News

The release of Fifa 10 is something that will be looked back on in years to come as a landmark date for gamers obssessed with the ‘best football game ever made’.

So it was only right and proper that this blog went straight to the source of its creativity, Mr. David Rutter.

Lead Producer for Fifa 10, he is the person in the know about every aspect of this game. Armed with a dictaphone and some questions scribbled on a notepad, this blog sat down with Rutter to get some answers.

David Rutter Interview - Part Two

Fifa Blog: Having asked producer Luke Didd the same question. Were you under pressure to make the game more realistic due to the way that football is now shown on TV with multiple camera angles and using modern technology?

David Rutter: Not really. When we watch real football, we watch it because we like football and because there are a great number of things that happen in a match that we can’t do in our game. Some people ask ‘are you at a point where you are running out of stuff to do?’, but there are tons of stuff.

Every game of football you watch something happens that is unpredictable or a player does something that makes you say ‘wow, he just did something that is just not possible’. So to take something from the real world of football and bring it into Fifa is our own pressure, not something coming from television or anything else.

Fifa Blog: The online community appears to be growing all of the time. How aware of its popularity are you?

David Rutter: In May, we had around 250 million and I’m guessing by the time this game comes out we will be up to 300 million of online games played. We have a monitor in our office that shows online users and games being played, so we can always see how busy it is. When we were watching the Champions League final, we came back in it was up around 40,000 people playing compared to 0 when the game kicked off.

Fifa Blog: Responsive gameplay is a great new feature and something that was much needed. How important was it to get it right for this game?

David Rutter: We have been aware that it is something that has been seen in a negative light for some time with people saying things like it takes too long to turn with the ball or the animation looks pretty but takes too long to load. And in fairness, some of that is true.

But we are not an arcade game, we do penalise you for doing certain things. So if it is not a movement that a player can do in real life, then it won’t be in the game. We spent a lot of time working on the syngery between the player and the ball, so that it is more realistic and players respond to situations like they would do in real life.

For me, we are in the fourth year of our gameplay engine and the reason why we can bring these new features in, like trapping, is because it has been a gradual process. We don’t want to scrap everything and start over in order to add something new, but we will do that if needs be as we did with dribbling.