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Interview: FIFA 11's David Rutter
We have a chat with FIFA 11's producer about what is (and what isn't) to be found in this year's FIFA.
Written by David Scammell, 09 June 2010
As EA Sports settles into its newfound position as the king of football, you might expect the FIFA team to start becoming complacent. In actuality, they're anything but. We sit down with FIFA 11 producer David Rutter to talk about the innovations planned for this year's game.
GamerZines: FIFA is comfortably one of the biggest sellers year in, year out, but is the game at a sales level that EA Sports are happy with or are you being asked to attract a bigger audience?
David Rutter, Producer, FIFA 11: I try not to get too hung up on the sales side of things, I leave that to the businessmen. Gary, Santi, myself and all the other guys on the team are more concerned with making a more refined gameplay experience, listening to all the guys that email us, and coming up with cool stuff that would make us want to buy FIFA. I've been a gamer my entire life and making football games for the last fourteen or fifteen years, but that side of things isn't important. What's important to me is being proud of the work that we do.
GZ: Quite a lot of the changes you've made in this year's FIFA seem to be more cosmetic - enhancements to players' faces, expressions, things like that. Are you confident in FIFA's fundamental gameplay, or do you think you can still push it a lot further?
DR: We're confident that FIFA's a good game, but are we comfortable? No. The interesting thing is, if you are a sports fan you're probably quite a competitive person, and if you're a gamer you're probably also quite a competitive person. So what you have here is the top game development, football fan and gaming talent in the world imported into one place and asked to do a difficult job. We're all competitive, so we're pushing the limits as much as we can. For me, the key part of the likenesses is that it's a subset of something bigger, the whole Personality thing, which sounds a bit cheesy but the plus is there for a reason. Personality isn't just about how a player looks, how he moves or how good he is on or off the ball; it's all of the above and a lot more. So really what we're trying to achieve is a state of the art benchmark on that 'thing', a human being playing football.
GZ: Do you think PES still poses a threat?
P3Zine Issue 40
For our latest fifa 11 coverage, click here to download P3Zine Issue 40 for free.DR: I guess for me it's a great game made by a great development team who I have a lot of respect for, and I've had a personal relationship with the game for many, many years. I played PES extensively, much more so than I played FIFA before I had this job. As far as quality is concerned there was a turning point a few years ago, but before then I think (PES) was the benchmark football video game. We did a lot of cool stuff, but they did a lot of cool stuff that mattered more to me and I think it mattered more to gamers as well. The key thing is, Gary, Santi, myself and all the other guys on the team working on FIFA have come from a more football, more gamer-y background this generation. We pushed hard to make a really good game and we've been lucky that the management and leadership above us supported us on that decision, and it kinda worked out. So, is PES a threat? Absolutely. Are we paying attention to them? Yeah, but I'm paying as much attention to them as a gamer as I am a competitor. So will I play the game? Of course, but then I play all of the football games and most of the big games anyway.
GZ: Are we far away from seeing FIFA in 3D?
DR: We spent a bit of time looking at the technology and it's not the easiest thing to put in, into our game anyway. We have a lot of camera cuts and a lot of camera movement which makes it quite challenging. We've looked at it, but this year, I don't know. I would be surprised if we manage to get to it. As far as I'm concerned we've got other things that we need to get done, but it's not that for off for us.
GZ: What are your personal views on the Online Pass system?
DR:As I know how much time and effort goes into making our online games I know why we're doing it. I also know how many people are using our online game, so I get that that doesn't necessarily match how many copies of the game we've sold. To be able to continue what we're doing online will come at a cost. It won't come at a cost to users who bought the game new and to ask a small amount of money from people who play second hand I don't think is a bad thing, and will allow us to continue doing what we're doing.
GZ:Elsewhere at the showcase we were shown Tiger Woods using the PlayStation Move which obviously feels quite natural, but whenever FIFA's attempted to implement motion controls in the past via the Wii remote, it hasn't really gone down so well.
DR: I think it has with the kind of people that play Wii games; I think it's been a success. Do people who play Wii games also buy a similar game on a next-gen console? Probably, but from what I've found and what I think a lot of people do is, if you're a gamer you play your games on your 360 or PS3, and use your Wii to play with your kids or when drunken adults come round to do stupid stuff. That said many people only own a Wii. I'm lucky and I'm spoilt and I have all the consoles so I can play what I want. People who like playing Wii games will play with a Wiimote and enjoy playing it. Does it make sense for FIFA? For me, no. We've tried. We've looked at Move and Natal and experimented with a lot of stuff. Some of it works pretty well, some of it not so well. Is it going to be in FIFA 11? Highly unlikely. I'm not a great fan of just shoehorning stuff in because it looks like it should; I want it to be in there for the right reasons.
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