Complex has posted their interview with the Producer of FIFA 12, David Rutter, as he breaks down all the new changes.
Complex: "You've said that this is the biggest leap the franchise has made since this generation of consoles—were the improvements more driven by external pressures from the fan community or were they things that the dev team had always wanted to do?
David Rutter: I think it boils down to this. For the team, we've been trying to craft a brilliant soccer video game. A simulation of the sport. So to hear you say that you played growing up and love the game is reassuring to me because that's what we're trying to do. Since we transitioned to this console generation, we rebuilt the engine, rebuilt the game, and slowly but surely have been getting to a game quality level that we were happy with. The past couple of years we've been 90 or around it on Metacritic. For this year, we actually invested a small team offsite to build the Player Impact Engine, and they were working on that for a while. The reason we wanted to do that was that we realized that we were limiting ourselves with the technologies we'd built four or five years ago, and we needed to rejigger. So this was a team-based initiative, rather than a company-based one.
For tactical defending and precision dribbling, those two things came as much out of my frustrations with the limitations we had in our dribbling, and also to do with the fact that our defending was basic and wasn't engaging—it was powerful, but ultimately did not reflect what defending is. We had the jockey press and whatnot on double triggers, but that was not an accessible mechanic for the vast majority of people. So we wanted to remove the kind of un-engaging, basic, and ultimately dull defending mechanic and put in something much more interesting, with a lot more depth, but that actually reflected the sport and people's experience with the sport."
David Rutter: I think it boils down to this. For the team, we've been trying to craft a brilliant soccer video game. A simulation of the sport. So to hear you say that you played growing up and love the game is reassuring to me because that's what we're trying to do. Since we transitioned to this console generation, we rebuilt the engine, rebuilt the game, and slowly but surely have been getting to a game quality level that we were happy with. The past couple of years we've been 90 or around it on Metacritic. For this year, we actually invested a small team offsite to build the Player Impact Engine, and they were working on that for a while. The reason we wanted to do that was that we realized that we were limiting ourselves with the technologies we'd built four or five years ago, and we needed to rejigger. So this was a team-based initiative, rather than a company-based one.
For tactical defending and precision dribbling, those two things came as much out of my frustrations with the limitations we had in our dribbling, and also to do with the fact that our defending was basic and wasn't engaging—it was powerful, but ultimately did not reflect what defending is. We had the jockey press and whatnot on double triggers, but that was not an accessible mechanic for the vast majority of people. So we wanted to remove the kind of un-engaging, basic, and ultimately dull defending mechanic and put in something much more interesting, with a lot more depth, but that actually reflected the sport and people's experience with the sport."
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