FIFA 11 Preview

FIFA 10, on the 360 and PS3, did very well for itself, selling roughly seventy zillion copies and averaging all kinds of critical acclaim. Kicking a virtual football into the back of the net has never been so fun - or lavishly produced, for that matter. FIFA 10 on the PC was rubbish, however, with subpar graphics and lacklustre production values. Boo.

FIFA 11 promises to do things differently. EA has ported their 360/PS3 engine over to the PC, finally "giving the community what they've asked for," according to PC producer Ian Jarvis. The attention goes right down to the menus: while use of a 360 gamepad is recommended (though the game supports 35 controllers out of the box), all in-game menus can be flicked through with a mouse and keyboard. They even use a simple windows mouse pointer instead of dressing the UI up with irrelevant and clunky custom pointers, which should please anyone familiar with the usual sub-par PC ports. Playing at a 1920x1080 resolution naturally makes the PC version the most attractive version of the game, which you'd expect, although such high visual fidelity does draw extra attention to the pixelated 2D crowd.

Using the same code means PC owners can expect parity with their console brethren, and EA certainly isn't resting on its current run of success when it comes to FIFA 11: at a recent preview event in EA's Guildford office, Line Producer David Rutter took the time to show a screenshot detailing the team's bugs and feature tracking software - and just how much work was going into quashing the problems. It's easy to picture Rutter as a perfectionist, obsessing over what the team can do to get perfect 10 review scores instead of being happy with solid 9s.

There's even a graph, so you know he's serious. They've mapped the gameplay experience of FIFA 10 across the X axis, and plopped the quality on the Y: FIFA 10 maintains a steady 9 and occasionally dips into the 8's, but the projected graph for FIFA 11 stays on the same 9 but spikes into the 10s. It's intended as a bit of a joke, but the underlying message is deadly serious: EA wants FIFA 11 to be the best football game of all time.

But what's new? If you're expecting grand theatrics, the feature list may disappoint. Rutter is adamant to focus the majority of the team's efforts on the core fundamentals of the game. The idea, he says, is to "actually spend time understanding the subject matter, understanding the people who play the game, and giving them fresh, new, good stuff that matters ... instead of coming up with inappropriate marketing gimmicks which just look good on the back of the box and are, you know, pointless."

What about the new Personality Plus feature, then? The name sounds like something that would be at home in even the most desperate of the barrel-scraping football franchises. It's a bit of a misnomer, though, and in reality the system is more of a suite of features, a "holistic umbrella of features" according to Rutter, which attributes an extensive set of visual attributes and specific animations to each player. There are now three times as many body shapes and sizes than in FIFA 10, for instance, and the technology has allowed EA Canada to expertly capture John Terry's distinctive gormless expression. Success.