FIFA 11 Interview

David Rutter might not be as well known as the likes of Molyneux, Miyamoto and Bleszinski, but as the Line Producer on FIFA he’s a big deal. We sat down with the “prime minister” of FIFA game development to find out just what goes into making a new game every year.

Q: You’ve got quite a good reputation, don’t you?

David Rutter: Yeah, well, I do try hard. And I tend to not make things up.

Q: Would you say you’re a perfectionist?

DR: Yes and no. I constantly find fault with things.

Q: Do the team hate you for that?

DR: I don’t think they hate me for it, because I think there are a lot of people like that on our team. I like that. I am more of a, uh, what’s the right word? Dreamer, probably, than some people on the team. Gary [Paterson, Creative Director] is an amazing pragmatist and he’s totally right in the here now and the ‘this is what we need to do next, and then we need to do that’. Whereas I’m a little more like, ‘how about this crazy thing over here?’ I think that’s probably why we work so well together. We’ve got all different types of personality on the team, but all of us are mad crazy football fans, all of us are mad crazy gamers. And we’re probably all a little bit a-type and have all got flown into one place, and it’s brilliant, and we live there having fun.

Q: Is it awkward that it’s a world cup year? Do you worry that people aren’t going to buy two FIFAs in one year?

DR: Naturally, somewhat concerned. At the same time I think our feature set this year is pretty compelling, and I don’t think that everyone who buys FIFA buys World Cup. For want of a better term, and this is not to patronise people, it’s a fair-weather fan’s game. We are making a game that represents a once-every-four-years experience, and people that buy it are hardcore football fans that game and all the usual suspects, plus people who are casually dipping into the genre. I’m not deceiving myself that people are then going to buy my game because they bought one: they probably weren’t going to anyway. I would love them to, of course, because I think we offer them something very, very different, and the people that play our game religiously will get a real kick out of this year’s game.

Am I worried? No. What I am worried about is the kits, to build the kits, because everyone’s been at the World Cup. So come back and send us your kits please!

Q: Let’s be honest, FIFA 10 did alright. Why haven’t you got lazy?

DR: I have this thing where I don’t want to let people down. I spent a great deal of time between FIFA 09 and FIFA 10 on the [official] forums getting feedback about the game, and I actually feel like I owe all those people stuff – constantly – and I just want to make a really good game for everyone.

I’ve probably got, like, serious issues.

Q: FIFA’s changed, hasn’t it?

DR: We have totally changed. I say we – that’s not true. I’ve been on record many, many times saying I was a big Pro Evo fan and was somewhat cynical about what FIFA could deliver, and then was courted by EA to go and work on FIFA and my opinion was transformed. Essentially by witnessing the people who were then working on the game, and then seeing where it had got to on FIFA 08, and then where we took that for FIFA 09, 10 and now 11.

The key thing is, actually spending time understanding the subject matter, understanding the people who play the game and then giving them fresh, new good stuff that matters. And that’s what we’ve done, rather than coming up with inappropriate marketing gimmicks which just look good on the back of the box and are, you know, pointless.

Taking this year as an example: we haven’t really done the whole ‘refinement’ story this year, which we have [in the past], but a huge amount of our effort this year has gone into nitty gritty fundamental tiny little details that the vast majority of people won’t notice until they see it or feel it for the first time. It might only happen once every hundred games, and then they’ll go ‘oh my goodness me.’ Things like the way you can change your players: tons of stuff.

Then there’s the whole responding to feedback, and we’ve made a big deal talking about the stuff we’ve done with Pro Passing because it’s a huge deal to a lot of people. And the ability to, you know, give a very engaging, deep, very rewarding passing system that is contextually correct within the game and within the sport of football. And then Personality Plus, which is probably the closest that we’ve got to something that sounds like a marketing gimmick, because it is a markety-gimmicky sounding name, but it’s underpinned by such a fundamentally deep and important way of making a football engine that it deserves to be much more important than saying “we’ve been working on player personality” because it’s a whole… more than that. I almost swore then!

Q: You talk about the community quite a lot.

DR: Yes.

Q: Does it get to you?

DR: Sometimes.

Q: Do you think the FIFA community feel like they’re heard?

DR: I hope so. I hope so. I’m going to show you something now, which is really rubbish. But, um, here’s my Blackberry. My new BlackBerry! Twitter! @rutter. There’s some people here, this is from today, 42 minutes ago 34 minutes ago… so, people are asking me questions. ‘What’s going on,’ blah blah blah blah. I go on [Twitter] and I talk to people. I don’t do it on the forums so much, but I try to talk to people, not just about the game but other stuff.

We live or die by providing people that buy our game with meaningful content, and if they don’t trust me or the team enough to try and at least do something better then they’re not going to tell me, and if they don’t tell me what they like or don’t like then I can’t give them it.

Q: You seem quite down to Earth…

DR: I am a genuine person, and I’m not just saying that to be disingenuous. Hey, that’s quite funny.

Q: Do you think you’ve established FIFA’s community in the past few years?

DR: I don’t think it’s just me. I think, you know, the people that were responsible for making FIFA before me allowed me to do this. Gary was doing it, and other people, but there was a huge fear of talking to people about what we did… ‘oooh, talking to the community? That’s just mad! What do you want to go and tell them stuff for?’ For me it was less about telling them stuff and more about asking them about things.

Naturally, I get pestered all the time for, tell me about this, tell me about this, when are you doing this, why don’t you do this why don’t you do that. I can’t always answer those because there are embargoes and all sorts of stuff like that. But eventually it goes out, and then people know. It’s important to me that I have credibility, and that the team have credibility. Because we’re trying very hard.

Q: Do you think in our age of web 2.0 that people need to make somebody culpable?

DR: Oh, I’m sure they’d have my head on a plate if I made a mistake. I don’t perceive myself that they’re all worshipping the FIFA team. I don’t think that at all. I am the first one to have my name dragged through the mud if they find a bug, and in many respects rightly so. If you were to liken making FIFA to running a country, I guess I’m the prime minister or something. Which means ultimately I am culpable for everything good and bad, but I didn’t necessarily do it. I’m just lucky enough to be given the opportunity – and I say it every presentation – that I am here representing the most amazing group of people. I owe them a debt, the people I work with, to make sure that people ‘get’ it.

Thanks for your time.

FIFA 11 is scheduled for release October 1 on all formats.