FIFA Online Preview

02 Feb 2010 at 15:12:09 by Andy Alderson

“It was accessibility,” says FIFA Online line producer Adrian Blunt when asked about the reasoning behind the game’s one-handed control scheme. “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.” Accessibility, he explains, is one of the three central pillars of FIFA Online (we’ll get to the other two later). Earlier, during a presentation on the FIFA brand, EA Sports supremo Peter Moore revealed how EA Sports’ aim is to attract the world’s two billion football fans to its FIFA products, and FIFA Online plays a big part in that. As such, FIFA Online looks set to be the long-standing football franchise’s most immediately accessible game with gamers able to control it using only the mouse.

Blunt demonstrates how this will work, showing off a “very early” build of the game which, sadly, we’re not allowed to get hands on with. Despite some initial scepticism on my part, it’s hard not to be impressed by the control system Blunt and his team have crafted for the first free-to-play version of a FIFA game. And, as promised, it requires only one hand leaving you free to do whatever you like with the other one, like making obscene gestures every time rat-faced scoundrel Craig Bellamy gets the ball.

Controlling players in FIFA online seems like a breeze as Blunt explains how the player that you’re controlling displays a line/cursor pointing ahead of them in the direction they're moving. You direct this line with the mouse and, the further you stretch the line away from the player, the faster they’ll run. However, like in all recent FIFA titles, running fast affects your manoeuvrability meaning you’re more likely to be dispossessed. When you don’t have the ball, a simple click of the left mouse button will perform a tackle, while a slide tackle can be performed with the right button. When in possession, the position of the line will indicate where the ball will go, should you choose to pass or shoot. Like in the most recent iteration of series, FIFA 10, you have 360 degrees of directional freedom and, when controlling with the mouse, it shouldn’t be too difficult to engineer some tasty passing moves. Equally, the directional freedom of the mouse control means that you’ll be able to place your shots nicely too as Blunt demonstrates with a strike that almost sneaks into the top corner of the opposition’s goal.

Despite the accessibility of the control system, we’re told there will also be an impressive amount of depth too. “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,” explains Blunt. As well as the standard controls there will be modifiers, allowing access to more advanced moves which will be showcased in the game’s tutorial section. The good news is that these moves will be unlocked from the start. “The idea is that you evolve with the game,” he adds, explaining that evolution plays a huge role in FIFA online.

The goal is to grow your players in order to make your team the best it can possibly be and this can be done in one of two ways. You can simply play the game, with your players awarded XP points based on their performance in every game, or you can you use microtransactions to accelerate the process.  “Basically, I can invest time, or I can invest a small amount of money,” says Blunt, but he is also keen to stress that those with more money than time won’t be able to create super teams simply by purchasing in-game items.  “So the items that we sell will be accelerators, they’ll be enhancers, but they won’t directly impact gameplay.”

The majority of player advancement will be achieved through the game’s League mode, described by Blunt as “the core of the game.” Authenticity, he stresses, is another one of the game’s central pillars so FIFA Online will sport 30 licensed leagues, over 500 teams and 15,000 players as well as the license for the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. The third and final pillar, we’re told, is community and Blunt recognises the need for a free-to-play game to develop a strong community in order to survive. As such, the game is entering a closed beta phase now and four months of community feedback will help the development team to tailor its game to the audience.

Just as we’re about to leave, we return to the subject of accessibility as Blunt reveals that part of that involves making the game playable for that vast majority of gamers who don’t own a gaming spec PC. While reticent to give an exact system requirements breakdown, Blunt reveals that despite the game being based on the resource-intensive FIFA 10 engine, a number of tweaks mean that it will be playable on much lower spec PCs. “To give an indication, we are focused on laptops with integrated chip sets for graphics,” he reveals. “So, really average PCs. We’ve worked very hard on bringing back different shaders, so the game is much lower spec than FIFA 10.” A FIFA game playable on laptops? It seems EA Sports is going all out to tap into the fabled two billion-strong base of football fans around the world. Blunt reveals that a lot of thought has gone into the game’s pricing model, control scheme and advancement system and, from the brief demonstration, it seems as if FIFA Online might just offer something new in the football genre.

Stay tuned for the full Adrian Blunt interview later this week.

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