Explaining the methodology adopted by the new FIFA engine isn’t easy, even for Paterson. He thinks hard before settling on an example to illustrate how his game works. “Maybe I could talk about a shot,” he offers, before launching into a deeper version of the criticism he sent to the FIFA gameplay team, filled with AI decision-making and detailed contextual considerations. The general principle is a drive towards complexity and realism, removing automated elements of gameplay in favour of minutely modelled and finely tuned mechanisms that offer a far greater variety of potential outcomes.

“I think fundamentally one of the things which changed in the way we build the game is we stay away from any kind of scripting,” Paterson confirms. “Before, when there were twoplayer interactions, we would script them. Two players would come together in current-gen for a header, and we would put them into scripted animation. So, you know, they put their arms around each other, and you couldn’t do anything about it once it started. It looked really nice but the outcomes from it were very limited.” The solution is to remove the shortcuts and build a system that relies on logic. Rather than simply coding ‘defender wins header’, “we have to make a system which makes the defender win, by using logical factors like height, weight, strength, heading ability,” explains Paterson. “We don’t script anything like that, it’s just: here’s the situation, here’s the context, here’s what’s logical, that’s what’s happened. It becomes harder for us to design, but it gives you the variety and the jump-out-of-your-seat moments you’re looking for.”

This drive to complexity and authenticity is something that FIFA shares with other leading sports titles. Only two current sports games can boast a Metacritic rating higher than FIFA 09 – NHL 09, also made by EA at Vancouver, with 88, and Sony’s recently released baseball game MLB 09: The Show, sitting pretty at 90. Like FIFA, they’re characterised by deep, strong core gameplay, backed up by an eye for detail. So is realism ultimately what lies behind the success of these games? “We do strive for a lot of realism, but I wouldn’t say always,” Paterson explains. “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.” He gives an example: acceleration speed. “Football’s about moving a man one way so you can beat him another. So if 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.” In previous years FIFA’s players had been too quick, so Paterson’s team researched the acceleration curve of sprinters. “It’s actually six seconds, six-and-a-half seconds into a 100-metre sprint [they’re] at full speed,” he says. “It curves 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 mimicked the curve, but made it, I think, two-and-a-half seconds. So you still get a lot of the benefits of it – 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. You’ve got to create this kind of balance: there’s real life, and here’s what we’ve done. We take the concept of real life and bend it.”

Released in September 2007, FIFA 08 was another step forward, scoring a Metacritic rating of 82 on PS3 and 83 on 360. Rutter arrived at EA in August as the game was being readied for shipping, taking over the producer role vacated by 08’s Joe Booth. “When I talk to people about it I always say it was like turning to the dark side,” says Rutter of the company he resented for so long. Contacted by a studio recruiter through professional networking website LinkedIn, Rutter was at first apprehensive, but after several phone interviews agreed to travel to Vancouver for a face-to-face meeting. “FIFA 08 hadn’t come out at that point, so I went and bought my own copy of FIFA 07 and UEFA Champions League and played those games to death,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘I can’t turn up and not know anything about their games’. And I actually thought, ‘Well, they’re not too bad’. I was pleasantly surprised.”

What he found at the studio surprised him even more. “I went to the interview and met the guys who work there, and what was obvious was that the opinion the world had about EA Sports and the FIFA team was really disaligned. There’s this weird form of prejudice, that I was guilty of myself. [I was] speaking to these guys and thinking: ‘Wow, they are actually trying to fix stuff and make a good game’.” He mentions in particular Andrew Wilson and Kaz Makita. “Those guys along with Gary and a few other people went: ‘What are we going to do to make everyone realise that FIFA can be as good as Pro Evo? The only way to do it is to make a really good game’. And rather than going the route of marketing gimmicks they went: ‘Why don’t we put ‘really good game’ on the back of the box?’ and then just went for it. And went for it like you would not believe.” Seeing the work that had already been done and the new direction the studio was taking, Rutter was convinced. “I realised that I can actually help, because I’m a firm believer in what they’re doing.”

As Rutter points out, the focus of the FIFA team was no longer on eye-grabbing features, but on refining the engine they already had in place. His first act as producer was to embark upon a press and community tour of Europe to gather feedback (“I would sit in a room and have 15 forum members from Poland march in and they would give me hell about things they didn’t like about the game”) which fed into the studio’s annual appraisal process. “What we do is split the game down into what we consider to be the 12 fundamentals of the game, so things like passing, shooting, dribbling, ball physics,” Paterson explains. “And every year the producers will rate them. We’ll get QA to rate them, we’ll get the dev team to rate them, we’ll get external people to rate them. We then rate how important these areas are to the game – so maybe passing and dribbling are more important than set-pieces, for example – and we use that to decide where we are weak.”