[EAUK_Baker011]

I asked Paul to answer some of the major questions being raised right now and he kindly replied with the following:

Hey guys.

I was very excited to hear your reactions to the FIFA 09 PC demo when we released it last Thursday, and I’ve been reading the forums a lot since. [I’m writing this Monday night – baker011 will be posting it shortly.] Thanks a lot for all the posts and feedback, the good and the bad – just as long as you keep it clean. Let me tackle three types of comments that have been repeated.

· Positive Comments

· Feedback/Bugs

· PC vs. 360/PS3

Positive Comments:

Obviously, thanks for the support. The team has worked really hard on the PC version this year and I’m very proud of what they accomplished. More so than any year in recent memory. A lot of the work we did this year was based on suggestions from the community. I even talked with some pro-gamers a month ago and we got in a couple final fixes based on their feedback. See FIFA 09 PC as the important, first step towards a better and better FIFA game on PC. Other things to check out:

· More Active Shielding: Just hold Sprint while not moving in any direction. Your player will actively protect the ball. Outcome based on strength and speed of both players.

· Scoop Turn: New trick move from standing position. I like to use it after going into shielding and releasing Sprint. Take right analog out to the side and do a half-circle in front of you. Time it well to turn to the opposite side that the defender is coming around.

· Rainbow Flick: New trick move from standing position that I also use after shielding. Use only with high skill dribblers. Take right analog out forward and do a half-circle to either side finishing behind you.

· Player Run with Mouse Controls: Scroll the ‘scroll wheel’ over empty space to send a team-mate on a run to that spot. If you left-click at the same time, your pass and team-mate will converge on the same spot – can lead to great passing build-up.

Feedback/Bugs:

As I read through your comments in the demo thread, I’m passing on the common ones to the team. It’s incredibly late in our process now, but we are trying. The demo is very close to the final quality of the game – we have just fixed a couple more bugs since the demo, and you’ll be able to play the full game soon. Let me address some of the most-often raised points:

· Control Issues: I have read a number of comments around controls and control mapping. For 09, we’ve added fully customizable controls and added support for more controller types.

o If you would like a different control layout, you can customize your own controls. Whether it’s which button is the trick modifier in the mouse-controls, or anything else. You have the control now.

o For actual functional control bugs, we did a lot of testing around the keyboard/mouse and our supported controllers. That said, I’ve forwarded some of your posts to the team to investigate if the issue is in the final game.

· Through Balls: Some gamers have mentioned they’ve had problems with through balls. In FIFA 09 PC, they are set to Manual by default. This means you have to have very good aim to play a great through ball, but it also means that you can play the exact ball that you want with the right practice. This is something we added in 08 and I love the challenge. If you prefer the automatic through balls, you can turn off “Manual Through Balls” in the controls screen.

· Ball Size: The ball size was not changed this year at all. It’s a trade-off between how it looks in the NIS’s and how it looks from the main gameplay camera. The ball is the size it is based previous usability feedback from the gameplay camera. I can tell that this is an important issue for you guys – we’ll look into possibly handling both situations through different sizes for different cameras, but that will have to wait for next year due to the potential knock-on effects of a change like that.

· Nets: Unfortunately, we are too late to make any changes to the look of the net at this stage. We are definitely taking this as high priority feedback for the future.

PC vs. 360/PS3:

And saving the best (or hottest topic) for last, I’m going to give you the straight goods here. We heard you last year when many of you on the forums were asking for “NG on PC”. On FIFA 08 360/PS3, the gameplay and the rendering were both different than FIFA 08 PC. At the start of the FIFA 09 PC cycle, we looked at what it would take to get 360/PS3 gameplay and rendering to work on PC. What we learned quickly is that there is a big difference between the gameplay and the rendering. For the rendering, it was very scalable – same as Crysis, CoD4, etc. The better your graphics card, the better we could make FIFA PC look. If you didn’t have the best card, the game would play the same, but wouldn’t look as great. That’s what you expect for any PC game. When it came to gameplay, the story was different. When we re-wrote the gameplay for FIFA 360/PS3 a couple years ago, we took full advantage of the multiple, multi-core processors (actually 3 essentially dual-core CPU’s on 360, and 6 available Cell processors on PS3). The bottleneck for getting “NG on PC” was the CPU (i.e. it was AI, not graphics). Unfortunately, unlike graphics/rendering, you can’t scale gameplay depending on the CPU in the machine because the game needs to “play” the same on each machine – you can't just turn off the decisions, positioning, or inverse kinematics for some of the players. Why does FIFA 360/PS3 gameplay use so much CPU compared to Crysis, CoD4, etc.? It’s because of the depth of the gameplay (21 players making 1,000 decisions/second, the new animation system, etc.) – very different from the amount of gameplay ever running in an FPS. This meant if we ported the 360/PS3 gameplay to PC and optimized it, we would have to increase the minimum spec on the CPU to a level where only around ~5% of FIFA PC gamers would meet it. As much as any of us wanted to do this, it did not make sense.

Instead, we decided to do the work of bringing a big improvement to the graphics (as many of you have noted), further polish and enhance our deep gameplay engine, and work on some PC-specific features. We didn’t want to just give you a port, but rather the best experience for FIFA on the PC. This included the mouse controls for the keyboard gamers, the online widgets, the higher-res menus, and fully customizable controls.

Hope you found this helpful. For those who have been with FIFA on the PC for a while, you’ll recognize that FIFA 09 is the biggest investment we’ve put in the platform in a while. It’s a sign of things to come.

Thanks again and keep the feedback coming!

Cheers.

Paul