AGTV: FIFA 15 developer interview

FIFA is back once again and we were invited down to EA's studio to test out the game and interview lead designer Sebastian Enrique.

He told us about gameplay changes, localisation for the Middle East and much, much more, so make sure you check out the video below to find out everything you need to know.

You can also read our hands-on preview of FIFA 15 and get excited for its release later in the year.

Transcript

The idea of gen 3, so it's not just going to be roster updates and the kit updates, so it's not what we call just a gold title. What's it's going to be is, it's not going to have all the stuff in gen 4 basically because we can't in terms of processing power, in terms of memory. So we're going to be telling in the future what is exactly the things in gen 4 that aren't in gen 3, but there is a team there trying to make the best possible game. So it's not diverging in terms of making a completely different experience, it's going to be a sub centre of what we're building in gen 4 but just in terms of taking the stuff that is possible to be in gen 3.

Our aim is PC, PS4 and Xbox One, to be running at 1080p 60 frames per second, that's what we had last year and that's what we're going to have this year.

Imagine playing your game without sound. Imagine playing your game where, instead of having all these beautiful enemies with textures, etc, you just have a pure black and white 8-bit experience. How much does the graphics, how much does the sound affect the experience for you a first person shooter? I think football is the same thing, and it seems even better because if you had the proper sound, if you had the graphics that gets you really immersed, in a way that you are like 'this is insane', if you had the crowd details and everything to support how you feel in a football game, I think that increases a lot better gameplay experience.

Imagine that the players emotions system where we're tracking each player emotion and the attitude that each player has towards his teammates and opponents, is that doable on gen 3? Yes but we need to eliminate something else from gen 3. It requires processing power and it requires memory. So are we going to eliminate passing to add that? Not a good idea! The physically based rendering stuff is not really doable on gen 3 otherwise the game wouldn't run on real time and the frame rate would be off.

In FIFA 14 you already have different physics and the players get tired more often, for example on a rainy match compared to a dry match. Why, the pitch is wet so there is different behaviour. Now when it comes to the pitch degradation, like a small hole on the pitch or a huge sliding mark, we didn't want the gameplay to be affected by that. Because imagine playing from the gameplay camera, are you going to see there is a hole in the grass? Most likely you won't, if you have like a random situation that appears to be random because you can't see it, you will throw the controller out the window. So we don't want to bring in an experience that will feel unfair, that will be not in your control. So we don't want the game to be the one that is blamed for something that happened where you didn't have control.

We feel that we're not ready to create something where a situation is out of your control. I can give you a lot of examples why. Imagine playing Simeone and Beckham from that 1998 World Cup. What was the situation? It was, 'This guy will get mad if I annoy him enough'. And he was annoying him, annoying him, annoying him, talking to the guy. At some point there was a bad reaction and then a red card. Do you want FIFA to do that? Do you want FIFA to force a situation like that? It would feel kind of scripted so I feel that today we're not ready to do that in a way that wouldn't be scripted and it would be accurate and you'd still feel that everything was in your control. So you don't really want to get a red card for something you didn't do. So until we feel we can do something that will feel fair and will improve the experience we might find a way to do it. 

Because when the gameplay guys approached me and said they were going to be doing this, I thought okay this would just affect the visuals, the ball will look really cool on the close camera. I was totally wrong. When I started seeing the effect it has on passing, the new type of passes that we can see weren't possible without this. So it's not a little thing, people say, 'Okay well the ball just rotates properly', no. The way it affects how the game goes in terms of ground passing, it's amazing. And also visually it's not just the ball, it's also about the synergy between player animation and the strength they've put into that pass, and then if you put that together with right touch, so inner side of the foot touch, outer side of the foot touch, you get a much better system. You put all of those together, it results in a game that is much more fluid, realistic and overall much more fun to play.

So I tell you why it's perceived to be faster. One of our main focuses this year was player control. Basically it's making the game feel much more responsive. By making the game feel much more responsive the players are doing what you want them to do, you feel it's faster because the game is giving you immediate feedback. By definition, by making something more responsive you will notice that it's faster.

We're going to be announcing all the languages that the game is coming with localisation in text plus commentators at a later stage, probably at Gamescom time. And I have gone on your feedback from last time for the commentators. At that point for FIFA 14 there wasn't much we could do, but even though I cannot tell you today what is going to be yes or no to fixing the two commentators issues, it's something that we put on our list of community requests.