The way you’re set up with this new engine, it seems that the immediate future for FIFA is refining and adding complexity to the models and ideas you already have…
It’s kind of the way we went so far…

But is there a ceiling to that, in terms of resources as much as anything else? Not just technology, but how long it takes to model players who look more realistic, who act in a more realistic way. Is there a point where you’ll hit a brick wall?
I guess it probably doesn’t have a ceiling, and I guess it’ll probably move in the same direction as, you know people now buy a rendering engine off the shelf, because they know that’s what they can do. Maybe one day we’ll buy a really complicated piece of software that deals with player movement off-the-shelf, because someone’s made that and then we’ll build the game around it.

I can’t see it stopping, but I do have the same concern around even the next generation of consoles, it’s how far do we have to go? Like the shooting system. We put the shooting system in the game that cared about all these factors about how the ball was coming towards you and your player’s preferred foot, and things like this. But then we needed to educate the AI so that the AI knew these things. So there’s an example video of FIFA 10 all about how the guy will try to trap the ball on the floor, because that’s easy. You kind of have to do that, because if you’ve made the system properly, to reflect real life, trapping in the air is really hard. So you have to then adapt the AI of your game to trap it on the ground, so the user doesn’t get frustrated by the fact that trapping in the air is really difficult.

So every time you update the system, you have to update the AI to understand the system. Same with the CPU AI. We now have to spend time to make the CPU AI learn that shooting with your back to goal isn’t going to work, because we’ve written a complicated shooting system. Shooting when someone’s jostling with you isn’t going to work very often – the AI’s got to learn about the complicated systems we create, and that’s going to create additional overhead for us, but obviously, we have to do that. Back to the root of your question, I am apprehensive about how complicated we’re going to have to get.

There must be a large added cost to it in terms of development?
Oh, yeah. Huge. It’s tough. I mean, as we’ve said before, we’re the biggest gameplay team at the biggest studio in the world, so I don’t know how many people are going to get the luxury that I have with my team. And even then it’s tough to make these things work. I mean we said downstairs that we’re refining this engine and it’s all about the detail. And it’s so hard just to take that feature from 85, 87 to 90, 91 per cent.

It’s really tough, it’s getting down into a lot of details about, like passing, we have to do all this spatial analysis to figure out where the best passing option is, and all these other things about trapping, and how we kick the ball with the shooting system. Even for me, for a producer, I have to tune all those things, so I have this tool that I can tune the shooting system with – and I tell you, you need a manual just to tune the tool, you know? It is getting tough, but I can’t see it stopping, I guess.

Is it driven by demands from the playerbase?
I guess it’s up to us to drive ourselves. If neither Konami or ourselves go that way, then people don’t know what they want to play until you give it to them, right? Ragdoll physics, for example, appeared in maybe third person or first person games, and that’s something that now we have to try and develop as well, some kind of ragdoll collision physics in our games to make them more realistic. And again, something like that would really take our sports games to a new level. It’s really tough with us, with so many characters, and interaction between characters, and so much non-scripted interaction between them for ragdoll physics to work, but again that’s something that could take us to the next level.

Read part two of our conversation here