Next-gen power unleashes lifelike FIFA crowds

Executive producer David Rutter details the work that has gone into this year's FIFA and the legends of Ultimate Team.

We talk to executive producer David Rutter about this year's edition of the FIFA series, what next-gen brings and how fleshing out the spectators helps immerse players.

An exclusive Xbox feature will be Ultimate Team legends - a selection of 40 legendary players you'll be able to collect and play with. Rutter explained it was far from a formal process picking which players to include.

"It started as an e-mail. "Hey, we're gonna do this. Ideas for football players that you'd like to see in the game?" And escalated from there into... we're lucky we've got more than 30 different nationalities on our team representating pretty much all walks of life that love football and love making video games. So if you ask 30 nationalities what football players from the recent past they'd like in there you get quite a lot of feedback. So it was an e-mail that went round the team, over and over."

Rutter went on the talk about the inclusion of specific players like Sweden's Fredrik Ljungberg, Brazil's Pelé and England's Teddy Sheringham.

A lot of effort has gone into the crowds and the presentation in FIFA 14 and Rutter felt this reporter was doing himself a disservice skipping past the intro.

"If you see the introduction flow into the game, that pans over the stadium, the way that the players come onto the pitch, that whole..."

"Usually I just click past it," we interjected.

"The idea really is to introduce this very lavish production quality to those things so hopefully people will enjoy. But yeah, you can click past them if you don't want to watch. But introducing those elements actually adds to the immersion and spirit of the match as they do in real life. Many of our fans were feeding back - when are you going to fix the crowds? When are you going to make the crowds good? etc. It was a thing that we wanted to do this year and obviously with the power of the new consoles and EA Sports Ignite it was actually something we could do now that there's a lot more power available to us."