Aug 15, 2007
Joe Booth, FIFA 08 (PS3, Xbox 360), Lead Producer
Welcome to the official FIFA Soccer 08 on PS3 and Xbox 360 blog. As a Leeds United fan it’s been a tough year and I have been through some real lows while supporting my club. Luckily, the FIFA development team has been through an amazing year. So many of us on the team moved from all over the world to Vancouver, Canada where we make the game. We challenged ourselves to re-invent what a great football game experience can be with the goal to make our game as accessible and fun to play to as many football fans as possible.
As the lead producer of FIFA Soccer 08 I want to make the game development more open and use this forum to talk about what you can expect from this year’s game and give you a better insight into how we are developing FIFA for next-gen consoles. Different producers on our team will use this space to talk about their particular areas of expertise. The first guy is Kaz Makita, who has really been the architect of the re-write of the game engine, driving the development and vision. Three years ago EA Sports decided to make its biggest investment in its history when we decided to build an engine from scratch for next-gen consoles and would fully ultilise the power of the multi-threaded, multi-processor CPUs for gameplay to better simulate real football. The new gameplay engine uses 35 times more processing power then the CG gameplay engine.
We had to throw everything away and start all over. So what you saw on FIFA 07 on Xbox 360 was the first version of our plan and you saw an innovation where the ball was now separated from the animation with independent ball physics. This year we have focused on building on the foundation of our gameplay. We have concentrated our efforts on things like the context and depth in AI and the sense of the player ‘brain’ working to a much higher fidelity than it has ever done before with each CPU brain making thousands of evaluations and choices per second.
