FIFA 11 : Inside Personality+

The Backpage… with Darren Cross

Darren Cross talks to FIFA 11 Gameplay Producer Aaron McHardy to find out more about Personality+, how it will change the way you play and what it feels like to work on FIFA…

We’ve been hearing a lot about Personality+ and it sounds like being able to identify which players you’re controlling and what’s happening around them will be hugely important in FIFA 11, because that’s going to help you decide what to do next?
“That’s exactly it. You get the visual feedback that you can base your decision on, and then you’ll see it play out as you would expect it to in the real world. Effectively you start to learn your team and their abilities, whereas in the past it might have been ‘give it to the fast guy’, now that’s not the case. You might have a really fast player but his dribbling could be terrible and his touch poor, so you really have to learn which players are suited to which situations.”

Can you tell us a bit more about that?
“I support Arsenal so I’ll use Fabregas as an example. You know that in certain situations he’s capable of playing a 90 degree pass, but if his team-mate Eboue is in the same situation then he’s not going to be able to do that quite as well. That gives you a lot of personality in the teams, which is something that was always difficult to do because all the players are using the same engine.

Now that we can do that, the difference between a lower league team and a Premier League team in FIFA 11 is not necessarily that the Premier League team will all be faster. That’s not the case because some lower league teams have really fast players too. But you might have three really fast players on the lower league team who can’t do as much in front of goal as Premier League players, or can’t play a lofted through ball over the top quite as good. So what distinguishes a Premier League team now is that you have a squad full of players that can do these things.”

So Personality+ is going to take players a lot deeper into the game, because they’ll need to think more about the abilities of the guy they’re controlling?
“Absolutely. We have a tournament set up in our office between myself, Gary and Santiago, and we’ve each picked a different star team to make sure we’re matching smaller teams off against bigger ones. One of my teams is Barnet and I played against Santiago who was using Valencia. In that game I really had to think about what I was going to do. I like to think of myself as a football purist and I would hate to play for a manager who would tell me to just kick the ball up the pitch, but I’m there with Barnet thinking ‘I’ve got a fast guy upfront, this might be the best tactic!’ That’s what I ended up doing and it’s cool, because it really brings the personality of the teams and the players to life.”

So the player with a good football knowledge will know whether trying a certain pass in a game is a good idea or not, and a more casual fan will gradually learn what the players are capable of and what’s realistic?
“The whole aim for us is to try to build the game so that, if you’ve never played it before, it doesn’t matter if you have played football. If you’ve played football then you’ll know whether something is the right thing to do or not in a real match, and we want that to be the same in the game.

For the guy who doesn’t play football or doesn’t play our game, we’ve done a lot of work on giving him feedback too. So if you try a 180 degree pass for the first time the feedback will be that it’s a poor pass, because it’ll be slower and bouncing and things like that. You’ll also see an animation where the player is off balance, falling over and may end up on his backside. The idea is that you’ll notice that was difficult and learn from that over time.”

Talking of passing, one of the things that came up in Community feedback on FIFA 10 was ping-pong passing. How do you stop ping-pong passing, but also balance it so it’s still possible to put great passing moves together?
“We get a lot of feedback from the Community, and with the ping-pong passing a lot of people said ‘why don’t you make 180 degree passes totally inaccurate or take off assistance on 90 degree passes?’ but obviously that’s a very on-off behaviour. Trying to get it working in the right situations, and not working in the wrong ones, is very difficult. So now the whole thing comes back to the kicking error system.

What that does is calculate all the contexts – how the ball is coming to you, whether it’s coming to your strong foot, if you’re under pressure and so on – and the good thing about that is all the information is there for you to see. You can see the speed of the ball, you can see it’s bouncing, you can see that it’s not coming to your player’s good foot and that he’s got someone breathing down his neck. So, just like a professional footballer would, you make a quick decision that it isn’t the right thing to do, and you do something else.”

As well as responding to Community feedback, do you react to things that happen in real games too? So if you see something happen in a live match that’s not in FIFA, will you come into the office and suggest it the next day?
“Oh it happens all the time! It used to be the Producers that would drive a lot of that, but we have such a great team upstairs and all of us are really into football and watch a lot of it. We get emails from everyone saying things like ‘I saw this and we need to get it in the game!’ There are always ideas flying around about cool things we can do.”

Plus I guess you’re always looking out for things that could be better when you’re playing versions of the game during production?
“We’re constantly playing the game and finding things to analyse and behaviours to add. Last year we introduced covering, so that if a player was out of position then a team-mate would step in and briefly play his position for him. This year we’ve added a brand-new behaviour, which is the ability for players to swap positions. That might be wingers swapping, or a central midfielder could make a run wide, the wide player would move into the centre to cover him and then the midfielder would stay out wide for a few moments until they get the chance to swap back. We’re constantly adding behaviours like that to the game. We really analyse the most minute details of football.”

Sounds like a lot of work, but it must all be worth it when you release a game and it’s a huge success, like FIFA 10 is?
“Absolutely! Everyone was so proud. I think we won something like 50 Game Of The Year awards and two BAFTAs! I’d never seen a BAFTA before but now we’ve got two and one of them is on my desk! The guys are so proud and it’s hard not to be, because everyone really puts everything into it. We love it, and when you read on the forums that everyone is loving it too it really is a great sense of achievement and it makes everything worthwhile.”

Finally Aaron, what happens when you finish a big game like FIFA. Do you get a massive holiday?
“Yes and no. You do get some time off to recuperate, but usually everyone’s got a list of things they want to do for the next one and we jump into designing it and trying to find areas to improve!”