BUILDING A BETTER FIFA
TEARS, TANTRUMS AND STUNNING VISUALS: THE RETURN OF FIFA
EA has told its FIFA team to forget Xbox 360 and PS3 and create a truly next-gen football title. Greg Lockley sits down with producer Sebastian Enrique to find out what they’ve done
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t’s a great time to be a football fan. We’re just weeks away from the biggest tournament on the planet as the World Cup kicks off in Brazil. The excitement of transfer mayhem is in full swing. And EA has lifted the lid on FIFA 15. Everything is pretty peachy over
at EA, too. FIFA 14 is now the best- selling entry in the series’ history and scored a record 12-weeks at No.1 in the UK, toppling the previous achievement by FIFA: Road the World Cup 1998. It hasn’t fallen from the Top Ten since its launch last August and is even joined by a World Cup tie-in. So it’s pretty safe to say that FIFA is more popular than ever. “It is. I mean a lot
of people play the game. I can’t share a number with you but it’s outstanding. It really is just unbelievable,” says Sebastian Enrique, producer on FIFA 15. “I’m a developer, and
even though I lead the team, I don’t consider myself a business guy. So how I understand it, what satisfies and
rewards me, is when I go to tournaments, when I head to conferences and when I walk into a shop. I see friends getting together on a Saturday night, having a few beers and playing FIFA all night long. That’s what satisfies me. Building something that people can have fun with and can connect with. It’s amazing for me.”
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STAYING ON TOP Having a franchise that sells in the millions year-in-year-out, and one that has two titles entrenched atop the UK chart, is sure to keep the figureheads at EA happy. But this success alone doesn‘t
make the task of creating a new FIFA every year any easier on the EA Sports dev team. Far from it. “It’s difficult,” admits Enrique. “You always have people asking
“When you have such a massive community like FIFA, any changes to a game that’s used so competitively will create polarisations and negativity. Why? If you’re a No.1 gamer then you want to keep being No.1. Anything that changes the way you play the game and forces you to re-learn something where somebody can be better than you, you’re not going to like that. A lot of the risks
Gen4 experience. We don’t build anything diminished just because it needs to be on other platforms. Forget about it. The other platforms don’t exist. What we build is Gen4. Let the other platforms worry about how they take the cool stuff from our game.” Enrique himself admits how
We don’t build anything diminished just because it needs to be on older platforms.
Forget about it. The other platforms don’t exist. Sebastian Enrique, EA
what’s next and there are so many things. There is so much that we have in our heads, that we have put down on paper and want to achieve. Working on our build we end up with enough content for around four or five FIFAs. “It’s about understanding the community and listening to what they really want. So even though you can’t satisfy everyone we make sure to choose the right things. That’s key for us.” Of course, any developer or publisher would love to have some of the ‘problems’ that the FIFA team has. But the developer has set itself a very high bar. “It is difficult enough to get
to the top and it’s even more difficult to stay there.
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that we face are when introducing innovations and game changers.”
BREAKING FREE EA’s bid to stay on top of the sporting pile has seen it place much of its FIFA 15 focus on the new consoles – PS4 and Xbox One. Gen3 versions will be handled
by one team. A different studio will handle FIFA on mobile. Meanwhile, Enrique and his crew are working strictly on the next-gen version. It’s a setup that Enrique says allows his team to lead the creation of FIFA 15 without the limitations of the weakest platform. “When I started on the team,
my message and direction to everyone was that for anyone who buys a Gen4 console deserves a
that might be a selfish mindset to have. But from a man that’s worked through both Gen3 and Gen4 development, it’s an understandable one. He’s served his time on the older platforms, limited by their outdated hardware. Now, he’s relishing the opportunity to truly lead the way with FIFA 15. “As a developer you want
creative control of everything. It is difficult in the sense that you’re not the one setting the direction. I did Gen3 last year, even though I worked closely with the Gen4 team. This year I have no other team saying ‘we want to do this’ and I had to implement it. It’s more like we set the direction and everyone else needs to follow. “That said, one of the goals we had when we started with FIFA is that we wanted to deliver an experience that was good and was tailored to the platform. So if you’re playing with mobile then you have the touch controls. If you’re playing FIFA World then you have mouse controls. That’s the plan. It’s about creating things that are tailored to that particular platform.” But all this talk of freedom and no limitations will inevitably generate quite lofty expectations for FIFA 15 amongst fans. Many of the improvements in
the game focus on its visuals, which producer Nick Channon
June 13th 2014
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