FIFA: The Road to Redemption

A Game of Two... Games

The annual battle for football videogame superiority between Konami and Electronic Arts feels like it's been going on for as long as consoles have been around themselves. In fact, that's pretty much the case, for all intents and purposes, given that the first FIFA title to hit the shelves did so in 1993 on the SEGA platforms of the day, while International Superstar Soccer - the precursor to Pro Evolution Soccer - arrived in Japan on the Super Nintendo in 1994.

Since then they've spawned around 36 titles between them and succeeded in dividing opinion on just which was the better all-round football game, with - historically - a sense that while the FIFA games were well-finished in terms of presentation and licenses, the Pro Evo titles were where the real football fans spent their money.

That said, review scores have mostly been pretty close. Going back to late 2004, Eurogamer's evaluation of FIFA 05 was a solid 8/10, while Pro Evolution Soccer 4 was 9/10. EA's franchise dipped to a 7/10 the following year, while Konami's game - crucially the last 'ex-gen-only' title grabbed another 9/10.

Then a funny thing happened - Microsoft released the Xbox 360 and the race was on to put out football games in high definition, and utilising the new improved online functionality that the console brought with it.

If we ignore the aberration of FIFA 06: Road to the World Cup - and my. how we'd like to forget with its 2/10 score - for the next two years both franchises tied on 8/10 reviews. But last year, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 fell to a 7/10 versus FIFA 09's 8/10 - and this year the tables turned completely as Pro Evo scored another 7/10, but FIFA 10 rose to a 9/10 rating.

While it's possible to point to Konami's struggle to fully get to grips with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, on the other hand EA has actually improved its act... something which hasn't harmed unit sales, either.

Reinventing the Ball

According to Peter Moore, EA Sports president, the changeover is the result of a long-term series reinvention plan that dates back to before his time, but had a firm focus on the new consoles coming to market.

"We're obviously very pleased with the critical and commercial success we're enjoying right now with FIFA 10," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "Well before I arrived to EA, there was a commitment made to reinvest in this franchise from both a development and marketing perspective.

"The team began the long process of rewriting the core gameplay engine with the switch to this generation of consoles, and our developers have been fully focused on innovating, tuning and polishing ever since.

"The combination of a great game and our renewed focus on speaking directly with fans - engaging them in the development process and listening to their feedback - has created the perfect storm for us. Bottom line - we've made the right bets and we've got an extremely talented team who have worked their butts off to get us to this spot."

It's difficult to argue that the approach hasn't paid off, and talk to the current FIFA team in Montreal and they'll often repeat words such as "simulation" and "real" - indicative of the four key themes they work around today.

"We have a number of sets of what we call pillars," explains the game's producer, David Rutter. "Gameplay, authenticity, approachability and competition are the ones we use a lot on the team. But what ends up within them are filtered by three important criteria.

"Refining - what needs to be made better; responding - what our fans are asking for or telling us needs to be improved; and finally innovating - what our next leap is, and where. Each filter needs to contribute specifically to the improvement of the game, rather than being purely a back of the box marketing gimmick. We've gotten very good at that over the last three or four years."

He goes on to underline Moore's point about reinvention, and why taking the long term view several years ago is what's helped the publisher to reap rewards now - a videogame proof of the old adage about never taking success for granted, perhaps.

"It's been a revolution in its own way. We took the decision as a studio to totally rewrite our gameplay as we moved onto the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The emphasis was to build a brilliant gameplay engine - from the ground up, with extendible systems supporting the fundamentals of football.

"Basically a true simulation, that was unpredictable when it should be, didn't break the laws of physics, but still eminently playable. And, as I say, extendible. We're at a point with FIFA 10 where we could do some revolutionary things - like our 360-degree dribbling - but that came about because we'd evolved the systems around it to a level that allowed us to do that.