Rutter talks generously about Paterson as the driving force behind FIFA’s gameplay resurgence. “We have a lot of meetings about [overall visions] and to plot out where we’re going,” he says. “Gary’s not into that so much, he just wants to make the best football game in the world, and he doesn’t really care about some of the [other] aspects. His purity of vision for that side of things is what makes the game so good. And he’s slowly brainwashing everyone to feel the same way.”

But both men also understand that the series’ strength is based on more than pure football. Paterson talks about coming up with features like the popular Be A Pro career mode that “marketing can get behind, with a story for the game”. Rutter seems to agree: “I think a brilliant game will sell very, very well. But if I was to walk into a WH Smith and say to someone browsing the games: ‘Excuse me, I’m David Rutter, I’m the line producer on FIFA. You should buy [our] game because we’ve worked on some prioritisation for positioning so that the centre back will always be covered by a defensive midfielder if you go up for a header’, most people won’t give a damn about that. What people give a damn about is, does it play all right and has it got the latest kits in? If you look at what I thought was the dark side of EA – the branding and the ownership of a number of important things – that’s also the positive for a lot of people. It’s a very difficult line to tread.”

It was this combination of ruthlessly refined gameplay and expensive, authentic licences that made FIFA 09 such a resounding critical and commercial success, and put it firmly ahead of old foe Pro Evo. Released in October 2008, the game reviewed exceptionally well (Paterson remembers that for a day the Metacritic score was 90 – “I took a screenshot”). It became the fastest-selling FIFA title in the UK, topping the all-formats chart at Christmas and boasting two million sales before the year’s end. EA recently announced total sales were over 7.8 million, up roughly four per cent on FIFA 08. The choice that gamers had been forced to make for over a hardware generation, between depth and glitz, and authenticity and licences, was no longer the defining characteristic of console football games. Now you could have both.

But the team’s celebration of its success is tempered by the self-imposed pressure to better its efforts this year. “People have asked: ‘So how does it feel to have a game that’s finally beaten PES?’ or: ‘How does it feel to be the most popular football videogame in the world?’” Rutter explains. “I don’t really think like that.” Paterson agrees that there’s a sense of postrelease anticlimax, especially since the allimportant Metacritic score takes around a month to crystallise. “There’s not one event where you go to and say, ‘Right, Official PlayStation gave us ten out of ten’ and that’s the only score you’re ever going to look at,” he says. “Obviously we’re really happy with it, but there’s not a lot of time to sit back and pat yourself on the back, because you’ve only got a year and you’ve got to put the new one out. And it’s an even bigger challenge now to improve on that score, given where we are. We’ve seen Konami struggle to improve upon what they had. It’s going to be tough.”

Rutter’s outlook is similar. “This is going to sound really rubbish, but I’ve been in musicals a couple of times, and there’s this thing where you invest your being in something,” he says. “You have your performance, and then the rehearsal goes away, the performance goes away, some of the people you were in the thing with go away, and then there’s almost this sense of loss which is quite deep. It’s not nice.” In fact, in the iterative studio environment of EA Sports, Rutter doesn’t think there will ever be a singular moment of triumph or celebration. “We’re proud, don’t get me wrong – you look at the sales figures, you look at the market share, and you go, ‘Blimey, we did all right considering what’s going on in the world at the moment’. Then you look at the trapping, you look at the passing, you hear the commentary, you hear Andy Gray say the same thing again… It’s never gonna end.”

Indeed not. In fact, when the team shows off FIFA 10 in the corporate presentation rooms at the Emirates Stadium, they are already halfway through their next yearly development cycle. The refinements and gameplay alterations that will mark this year’s game from the last have already been decided, and Rutter’s presentation highlights the completion percentage of the major revisions: passing – 40 per cent; goalkeeping – 45 per cent; defending – 45 per cent. In line with the studio’s philosophy of making a good game first and marketing hooks second, Rutter boasts cannily that 70 per cent of his team’s resources have been devoted to refining and improving the existing game, and 30 per cent to innovation.

For the most part these refinements are minute, the sort of details that only serious players will understand, let alone become excited by. The AI’s understanding of trapping the ball has been improved, for instance. Now, rather than positioning themselves to control the ball as early as possible – which often results in unrealistic mid-air chest-downs – players will look for the easiest way to bring the ball under control, perhaps by taking a step backwards and waiting for it to drop to the floor. Through balls are now played into the space in front of runners rather than directly to their feet, and those runners can now make curved runs, bending along the offside line to spring defences or arcing between opposition players to collect an angled ball.

There are dozens of such tweaks, making the game more authentic, more complicated, more contextual. But perhaps the alteration that will make the biggest difference to how FIFA actually feels is the removal of the standard eight-directional player axis and the introduction of full 360-degree turning and movement. It’s the perfect illustration of Paterson’s drive to open up scripted and limited areas of FIFA’s engine with lifelike mechanisms offering a far greater number of gameplay variations. “I find it very satisfying,” Rutter says of the new system. “The fact that you couldn’t do that with a player like Cristiano Ronaldo just seemed pretty wrong… It’s one thing people saying, ‘We want more kits, boots and balls’, but when you can’t actually do something as simple as go: ‘There’s two players – I want to run between them…’”

Captured in Rutter’s comments is the essential problem of working on FIFA, or on any yearly title: no matter how good it is, it can always be better. No matter how strong FIFA 09 was, and FIFA 10 looks like it will be, the team will always see the faults in its own game before its achievements. But despite this, Rutter explains why, for the moment at least, he’s not tempted to push his team’s success into a position away from the demanding cycle of yearly development. “People in the position I’m in and people that are in Gary’s position don’t necessarily have as much career aspiration for advancement. For me, I’ve got my dream job. I’m doing something I’m pretty good at and I’m surrounded by people who are bloody excellent at what they do… I didn’t move to EA or Vancouver because I wanted to move to EA or move to Vancouver. I did it because I wanted to make a really kick-arse football videogame. I only know of one other place in the world that I can do that. It’s Vancouver or it’s Konami, to be honest – and my Japanese is terrible.”

This article originally appeared in E203.
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