FIFA 08: EA Interview

Five-on-five online play, fancy footwork, and Be A Pro mode: EA tells us all about its latest FIFA game.

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If the goal is to get you playing online with your friends, getting the most out of the experience means that you need to make sure you know how to play the various positions on the field. And that's where Be A Pro mode comes in. In this new mode you'll be able to play entire matches from the perspective of just one player.

"The thing that was important to us was that we create gameplay away from the ball," Booth says. You'll get rewards in the form of points for playing each position properly, giving you a virtual pat on the back for sticking in the right areas on the pitch, dribbling well and passing accurately, and generally playing each position as it's meant to be played. "It's about learning each position and what's important to that position," he adds.

Though the ideal is to get to the point where you'll be able to play a match with nothing but human opponents, that goal is still a way off, and so computer-controlled AI teammates and opponents are an essential part of the experience.

There's been a lot of work done in this part of the game, work that has resulted in AI players being more self-aware, keeping track of their positions on the field and how closely they're sticking to the overall strategies you choose. One way the team did this was to make the AI players more spatially aware, so that not only do they know where on the pitch they're supposed to be, but they can also read situations and come up with the best way to block you, say by moving into an open space to cut off your run on the goal.

All of this understandably takes a lot of horsepower. Booth says the current gameplay engine in use in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions uses around 35 times as much processing power than the version on the PlayStation 2 and other older machines. Allowing for the emergent behaviour of AI players meant that the team had to optimize the engine for the Cell processor in the PS3 and the processor in the Xbox 360. This was essential because these new chips have such different ways of handling data and instructions compared to their predecessors.

With so much going into the AI and the engine itself, you'd think that something had to give. That something is not the graphics, which EA is refining further, making it one of the best-looking of the new crop of games. Mostly that's because the team has become more proficient at using the hardware over the few years they've been working with it and have come to understand how to take last year's engine to the next level. "I didn't want them using all the cycles from gameplay or the memory, I wanted that for animations or AI," Booth says.

For all the things FIFA does do right, there are still many areas of the game that EA is looking to improve. For instance, there's no rumble support in the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 versions. Booth says this is near the top of the list of the things the team is looking to add, but because of the limitations that come with creating high-end entertainment, there's simply not the resources to get to everything.

"That's the thing that people often misunderstand about FIFA and football games is that if we haven't done something, it's not that we haven't thought of it, it's because we have to make priorities," he says. That, he adds, is one reason why the team hasn't yet added on-field referees into the game and why there's no support for the tilt-sensing features of the Sixaxis controller on the PS3.

"Our bottleneck there is having people that are very, very smart engineers who really understand football and really understand this complex engine and the hardware," says Booth. "Those people are our core assets and we need to make sure they're focussing on the right things."

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