There's a lot of yelling coming from the playing area on the fifth floor of EA Sports Headquarters in Vancouver. No doubt, many of the video game publisher's employees are hearing a lot of "oooh's" and "aaaah's" punctuated by cheering, sharp intakes of breath and the occasional barrage of swearing. If you were to multiply the number of people making all this noise by about 10,000, it would probably sound like the contents of a football stadium on match day – which is fitting because the video game that's keeping all of us riveted to the screens in the playing area is FIFA 10.
To say that EA's forthcoming football game looks promising is a chronic understatement; it looks absolutely amazing. The best thing you could say about FIFA 10 is that It's a massive improvement on its predecessor. This accolade is thrown into even sharper relief when one considers that FIFA 09 was the game that established EA's dominance over Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer franchise. FIFA 09 was quite simply the best football game of last year, and the fact that it hardly holds a candle to FIFA 10 is mind-boggling.
Describing how FIFA 10 ups the ante on FIFA 09 would result in an article which would probably run into hundreds of pages. The changes aren't immediately apparent until the kick-off whistle blows and then the differences slowly emerge. The pace of the game is fast and beautifully fluid. Players have smooth, 360 degree movement. The referee jumps out of the way of through-balls. Defenders cover positions around and in the box. Strikers curve runs to stay onside. Tackling feels more meaty and powerful. Goalkeepers are aggressive; they no longer lie on the ground after the initial save attempt, and instead make double-saves and leaps to tip the ball over the crossbar. Players in the path of a long-pass jump over the ball or get out of the way. Most impressively, the game looks absolutely gorgeous; anyone briefly glancing at the side-on view of the pitch stands a good chance of being fooled into believing that this is a real game in progress until they spot the two people holding control pads and yelling at their players. These gameplay enhancements wouldn't impress all that much if looked at individually. Considered as a whole, they are quite frankly jaw-dropping.
According to FIFA 10's Line Producer, David Rutter, the reason for this vast improvement is down to his team's three-pronged strategy of refining the game's fundamentals, responding to player feedback and ensuring FIFA 10 contains more than its fair share of innovations.
"One of the things that FIFA 09 benefited from the most was when I was lucky enough to be flown to the UK to meet with journalists and FIFA community managers from around the world," says Rutter. "I spent a great deal of time just talking to people that had played the game a lot more than I ever had, and I found out the things that they wanted and the things that had been bugging them about the game."
Much like its predecessor, FIFA 10 has been the beneficiary of a myriad of tweaks, nips and tucks aimed at building on and improving what made FIFA 09 such a fantastic football game. There has also been a strong initiative aimed at eradicating anything that players (as well as Rutter and his team) complained about – scoring from the halfway line, for example, will no longer be possible.
"The split on refining the game and responding to feedback probably combines to around 70 per cent of our efforts on this game, and innovation is about 30," he says, ""We’ve been tinkering quite a lot this year. FIFA 09 was a great game, but when you do this as a profession, it's very hard to be happy with anything. We're very critical people."
Aside from polishing their already superb engine, Rutter and his team have introduced several new gameplay elements – along with the fantastic Create a Set Piece mode (which does pretty much what it says on the tin) the most immediately noticeable gameplay innovation is 360 degree dribbling. While this feature is not entirely new to football games, it has never been done on a next-gen console football title and has also never been implemented so impressively. Whereas in previous FIFA titles, players seemed to move in a strict arch, now their movements seem completely fluid. Players can now switch feet in mid-dribble or fake out opponents. The level of control this offers anyone playing the game is unprecedented, but Rutter is quick to point out that it has been tempered with slight tweak in the game's difficulty settings. "We'll never let you break the laws of physics. If we did, players would just be able to run rings around all of their opponents and score too easily – and that would be a bad thing," he says.
The gameplay fine-tuning has been extended to the manager mode which has been the recipient of a multitude of improvements. However, Rutter says that the team see manager mode as a multiyear initiative. "We've got a lot of things we want to include in manager mode that we couldn't do in one year, so that's going to be an ongoing challenge," he says.
All in all, FIFA 10 is shaping up to be a vastly superior offering than its predecessor; to put it bluntly we're not sure if we'll be able to go back to FIFA 09 after playing it. It's true that we have yet to take a look at the Pro Evolution Soccer entry for this year, but right now EA's football franchise looks unbeatable, and unless Konami produces something really special, it looks like this will be the year FIFA 10 cements its status as champion.
پیش نمایش FIFA 10
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محتوای مخفی: FIFA 10 
