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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 One

Fifa Blog: You must be excited about the release of the new game?

David Rutter: Yes. Everyone says to me that ‘you must be sick and tired answering the same questions over and over’, but the big point for me is that I just spent nearly a year hiding away in a studio with a bunch of other people making the game, so you don’t get a chance to tell anyone about it. So when I do get a chance to speak about it, I’m happy to let it all out.

Fifa Blog: What was the biggest challenge when you set about making Fifa 10?

David Rutter: Not sure. The biggest challenge was that last year’s game was pretty good, so we had to decide what we were going to do differently this year. We had an idea of where we wanted to go with our innovations – we really wanted to do something with dribbling, which we did by introducing the 360 degree dribbling. The same with the skill dribbling, we wanted to be able to beat defenders better in a one-on-one and make it a little bit more unpredictable.

Then with set-pieces, we wanted to give them a bit of a lift because they were a bit stale. With last year’s game you were okay if you knew how to do certain things, but if you didn’t then you were kind of screwed. So we wanted to do a lot of work with that, which is how that feature was born.

Fifa Blog: The set-piece creator will be something that gamers will surely be excited about. Did you look at introducing it in past versions of the game?

David Rutter: Not enormousley. The way we did it was that we looked at each facet of the gameplay – a bit of passing or dribbling or shooting or set-pieces. There was nothing fundamentally broken with set-pieces, its just that as the rest of the game got better they have not really improved as much, because we don’t really need to do so much work on them.

This year, looking at the game as a whole, one of the weaker elements of the gameplay was probably set-pieces, so we wanted to do something special. Every day that I am out on a promotional tour someone will ask me how to do set-pieces, so it is quite apparent that a lot of people don’t know how they work.

The other part of it then is to trying to make it more exciting for people and give them a chance to actually create something. Last year we had the custom team tactics, which was very cool, so we wanted to bring that over to set-pieces in the way that we said ‘okay someone did this in real life, how do we make it happen in the game?’. We made a tool that allowed us to do that and we thought it was cool because you can actually enjoy making the set-pieces. So it is kind of a customised element that happened by accident.

Don’t forget to check back with this blog to read Part Two of this interview