SJ: That’s my game basically, playing Career Mode. That’s where I’ve played FIFA my whole life and that’s where I feel I get the most joy out of playing FIFA, so I’m a big big fan of the improvements that have been made this year. I think the fans are going to love Career Mode. I think it is by far the best Career Mode that we’ve ever had. To give you a little bit of a background, FIFA 11 was the first year of the new engine for Career Mode so it was a tough year in that everything had to be rewritten from scratch. It was a lot of work, a lot of bug fixing, but we knew it was the right thing to do because it was going to give us some good features last year that we didn’t have before but more than that, it was going to open the door to do really cool things in the future. FIFA 12 is really the first year that we’ve been able to pack the game with much more polished fundamentals and also with bigger features. So just to point a few of them out, as a manager something that you’ve never really had to do much before was to do a lot of managing the players, not only on the pitch but off the pitch. You will have to now be conscious of if your players are happy at your club, if you’re paying them enough money, if they’re playing in the right position, if they’re playing enough because these players will then send you emails saying “I want you to play me more” or “I don’t like that you bought these other guys so now I want to leave.” All that kind of stuff that you see in the news every day is going to be part of Career Mode. For example, just the other day I got one of my star players, I bought another player who was really highly rated in his same position, ask to be transferred so I transfer listed him, and then the news broke out in the world of Career Mode that this player had been transfer listed and a lot of big teams were going to go after him, and right away I got emails from other teams wanting to buy this player and a bidding war started, so all those sagas that you see in real life that a manager has to deal with week in/week out are going to be part of Career Mode. So it adds a lot of depth to the mode and it’s so much more fun what you do every time you’re outside of gameplay and before you go to the next match. There’s a lot to do now as a manager. We also have much more realistic broadcast style coverage of really special days. The most important one is the transfer deadline day which what happens is you get the summer transfer and winter transfer season, and as you know a lot of activity happens. Players go for much more than they are probably worth because teams are desperate to get this or that other player to fill a hole that is in their team. All that extra activity and that sense of emotion and coverage is something that we have in our game. So when you get to that day in the calendar, the Hub changes to be this transfer deadline day type of Hub with a clock that is counting down hour by hour and this advances through the whole day. It’s much more realistic and allows you do to last minute changes to your squad in the way that real teams do at that time of the season. Also, players will now have much more realistic player goals and form value so depending on how well they are playing they will start to grow. Older players’ attributes, because of their age, will start to go down. It’s just a much more realistic, much more compelling experience overall with Career Mode.
GE: The music selection in FIFA games has always been a big part of the games ‘atmosphere’ so to speak. How do you go about picking what bands/artists/songs will appear in the game?
SJ: It’s funny because I actually got that question the other day. I’m not really involved in that much. All I can tell you is what we always want to do is represent, because we know that soccer is the world sport, as many territories as possible. We tend to go with more Indie type of bands that are just up and coming. Really it’s our audio director who is more involved with that and someone from EA in California who go back and forth between that list of bands and then eventually the contracts get signed and those are the bands who’s song gets put in the game, but I don’t really know all the details. GE: It seems that a lot of developers are implementing some type of motion control and/or 3D into their games these days. Do you have any present or future plans to bring Move/Kinect controls or 3D to the FIFA franchise? SJ: Obviously we haven’t discarded any of them. In terms of 3D, I can’t really say what the direction is at this moment or how pressing that priority is. I’m sure that once there is a big install base of 3D TV’s… than our game will do its best to adapt to that sort of experience, but at the moment there’s not that many 3D TV’s out there. I think HD TV’s is still the main way that people are playing video games like FIFA right now so we’re focusing on continuing to improve and use our capacity to improve that experience at the moment. In terms of motion control, basically FIFA 13 is going to be the year we are going to invest in different ways of integrating those types of technologies into our game. What those ways are is the current brain storming that is going on.
GE: If you could say anything to the new players to the game to convince them to buy FIFA 12 over another football (soccer) game, what would it be?
SJ: *laughs* It’s difficult to say one thing because I feel like it’s so many things that could be used to convince someone who is playing PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) right now. I think the main thing is FIFA has taken such huge quality strides in gameplay which was really where many years ago Konami had the upper hand on the old generation consoles. I think people who are still playing Konami (PES) are those who have this romantic idea that it was better then and it’s way better now so they continue to play Konami (PES) so it has this type of cult following, but I think for anyone who really gives it a try, tries FIFA in the past 3 or 4 years, the gap of quality is becoming more and more evident that I truly think FIFA 12 is going to blow it (PES) out of the water even more. Obviously people might think that I’m very biased saying that but you look at Metacritic our score just keeps going up. Konami is going to start giving up the market share as our market share keeps going up. So for those who have the objectivity to try both games, I think there are very few who still decide to stick with Konami. I’m really happy about that. I think our game is reaching a level of excellence that it really is a trail blazer when it comes to sport simulation. That is why we are winning certain awards and why our market share continues to grow is because we make such a great game. I’d like to take this time to thank Santiago for taking time out to conduct this interview as well as thanking fellow Gaming Examiner Editor Tony for actually conducting this interview over the phone as the time difference prevented me from doing it myself.
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