different shaders, so the game is much lower spec than FIFA 10. At the same time we have to make sure the gameplay is really fluid and that’s very important.

So framerate is a priority?

AB: We’ve been working on this game for a long time – we’ve got people that worked successfully who worked on different FIFA products who really understand the framerate and what we can do and what we can’t do. I’m really happy with the result but it’s something that we’re gonna keep on refining. Because it’s an evolving game, it’s not something we’ll be shipping out, then waiting a year, then shipping another version. Every month we’ll be getting something else and part of that will be making it more scaleable.

Comment