FIFA 09 (PC)

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Fear not football-loving PC owners. FIFA 09 is coming out on PC. The long-running football franchise seems immune to the troubles the PC versions of other EA Sports titles, like Madden, are experiencing on home computers. And it'll be coming out for years to come, too. Don't believe us? Fine. Listen to FIFA 09 PC line producer (and Liverpool fan - boo, hiss!) Paul Hossack instead.

VideoGamer.com: Is it harder to make a new version of the same game every year compared with other video game development?

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Paul Hossack: One of the things that we find is that, and it's a good question because from the outside you might look at it and say, well what are you going to change this year? This is my eighth FIFA I'm working on. I've worked on the franchise for over five years now. And the thing is every game you make there's a lot of ideas that you have that you can't put in the game. There's always restraints. Creativity abounds, you have tons of ideas and you focus on the ones, the right ones to do that year, and then based on the reviews we hear, the feedback we talk to gamers, read the forums, because we play the game a lot ourselves, new ideas come up. I've never been in the position where I'm stumped of what could I work on. The challenge is actually a different one. It's like wow, that sounds pretty cool, that's cool, that's cool, what are we going to focus on this year? And that's really what it comes down to.

VideoGamer.com: Why is it difficult to get everything you want to get into the game into the game?

PH: It's something that you don't see on the side when you're a gamer. When I'm working with my team to make a game we have a certain number of people. It's going to be out in the next year, roughly the same time every year. So that's one of the challenges. You can come up with lots of ideas and you have to make sure that you don't come up with too many ideas that you can't really get them done and get them polished to the right level. It's an insight you don't hear often from making the games. One of the things we have to really work on is to not add too many features. If you sign up for too many then you probably won't have enough time to polish them and add a little extra feature, little nuances to make them even better as you're finishing the game up.

VideoGamer.com: What were some of the features you would have liked to have included in FIFA 09 but couldn't because of the issues you mentioned?

PH: That's funny because I'm almost trying to visualise right now what are the things that I've seen that I had to put in emails saying cut from the game! Sometimes it comes down to full on modes that we'll look at and prototype earlier on in the year and decide, well, cool but you know can't do it. But you know I'm not going to give you that list because I don't want to spoil it because in the future we might come out with some of them. But there are certain game modes we'll think of and we'll play around with a little bit and it's like, that would be cool. We look at how much time it will take and it's like wow! OK that's going to take that much time and we add up that plus the features and it's like well, are we expecting the team to work double the time a human can put in? Obviously no. So we have to cut those back. There's little things here and there that we definitely have to cut and that's one of the hard parts of making the game. You get attached to them. It's like your children, you have to say, oh, as much as I love this idea it's not necessary to help what we're already doing in the game to make that great.

VideoGamer.com: As line producer for the PC version do you have input on how the game will change overall or are you told how it's going to change and you simply have to execute on PC?

PH: We actually have a lot of autonomy on the different versions of the game to decide what direction to go in. No one told me what to do this year. Actually as early as May of 07 I was already thinking what the PC version of FIFA 09 was going to be. Starting to work on what do we think we're not getting to in 08 that we want to get to in 09? Where are the trends of the market and what are the gamers asking for, start to figure that out so it's actually a deeper franchise especially this year a bit more so than in the past. We're putting out versions of the game that are tailored to the platform they're being released on. So it's not simply there's one console version we make work on a million different platforms. The PC game is very specific to the PC. We've done a lot of features on it that wouldn't make sense on other platforms, let alone we haven't done on other platforms. You'll see the same from our Wii product and other products as well.

VideoGamer.com: Obviously Peter Moore has been quite open with the community regarding the challenges of sports games on the PC. Does it apply to FIFA?

PH: In general a lot of what Peter's talking about is about North American sports. So if you look at them, in North America when people play sports video games they play them on consoles and the trend has been to get more and more towards console as the platform of choice for sports gaming. For football, the real football, FIFA, you look at it and we actually have quite a healthy market for FIFA PC. If that wasn't the case I don't think I would have spent as much time and my team would have spent as many hours and investment on making the PC game that much better this year, putting in a lot of PC specific things. So there's a distinct difference between football and the North American sports in terms of people's outlook and people's desire to play it on the PC. Germany, UK, a lot of the Eastern European markets, PC is a very important platform for them for playing games and playing FIFA.

VideoGamer.com: So FIFA doesn't apply then?

PH: It doesn't apply. Some of the stuff Peter talks about that is definitely applicable, and I can't get into a lot of detail on it, is I think there's a lot of opportunity on the PC platform to do things differently. We're not just making ports of console games any more, we're tailoring the game to the PC platform, what you can do on the PC. I think that actually begs the question of what happens when you do that for another year and two years and three years down the road and we're really thinking what's the right game for the PC. I think there's different ways we can present the game. Different business models we can even look into in the future around the PC title. I'm not sure where that's going yet. I know Peter's alluded a little bit to those types of issues. I think those are completely relevant even to where we could take football franchises on PC.

VideoGamer.com: It's interesting you talk about different business models, and I know you can't go into too much detail but what are some of the possibilities there for future FIFA titles on the PC?

PH: I really don't want to get into too much detail there because it would be pure speculation. But if you look at buying a box product in a shop is a great way to get games to people but there's a lot of other ways people play their PC games and that's something we should probably look at. Is there a better way for us to get them that football entertainment experience? If there's a better way then we'll be looking into it.

VideoGamer.com: So your many PC owning FIFA fans who have read Peter Moore's comments and seen what EA has done with North American sports games on PC, who are perhaps a little worried that a similar fate might befall FIFA, they've got nothing to worry about?

PH: I see no reason to worry. I've come over on this press tour specifically to promote FIFA on the PC. That's the only reason why I'm here. We're investing in it.

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