PALGN: Hi, thanks for being here today
Andrew Wilson: It's a pleasure.
PALGN: So first up, you're the executive producer of FIFA, does this mean you are in charge of all version of the game? Even the handheld and mobile versions?
AW: Yes, I'm Executive producer of the whole franchise.
PALGN: So how much responsibility do you have for each individual version?
AW: Um, I guess I have the same responsibility for each individual version. I'm actually responsible for all football games, including the Euro and World Cup games, FIFA Street...
PALGN: And there are individual directors and producers of each version?
AW: Yes.
PALGN: Do you take a particular interest in a certain version each year?
AW: Well, this year I think we've paid a lot of attention to the next-gen versions, Wii is a very interesting version this year, so we looked at that a lot, PS2 for us is still a huge market – to be honest with you I try to get to them all. I played more of the next generation – PS3, 360 and Wii than I probably did of the handhelds this year, but I play them all.
That's some pretty impressive cloth modeling.
PALGN: Okay, we'll ask about the next-gen versions first. Online on the 360 version of FIFA 07 seemed to be pretty much the best implementation of online play the series had seen yet. Have you managed to top this for FIFA 08?
AW: Well I think we have. I think that the online team we have are phenomenal, I'm really proud of the stuff that they've done. I think they've worked really hard to reduce the lag even more, and I think our play through rates, and our lag is even better than it was on 07.
PALGN: And new online features?
AW: Well, the core gameplay is what's been focused on, but we've got to the point that we have the interactive leagues from the current gen versions we've brought across, we've got custom leagues, so you can go in and create your own custom league with your friends and set up the rules for that league. We added video upload to that online offering – which is a really fun feature. So I think that onlne for us is a really big focus, and we want to keep that leadership in online that we've had for the last couple of years. So yeah, we're really happy.
PALGN: Well, the 360 version is on the Xbox Live pay service, but the PS3 is a similarly online focused console but without a pay service – is online play equivalent?
AW: Absolutely.
PALGN: Are games hosted on your servers?
AW: It depends on where you play from, but generally yeah.
PALGN: So that may even be a selling point for FIFA fans after a console, given online is equivalent and free on PS3
AW: Yes.
PALGN: Is the Wii version also online this year?
AW: Yes, absolutely.
PALGN: Ok, onto gameplay. We've heard you're implementing more manual control in 08, in particular the pass controls where you can pass to a position rather than a player. We've had a quick play of 08 here at this event, and while we've obviously had limited time with the game we couldn't immediately notice too much difference, could you describe exactly what has changed?
AW: There are some things in the options you can go and change, did you guys have a look at those?
PALGN: We did, but we had no idea what we were doing!
AW: Ok, so in the options you can go from completely manual, to semi-assisted, to very assisted. We ship the product at different levels based on the feedback from focus groups. Ultimately you can go in and make everything absolutely manual. Manual crosses, manual through-balls, manual passes – to give you complete control over it. My belief is that there are some things that are better manual, and there are some things that are better assisted, but ultimately we let the gamer choose.
PALGN: Have there been major upgrades to the AI this year?
AW: Absolutely!
PALGN: Could you describe some of the changes?
AW: We've implemented a whole new decision system in how the AI works, and we have a notion of a 35 point decision system. Basically, the AI is evaluating according to 35 different points bout what's going on on the pitch. There are 21 other players on the pitch – so what's happening with them, and another series of variables that it's evaluating. So it's making decisions based on those evaluation points, 1000 times a second. What you get is a level of intelligence than that we've never seen before in football. We could never get there because we didn't have the processing power to process that much information. What next-gen consoles do really well is to process that information. So in terms of broad context, they evaluate the picture in terms of threat versus opportunity. So when they look at one of those 35 options, they say, on a scale of 1 to 1000 'what level of threat' and 'what level of opportunity' is it. And that helps them decide the best course of action now, and at the same time they almost store that in their memory so they're not just evaluating for now, but also how the now affects them two, three, four, five seconds from now, based on what's going on around the pitch.
PALGN: Sounds a lot like chess AI, but much faster.
AW: (laughs), I've never heard it described that way, but I guess that's how it is! Basically it's 'do I tackle now, no, when should I tackle? Three seconds from now, but only if this and this and this happen. So it's a level of complexity we've never seen. Ultimately what you get is a more realistic decision making tree, so it's not the 'zeros and ones' decision making we've traditionally had, where it's either yes or no, now it's 'yes, no, maybe...maybe later'
PALGN: So we won't be able to know the AI and 'trick' it into doing what we want like we may have been able to in the past?
AW: I don't think that's possible now. The thing that we' always try and get to is hundreds of hours of gameplay without seeing repetitive play. And based on the way this dynamic system works, based on the fact that each player is evaluating things based on the attribute system, and we've got so many attributes per player – we've got 15,000 players this year. The notion that an individual will go on and start to read the play, and how the AI is going to play – that's going to be very challenging.
PALGN: So you've mentioned the 15,000 players there – how many of these players have been individually tailored to match their personality and playing style to real life?
AW: Well, pretty much every single player. Our new engine is completely attribute driven, nothing is hard coded. And the attributes are broken up into two sets, qualitative and quantitative. So Quantitative covers elements such as how fast are they, how tall are they, are they right or left footed, that kind of thing. Qualitative is about player tendencies. So given a certain situation, how does a player perform. What are the kinds of decisions a player will make based on the context of who he's playing, where he's playing, the time etc. We have a global database with data editors around the world – I think right now about 300 – who are inputting data daily based on how those players are playing from day to day. We than balance it in the game so that all of those 15,000 players are playing the way they do in real life, because the engine is data driven.
PALGN: So your engine is so versatile you can just enter some data about a player rather than having to 'write' the player into the code
AW: Yes, when we re-wrote the engine, that was what we wanted to get to. Ultimately;y what we'd like to do sometime in the future is open up that database to the world and say 'go for your life' so you get that concept of a dynamic football product. For us, next gen was not about hard-coded content anymore, it was really about data driven content.
Don't worry, only the extra modes in the Wii version look like this
PALGN: From our playtime here, the animations certainly looked more natural and fluid than last year, even on the PS2 version. But as a result, play also feels a little 'heavier' for lack of a better term. Is this a trade off you have to make to make the game look more fluid?
AW: Well, the build that we're playing here is a couple of weeks old, and we're not quite done yet. When we go through the tuning process, we have to hit that balance between 'super responsive' and 'believable' in terms of look and feel. The builds here are a little bit behind what we'll actually ship, and recently we have gone in and taken away some of that 'heaviness' – although once again that's all completely tunable, the engine has parameters that we can tune, to get that balance between believable animation as well as responsiveness of control.
PALGN: So we noticed that it took a little longer to make a 180 degree turn on this build here, and that changes the gameplay
AW: Yeah, it changes the gameplay, and while you never want to be at the point where you can flip the player around 180 instantly, but what we did get was to a point where, depending on the context, a player, if he's running a full speed, probably can't do that, but that if he's just controlling the ball than he can turn much quicker.
PALGN: We've heard you've added some goal keeper controls in 08?
AW: Yes, goal keeper control in in current gen. Our PS2 team has given you some basic options for goal keeper control. People ask for it a lot, and we originally had a very complicated set-up, but we dialed it back to something we felt was fun, kind of the balance between the art and the science, but the feedback do far has been very good, your ability to call the goalkeeper out and control him more than you have in the past.
PALGN: Is that option available in every mode of the current gen version? And is it another option you can switch on or off?
AW: Yes, you have that ability to play as the GK in all modes, and it is entirely optional.
PALGN: Could you explain the 'be a pro' mode where you play as a single player, and also explain how this will work full team online multiplayer?
AW: Okay, there are two things that have driven this new way to play. One is that since we went to 3D, the essence of view from which you control a team hasn't changed. So gamers have been saying 'okay, we get that, but next generation football to us feels like it needs to be eleven on eleven at some point'. So when we first started to implement eleven on eleven football, we realised it's actually a very complicated procedure. There were a lot of things we needed to get to in terms of our ability to fulfill the micro-challenges of what makes playing 'left-back' fun, and gamers' ability to understand how to play a single position in the context of an interactive football game as opposed to a real football game. When we first started, what we realized was that people are attracted to the ball, and they run around in a group, so the ability to play the position immediately went away. And so what we started to do is what we've called 'be a pro offline training' – we're trying to fulfill a vision of getting to eleven on eleven play, where you and ten of your friends can play against eleven other people on an opposing team, so 'be a pro offline training' teaches you this with a new camera angle. It also gives you feedback as to where you need to be on the pitch, so if you're out of position you get some on-screen prompts to get back into position. And it also gives you a score based on the decisions you make as a player – good passes versus bad passes, good tackles versus bad tackles. It's a training step so gamers can start to get into that eleven on eleven style play.
What we're also doing in some parts of the world, is taking five on five, and allowing people to lock in a single player for five people each team, and allowing you to start playing that online. We've added these in on top of everything else so we can learn how to implement these things better in the future, and to allow players to give us some feedback as we move toward these ideals.
Some classic moments may be had in the 'be a pro' mode
PALGN: We've had a go of the behind the player camera, and it was quite fun. How exactly will this work in a game context?
AW: The camera is set-up strategically. There are times on the pitch where you need to see everything that's going on - when we first built this style of play we had it always in third-person, and what we realised was that there are actually times where you need to have a much more strategic view of what's going on on the pitch, you need to have a look around and see what's going on. The concept of actually using a controller to turn your head and look around wasn't particularly intuitive, and so what we've done is we've got to a point where the camera is not only allowing you to see what's going on, but actually prompting you. So if the camera pans back, the game is telling you that you need to be looking at what's going on around you. When the camera comes in, it's telling you to forget about what's going on around you and that you need to focus on a single point. So not only does it put you in the particular emotion of the situation, it's actually telling you what you need to be focusing on at that particular point in time. Whether it's a one on one gameplay experience between you and a defender, you shooting for goal, or whatever it might be. But it's not just about a visual aesthetic, it actually helping you understand what you need to be focused on.
PALGN: One last question – do you take note of the competition in the genre, or do you just do your own thing?
AW: Always, we'd be silly not to. We like competition, and I think that the competition has meant that both products have gotten better every year. And i think that gamers benefit from the fact that there's strong competition.
PALGN: Well, that looks like all we've got time for, thanks very much for your time.
AW: Awesome, thanks so much!
PALGN would like to thank Andrew Wilson for his time and Cameron Jenkins at EA.
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