The Special One

At this moment it's still speculative. I think until we get the gameplay balance, we won't have a sense of how well we've done, and I think we're going in with an open mind so we're not trying to position this as the main new feature of FIFA. We haven't thrown all the resources at this. We haven't built this whole lifestyle mode around it. We get that there's a fantasy around playing as a single player, and we get why that could be appealing, and we get that it's a step to this 11 versus 11. But we need to be cautious and learn and get feedback as we go along.

We have some technology that could probably scale quite quickly. I think it would be slightly worse than the current experience. But what we're trying to get to is something that feels like offline. And that feels like it's at least a cycle away.

The problem is, the difference between a football game and a first-person shooter in terms of multiplay is that in an FPS you don't have the players colliding together, and so you don't have to resolve an instant collision. And that's a key component of football. So when you have that much interaction going on, I don't know how easy it is for us to solve that. We've got some work going on around that that's very sort of high-brow, predictive stuff. And we'd love to get there for 09. But definitely for 10, to try and get something for the World Cup. So we're working on different solutions to solve at different times. There's something called 'predict and correct' which FPSes use, that can run a local model and a server model. And if the local model gets out of synch it has to resolve that. So that can work for most of the time, but then it's dealing with those circumstances when it's wrong, because if a goal happens it's quite major.

It's almost like people have been very anti-PS3 in the media. I don't think it's as bad as we've made out as developers. What I think it is, is it's just expensive. We've had a huge investment. I don't think we've added any 360-specific rendering features this cycle. Certainly the visuals have got better through better use of the technology, but it's all been about optimising and making it work for the PS3. So we hit 60 frames-per-second about a month ago, about five months out from launch. Which is actually three months ahead of the engine last year. So we didn't hit it on 360 until two months out from launch. And that's only because we started so early on it and we put in so much investment, and we had a really early milestone; 'we have to get to 60fps on PS3', and they kept missing that so they couldn't do all these fancy rendering things on top. The other side of it was that we always had the PS3 in mind. We understood the architecture from day one as we were rebuilding the gameplay systems. So we always had that distributed processing architecture in mind for these systems.

No. The goal that we have is that they'll feel the same and glance-look look the same. And any visual difference will be very, very minor. We're not trying to do additional stuff for either platform at this point.

It's not impossible to do that. FIFA 07 - that launched later in the cycle that we typically would do. I think our current management has been successful within the constraints of EA of doing that. So we didn't have a PS3 title at launch, and we moved it out last year. And that was almost unheard of within EA, of not having a FIFA for a console launch. I think the bottom line with EA is you've got to nail the business predictable side and do the creative. If you come in with the attitude that you're just going to do one, then you're going to fail. What's refreshing here is the senior management - they are all gamers, they do all want the quality.

And in Worldwide Studios. So it's not run by accountants. There are certain suits in the organisation like there are in anywhere, and it's certainly more fiscally aware than any other studio or publisher that I've worked for, but the expectation is that you do need to get to quality.

I think there were a number of factors going into that. We had questions of whether PS3 would make their commitments. We had questions of whether it was the right thing to do to have a team focus on PS3, doing a launch title and a new engine coming out on 360. And then there was an opportunity of doing an exclusive with Microsoft. So I think it was those factors working together. The way EA works is it's not just got one master guy plotting the whole organisation, it's kind of movements of opinion. So there was those things aligning to make that happen.

Yes. Leeds first, and then we got Norwich back in.