2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Preview

Can you feel it? That's excitement brewing in your belly. That's the irrational notion that, somehow, this time, England may actually win the World Cup. Well, if Rooney's fit, and Messi and Ronaldo are injured, and Brazil fail to turn up, and Spain forget how to pass and move. Hmm. It's not such a sure thing after all. Oh well, we'll have to make do with a virtual victory on EA Sports 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa, due out in April. At a packed preview event at Stamford Bridge - the home of the next Premier League champions - EA took the lid off the game, impressions of which you can find here, and line producer Simon Humber sat down with us for a chat on the game every football fan will be playing this summer.

Q. Tell us about the team behind the game and how it differs from the team behind the FIFA games.

Simon Humber: It's both the same and it's different. Gameplay is the same. There's a guy called Gary Patterson, who is the creative director for the FIFA products; he runs the gameplay team. That group of people produce gameplay, whether it is for FIFA 10, or for World Cup, or any other next-gen products. Then there's the core team. The core team puts together the front end menus, the game modes, the rendering, the presentation, the audio etc. That's different for each product. Dave Rutter's got his FIFA team over here. I've got my World Cup team over here. And then we both share the gameplay resources.

Q: Are you under the same pressure from Peter Moore to get a 90 average review score as Rutter was for FIFA 10?

SH: [Laughs] The thing is, for some reason the event titles always Metacritic lower than the FIFA titles. You read reviews and they talk about the fact that the game isn't as deep as the FIFA game. I've asked people questions about that. Depth seems to mean number of teams, to a lot of people. They look at FIFA, which has got five hundred and something teams. They look at Euro, which has got 53 teams because that's all there is in Europe; you can't do anything else. For World Cup, back in 2006 we had 124. This time around we knew if people are going to equate number of teams with depth, we've got to get everyone we're allowed to put into the game, into the game. FIFA have got 208 member nations. Nine of them are not eligible for this product because four of them didn't enter and five were thrown out because they weren't able to arrange their first match or something bizarre like that. So FIFA wouldn't let us include those. But all the other 199 are there. So if you really fancy the challenge of winning the World Cup with Vanuatu, you can qualify from Oceania, stop New Zealand getting there, and get there with Vanuatu instead.

Q: So, really, you are under a similar pressure to make a game that matches FIFA 10.

SH: Absolutely. We're not in the business of churning out rubbish. Every product we release needs to be an improvement on the previous one. That's how we keep each other on our toes. Both David's team and my team are trying to outdo each other all of the time. Plus we're looking at PES, wondering when they're going to come back strong, because surely they will do; they're not going to give up that market space so easily.

Q: Describe the conversations you have with Peter Moore when discussing this game.

SH: I say 'Peter, we're going to make this the most authentic [laughs], realistic, visually epic game you've ever seen in your life, featuring every team possibly available to us. Do you buy into that, Peter? We're going to have the whole tournament online!'.

Generally what happens is, we don't see Peter day to day. He's down in Redwood Shores or up in Vancouver. He'll come up six or seven times a year, sit down with us, we'll go through our product plans, our design reviews for products, say what we're looking to put into the product, what we're looking to achieve with the product, and we sit there, mull it over and he gives us the approval or not. But we're pretty autonomous as well. The football group's done a great job over the last few years. Our products have become very successful. So it's not as if we need to be looked over all of the time. We know what we're doing. We've got a great group of people up there.

Q: Do you have wagers with Rutter on the review score average?

SH: On World Cup we haven't got that yet. FIFA they had a sweepstakes, so everyone could enter and they had to give a predicted Metacritic score.

Q: So if World Cup's average review score is higher than FIFA 10's, you won't get anything, or there's no forfeit?

SH: If we average a higher Metacritic than FIFA 10 I'd be prepared to do many different things. So feel free to contribute towards that if you like!

Q: Some have already begun asking why World Cup isn't FIFA 10 downloadable content. What do you say to that? Why shouldn't it be FIFA 10 DLC?

SH: Firstly, DLC is limited in terms of how big it can be. If we eject the disc from a 360 over there and look at it, it's a DVDs worth of data. DLC isn't set up for that at the moment. That's the first point. Secondly, this is the world's biggest sporting event. It deserves its own platform. It's only once every four years. A great many people want a World Cup game. They want something totally unique. If you were just playing the World Cup using what FIFA 10 has for presentation for stadiums etc, it wouldn't be the World Cup. We want to produce the de facto authentic tournament experience so that when you're watching games this summer and you're playing the game you feel that connection. Maybe you want to play before the game, maybe sneak in a game at half time if you can't be bothered to listen to Hansen and Lineker, and then play it afterwards. It's a big social occasion as well. Groups of people get together to watch matches, play in game modes together, just playing co-op kick off matches, co-op online matches.