This is the second part of our interview with Gary Paterson, the creative director of FIFA 10, in which he continues to explain exactly how the football game works, how FIFA finally made its way into the premier league and the technology he'd like the next generation of football games to feature.

Read the first part of our conversation right here

The sports games which are really excelling at the moment – the likes of FIFA, NHL, and MLB: The Show – share a passion for realism and detail. Is being ‘realistic’ what you strive for, and how does that impact on the playing experience?
I think we do strive for a lot of realism, but I wouldn’t say always. There is that balance between realism and fun to play. So things like, for us, if you look at our game, the pass completion percentage of our game is much higher than it is in real life, because people want to play a version of football that’s the 1978 Brazil team or something, they don’t want to play a version of football that’s, I don’t know, Cardiff.

...well, Cardiff are pretty decent these days, but the point is that players don’t want a league two version of football. They want to play their idealistic version of football, and it can become frustrating if they can’t. The phrase we use around the office is to actualise what the players envisage in their heads. They envisage that they’re going to be able to play this pass, and if they can’t do that it’s going to get frustrating.

It’s more of a pragmatic approach then?
So there is an element of, yeah, we want realism, but we temper that with how much fun it is and what the experience is. Realism is very important, I think we’re probably 80 per cent of the way to simulation and then we tone it back a little bit, and try to get this balance between fun and frustration. Otherwise it’d be too real, too hard. It’s a bit like if you played on manual, when you first picked it up, you’d probably struggle and you’d get frustrated very easily.

Also, for us, things like sprint speed and acceleration speed – another reason for me why the current generation has excelled is the idea of physical momentum. Football’s about moving a man one way so you can beat him another, and that’s momentum, and if you lose that momentum you lose your balance. So if, as in the last generation, you have a game where a defender can go from zero to sprint in, like, half a second, even if you beat him he’s right back at you, so there’s no depth there. We had a problem in FIFA 09 where sometimes you’ll go for a header, and the defending player speeds up a lot to get to the header. And you feel like, ‘Well, he cheated there, because I was about to have a header on goal and the defender broke momentum and managed to get the header in before me.’ Those kinds of things, controlling momentum is very important to creating the depth of gameplay that we need.

Could you specifically detail how that philosophy applies to any aspect of the game?
OK, so if we look again at the player acceleration curve, in the earlier FIFAs it was very fast, almost no time at all to get from zero to full speed. So we looked it up on the internet to see what a 100 metre sprinter takes. And it’s actually six seconds, six and a half seconds into a 100 metre sprint they’re at full speed, so it curves a bit like this [motions a graph], very fast, and then it tapers off at the end. Obviously, six seconds to get to full speed you’re thinking, ‘You can’t have that in FIFA’, so we kind of mimicked the curve, but made it, I think we made it two and half seconds. So you still get a lot of the benefits of it – the benefits are, if you can kick the ball past the defender and get yourself up to full speed it’s going to take him a while to accelerate to full speed.

So you’ve got to create this kind of balance, and it modifies the shape of the curve too, but it’s another example of, there’s real life, and here’s what we’ve done. Because when you’re in real life, you can anticipate so many things that are about to happen. Like when you’re moving with a player – we had a version of the game where the 180 degree turn was really long. Realistically long, like, it was the same length as it’s supposed to be in real life. But then because you’re on the pad, you make one wrong move with the pad, because switching happens, or because you don’t anticipate something properly, then you’re out of the game because the turn takes too long. So we had to reduce these turn speeds to make them so the gamer could recover from them if he made the wrong decision, otherwise it was really frustrating and felt really unresponsive.

That’s something that you have in real life that you don’t have [in the game], you have all your senses, right? All these senses which determine the depth and the distance of the ball, and what’s going to happen in the future, you can perceive all these things. We put this ‘X’ on the floor to show you where the ball bounces, because we know that you don’t have the depth perception of where the ball’s coming.

All these things are ways in which we alter the experience to make it more gamey and less realistic. But at the same time, like the acceleration curve, it’s less realistic, but it still follows the concept of what realism is, the concept of ‘accelerate fast, slower, slower’, and we’ve taken that and shortened it, condensed it a little bit. Because our game also isn’t as fast as real life. The reason it isn’t as fast as real life is because if things happened that quickly, you wouldn’t have time to respond. So, again, we made the acceleration faster but the top speed slower than in real life. We take the concept of real life and bend it.

Crossing is another great example. In real life, crossing is horrific. How many times do you see your team in real life and you’re like, ‘You can’t cross your legs!’ The stats are something like only one in 10 crosses actually hit the target, and if you had that in a videogame, you would just never cross. You would never go down the line and cross because you know that crosses aren’t that successful. So we had to cheat a little bit and make the crosses more successful. The same with shooting, too – to get a really decent shot in real life you have to take a touch, you have to be so composed on the ball. To have to do it to that extreme in a game.