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EA Sports FC 25 directors lay all cards on the table, even the blue cards (Gamescom 2024) - Interview with Sam Rivera and Andreas Wilsdorf
We stopped by the EA booth for a quick game of the upcoming football game and chatted with its creators about our feelings on the ball, the new game modes and what the upcoming season will be like.
Audio transcription
"We're at the Gamescom 2024. I'm here joined by Sam and Andreas.
This is almost a tradition, guys, to talk FIFA before and to talk FC now, these years.
And really, really nice for you guys to join us once again."
"I missed the Vancouver trip. I really enjoyed your offices and learning how you guys create FIFA or FC.
So, before we get into specifics, I just had a match of Rush. I think the name is, like, nails it.
To me, I don't know if you got this comparison, to me it felt like Mario Strikers.
I felt good playing a quick match full of, you know, fun, fast action, a little bit of silliness, you know what I mean?
Is that what you wanted to pursue here?
So, the goal was to give you more time on the ball, because having the ball is fun, it's engaging."
"But, as a result, with having less players, that also means that when you don't have the ball, everything that you do matters.
So, where you run, do you stay back, do you join the attack, everything matters.
And that, all together, creates a more engaging experience.
So, yes, it's more dynamic, and that is the core gameplay with the amount of players that we have, with the dribbling, passing, shooting that we have that comes from 11 vs. 11."
"But, with a touch of fresh mechanics, so we are redoing all the set pieces, the penalty kicks are completely new, even the kickoff is brand new, you have to rush to the ball, rush to the ball.
So, yes, the goal was to create a more dynamic, fun, and engaging experience.
And, so far, the feedback that we are hearing from the community is very positive."
"If you go to the forums, if you check social media, you will see that people are enjoying this new experience.
And it's 4v4, you're only missing the supercharged shots for it to be more fantastic, or fantastical.
Also, I got a blue card, and it didn't feel right, but anyway.
So, tell us about the blue cards, and how the offside works in this specific mode."
"Ok, so, the reason why we have blue cards in the game is because red cards were quite penalizing.
So, let's say the match is starting, you do a slight tackle, you get a red card.
That means your team is going to be playing with only three players for the rest of the match.
So, four versus three, you really feel the difference, and that can create some disengagement."
"So, basically, oh, with three, we're not going to win, let's just quit, for example.
So, we don't want that to happen, so instead we're doing temporary red cards.
So, it's one minute that the player gets sent off, and then we'll be able to come back after the minute is over.
So far, that's been quite popular. People are, again, providing positive feedback, and we'll continue monitoring."
"There is a world where maybe we can reduce or increase the timing of the one minute, but so far it feels good.
So, that is the blue card, and that's the reason.
And then the offsides, so, in 11 versus 11 football, the offside starts in the center line, in the half line, right?
Well, here we're moving it to the attacking third."
"That is to give you more space to basically be able to just play normally, don't have to worry too much about offsides.
But then, that doesn't mean you can be anywhere in the pitch and take advantage.
So, after the attacking third, then there is regular offsides.
So, it's exactly the same as 11 versus 11, but after the attacking third, instead of the attacking half."
"And, again, the reason was to try to give you more space to not worry about offsides.
And a lot of iteration happened to decide where the offside line would go.
And that's where we, as a team, felt like, okay, this is the right location.
That makes for a lot of opportunities where the goalkeeper will give the assist directly to the striker."
"So, if rush is like the most compact, essential way of playing FC, the career mode is the longer, more expansive, longest way of experiencing the game, right?
So, this year, you guys wanted it to be updated more often. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct. We're bringing in live starting points, which means basically during the season, we give updates that basically include the real matchups, the real match happening."
"So, for example, let's take last year's example where Girona was leading after 10 league days in the La Liga.
Now, you could have the same scenario and basically start from that point in La Liga where you go, okay, I want to actually take Girona to the title because they're right now leading.
So, we are updating every week. We will update the standings of the top leagues, the injuries, the goals."
"Even for Champions League, the same thing, the standings, who's knocked out, who's staying in.
To really give players more scenarios to play in and basically start not only from the beginning of the season, but all through the year, challenging themselves in these scenarios.
So, let's say, for example, a manager sacking is happening. You know how you always, as a player, go like, I could do this better."
"Now, you can really jump in and try out if you could take this club to the title or change the fate of a club.
And, of course, you can do the career either as a player or as a manager.
What is the main piece of feedback you got from the players coming from FC24 in terms of the progression and the pace of the career itself?
A colleague of mine said you could become a start too fast. Is that something that you have tweaked?
So, yeah, we brought in some new options. We brought in the clean slate."
"You can now really decide what's your starting OVR, what's your starting stats, so you can really decide how fast you want to progress.
Also, we brought in new settings, especially also in manager career, where you can decide, even for your team, how fast are players developing, how fast are youth players developing.
So, do you want it to be really quick, you know, get all the superstars really quick, or do you want a more realistic, slow-paced development of players?
So, just bringing in more options how you can basically design your game and how you can play it was a big focus, especially with us bringing in Rush also into career mode with youth players."
"So, you're able to play as your youth team. And even there, we wanted to give you the option to play either to the potential of the youth players.
So, meaning if you have the potential of a 90 youth player, you could try him out and already get a feeling of this is how he's going to be when he's, you know, grown up and ready for the first team.
Or you can play with his current OVR and, like, more feel like how is right now the state of that player."
"And I think career mode this year is really all about options and making it to play how you want it to play.
And as you mentioned options, it's also about female career as well, if I'm correct, for the first time?
Yeah, exactly. So, we're bringing in female career for the first time. We have the top five leagues of women's football in career mode."
"And it's not a split career mode. So, it's not, you know, you pick between men or women's career. It's one universe like in the real world.
So, you can switch from men's career to women's career and vice versa. We've seen it in real football happening in Germany.
You're right now in the third league of Sabrina Wittmann, who's a coach for a men's team."
"She's the first professional female coach in professional men's football in Germany.
And we wanted to really give players the choice there to explore teams, to get to know women's football with the challenges that women's football brings, which is different salaries, transfers are different, different stars coming in.
Even, you know, who are the top teams in women's football are kind of similar but not in women's football, as you know."
"You know, like in Germany, for example, you have three teams fighting for the top.
You have differences in who is getting the top players. And that's why we also had a big focus on youth.
Batteries?
Yes?
Switch or we continue?
We continue."
"Yeah, and you guys have Aitana, which is crazy good, so really nice.
And in my team, for us, there were men and women, so you could see that as well.
One thing I wanted to ask you, both of you, both aspects, let's say gameplay and career, is how do you analyze metrics from what players do in previous iterations of the game?
So, for example, how did players play career in 24 and how sort of you took that into what you guys are doing today and same for how players play and react. How do you gather that data and how do you work based on that?
I can talk about the rest of the game. He can talk about career mode."
"So, we look at a lot of telemetry, a lot of data.
And in gameplay, for example, we look at, we call it the health of the game.
How many goals per game are happening, how many fouls, how many offsides and all of that.
And then as soon as we know this is out of where we want it to be, there's too many goals."
"We have what we used to call internally a festival of goals.
Perhaps that is not necessarily the most fun gameplay because it's not possible to defend.
So then we look at that and then we look at tweaking, defending the game.
Very often we hear from the community, oh, this is, there's a problem here."
"This play style is overpowered.
And then, OK, we go, we check the data and it's like, it's not necessarily overpowered.
So then we make the decision. This needs to be there.
So that's an example of how we look at data for gameplay."
"How we look at data for the entire game.
Every year we understand how many players we have in ultimate team, we have in clubs, we have in career mode.
And that helps us prioritize features.
There's so many features in our backlog that we would like to get to."
"But it's always a matter of understanding, OK, what's going to be the usage?
Who's going to be playing this?
And obviously we also have a long term strategy for the franchise, like a five year strategy.
In terms of how we want to grow and where we want to go, not just for gameplay, but for every area."
"So then that also helps us prioritize.
So we really use analytics, metrics to really inform how the next year's game is going to be.
So that's for gameplay and for just high level of the game.
Before I ask you about the same thing, would you expect analytics and metrics to mandate that Rush become a separate game next year?
That would be really successful."
"A separate game, you mean it's own thing?
Something like it happened with Street. Like Rush being like a thing.
So that one, it's probably more about player feedback.
Like what are players saying?
So Volta used to be a separate mode."
"The feedback that we were getting is that they didn't want to leave their modes to go play Volta.
Because they felt like they were missing out on progress and rewards in their modes.
So instead they wanted an experience integrated into the different modes.
So we're doing it."
"When you ask, will Rush be its own mode?
For now, probably not.
We're open to anything in the future, of course.
But based on player feedback, more than metrics, we would make a decision like that."
"We talk a lot to our design council, which is a group of influencers that we work closely with.
We talk to the community, we read forums, and that's where we're coming from.
It's a learning from Volta that now Rush is integrated into different modes.
For Karibon, it's very similar."
"On the one side, it's the health.
We look at what transfers are happening, for what sums are players being transferred.
Just to make sure that we have realistic transfer systems.
So if you see an unrealistic transfer happening, we know this is something we want to fix in the game."
"Another part is also we look into what teams are players playing with.
Which has to do with live starting points.
Because it showed us a lot of times players love to take teams that are struggling or fighting relegation.
So it showed us that there's a lot of interest in there."
"But also, on the other hand, player feedback is really, really important next to data.
So for Karibon, the example is with Youth Academy and with scouting, bringing in 90 more countries was really high on the wish list of the community that we have more countries to scout in.
So bringing in these countries while also working with data, knowing what are typical players coming from these countries, what are interesting players you could find in these countries when you're scouting is really important."
"One team that is suffering this year is my dear Barca.
This is full of Bellingham, so I won't mention it.
Okay, Haiti here is telling me this is the closing one.
So, as I said, I've been playing FIFA 23."
"I wasn't playing FC 24.
My brother is a huge fan, and he's mad at two things about how the game feels controller in hand, which is a handicap versus other players.
When he's winning, it looks like there is some benefit to the other player."
"And the rebounds, like they are magically, the ball is magically landing, you know, next to the striker rival, for example.
So what can you tell him about that?
Oh, we could talk for 15 minutes about that."
"Ask Haiti, can we talk for 15 minutes about this?
She just gave me a blue card. Really?
Okay, so there's no such a thing as scripting momentum or anything like that in the game.
I can confirm we've been saying this for many years."
"What we do is we put gameplay or football components from real life, we put them in the game.
So when you take a shot, and the ball is spinning or is bouncing, or it's moving very fast to me, or I am moving too fast, or I am facing the wrong way, or there's a defender, all these factors matter."
"And then we calculate what are the chances of you scoring or miss, not scoring, or your shot being accurate or simply being inaccurate and missing the goal.
So that's what we do.
And then automatically, you are going to have goals at the end of the match in the last minute or after you score a goal or not."
"Now, there's multiple things that can contribute to feeling like there is momentum.
One of them is if you can see that goal in minute 32, I think you're going to forget most of the times about the time.
It's the same if you can see it in minute 20 or in minute 15."
"If you can see a goal in minute 93, more likely you are going to remember about that because you were about to win or you were about to get a draw and then suddenly not anymore.
So automatically, those moments get more focused.
So there's more chances to remember that."
"But that's just one example.
Another example is if there was such a thing, there wouldn't be consistency in the pro player community.
However, there is, meaning the same players are usually the best in the world.
They manage to beat anyone and anything, meaning there is a way to do it."
"It just requires a lot of practice and investment.
So not everyone will have simply the time to do it, right?
So that's another one.
If I can do it, then everyone can do it."
"I wouldn't imagine how come no.
Okay, that's the other one.
I guess those are the three ones.
We do football components that result in football behaviors."
"In real life, you often see someone scoring at the end of the match or whatever time that is important.
And then in terms of the goalkeeper deflections, that has nothing to do.
If you count all the deflections, yes, once in a while the deflection will go to the attacker.
But if you check all of them, many of them go to different directions, go to the defenders."
"There's no such a thing as it goes in a planned way to somewhere because of a certain reason.
No.
Goalkeepers deflect the ball often into the opponent's feet.
They gave me the red card now."
"So short answer was quit whining, get good.
I think that's the short answer.
Okay.
EA Sports FC 25 is going to release in a month's time on September 25th, if I'm correct."
"27th.
27th on pretty much every major platform.
Thank you so much for your time, guys.
Enjoy the final stretch and good luck with the release."
Gamescom
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