Gaming Examiner: As the highest selling sports game in the world, FIFA always has such huge expectations heaped upon it. How have you approached FIFA 12 to take it above and beyond the amazing FIFA 11?
Santiago Jaramillo: Well I think… the expectations that are on our game every year are so big because there’s such a hardcore following of the game that is supposed to represent the world’s most popular sport. Given the level of quality we’ve achieved, particularly since FIFA 09, we have continued to just take more and more market share, and higher and higher quality ratings, and as you pointed out, FIFA 11 is kind of like the pinnacle of this. So as a producer and as a development team we went into it as a challenge. That’s really what the job is about here, is how can we continue to progress and to innovate the game so that those who already like it, and are already playing it, want to buy the next one. So you can’t give them something entirely different because than it is probably going to be something that they don’t like. But how do you make it different in a way that it’s consistent with what they’ve liked and what their expectations are going to be, and really that it where the magic happens and that’s the art of making video games. It’s knowing what big leaps to take in certain areas of the game, what fundamentals to focus on and then just try to polish certain areas because they are basically what users want and they just want it a little bit more polished. It’s knowing that what the expectations are and seeing how much our capacity is going to be for the year and prioritise accordingly and then make the game. FIFA 12 is probably the biggest leap that we’ve taken from one year to the next. FIFA 11 left it at such a good quality level, not just in gameplay but in other areas of the game as well, we’ve managed to spend more time bigger, more impactful, more revolutionary type of features like the Player Impact Engine, Precession Dribbling, Tactical Defending and those sorts of really big features that are really going to revolutionaries the game in a way that we feel is consistent with the expectations of what people want.
GE: FIFA 12 has picked up multiple awards at both E3 2011 and Gamescom 2011. What type of effect has this had on the development team leading up to the games September release?
SJ: It’s a great morale booster. Making the game is such hard work, especially in these summer months, when we’re finalising the game and just fixing bugs and polishing and working really long hours and working weekends. I think for the development team, playing the game all the time, and just being so involved with the product itself, you maybe lose track of maybe how much people love it once it’s shipped. How much joy you bring to people’s life once FIFA ships. I think when we hear about all these awards and what our consumers and our fans are saying about our game then it gives us a little bit of a boost that at this very tough time, to make this one last push, and finish the game properly, polish it properly, fix all the bugs and get it out of the gate in time. So it’s great to hear that because basically it shows that a whole years’ worth of sweat and hard work is actually paying off in the way that we want it to pay off, which is in the satisfaction of our fans.
GE: Arguably the most stand-out and anticipated feature of FIFA 12 is the Player Impact Engine. How was it working with this new physics engine and how do you think it’s going to change the way the game is played?
SJ: This engine has been in the works actually for a couple of years. So we started it at the beginning of FIFA 11, in parallel as we were making FIFA 11 but we knew it wasn’t going to be ready, so we basically took 2 years in development. What it does is it replaces our old collision system that could only process the physical interaction of a player against another player in just one frame. We would have to then give you the result based on just one particular frame of interaction which probably is not going to be the most accurate representation of what would happen if there’s a collision because more and more contact and more and more collisions are going to continue to happen in the frames after that. That was one problem. The second biggest problem was that we would give you say a stumble animation or a fall animation which would be part of the animation that we had created. We didn’t have a way to modify those animations to represent something more accurate. Those are the things the Impact Engine allows us to do. [We can] add an incredible level of variety in terms of how players react to collisions, and also be able to process the information more accurately, to give you more authentic results. So it’s been 2 years in development and it’s been a lot of work with just polishing and polishing. Creating new animations that fit scenarios that we didn’t even have in the game before. The way it changes the game is very fundamental because, as you can imagine, the way players interact against each other happens countless times in one match. So the fact that we now have this much more powerful, much more accurate and sophisticated engine at the base of it all, that it really allows us to bring to life other types of features that you might not necessarily think of them as physics or collisions. Just say like the way you shield the ball or just say you’re sprinting with the ball and you get hit by a tackle on your trailing leg, but you can still manage to continue. These are things that we weren’t able to do before, but now we can have much more accurate results that it really changes the way that the game plays in other areas, such I was saying, dribbling, shielding, jostling, all those things to give you more accurate and more varied results even in those areas.
Interview with Game play Producer Santiago Jaramillo - Part 2 Click Here
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