Interview: EA Mobile talks FIFA 09

The battle of the footballing big guns is about to hot up. No, we're not talking about Manchester United and Chelsea's struggle for Premiership spoils. Or even Bishop Stortford and Bromley FC's battle for Conference South glory.

We're talking mobile football games, and the three-way fight between EA's FIFA 09, Gameloft's Real Football 2009, and Konami/Glu's Pro Evolution Soccer 2009. Real Football 2009 is already available, FIFA 09 is coming out this Friday, with PES 2009 following next month.

Exciting times. We sat down with EA Mobile's Adrian Blunt to find out what this year's FIFA has in store for mobile gamers. Quite a lot, it turns out, with an impressive list of gameplay and presentational improvements.

"The first thing is we've focused it around the concept of 'My Team'," he explains. "The first time you install the game, it asks you what your favourite team is - Liverpool in my case - and then tracks everything you do as that team, makes them the default choice when you start a Quick Match, and customises all the game menus with their colours."

In terms of game modes, FIFA 09 will have the regular Quick Match mode, and an expanded Season mode that'll let you play through a season with your favourite top-tier team from key European countries.

However, that mode now dovetails with a new Challenge mode, which presents you with eight specific challenges - score two goals in 40 minutes or beat a top team with an average team, that kind of thing - unlocking reward cards that can be used in the Season mode.

"You can use them to heal injured players, remove a red or yellow card, or make players perform better on the pitch," explains Blunt. "So for example, if your star striker gets injured in Season mode, you can go into Challenge mode and play the injury challenge, and use that card to cure him."

The idea of the Challenge mode is also to encourage players to try different teams - playing as Hull City rather than Liverpool, for example, to stretch their skills.

As we said, the Season mode itself has been beefed up too. Every player now has a fatigue rating, which affects how likely they are to get tired and/or injured. There's also a neat Man of the Match feature, which tracks the player who does most stuff - shots, passes, tackles - in a match, and gives him a performance boost for the next one.

"It replaces last year's In Form Player feature," says Blunt. "But there's a trade-off. If you get Steven Gerrard running about like a madman and scoring lots of goals, there's a strong possibility he'll be Man of the Match, but also it's more likely that he'll be tired and prone to injury. So you might even end up resting players, or thinking more strategically about who's seeing a lot of the ball."

Rafa Benitez-style rotation policies ahoy! There will be a specific challenge in Challenge Mode to earn a card that lets you choose the Man of the Match, too.

What about the gameplay itself though? The most obvious change for FIFA 09 is its move to a side-on viewpoint, rather than last year's isometric view. Blunt says EA Mobile thought long and hard about this, but feels handsets are now powerful enough to do the viewpoint justice. The fact that both Real Football 2008 and Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 adopted a side-on perspective last year was surely a factor too though.

"We've done a lot of work on the visuals and animation," he says. "The frame rate of the game is generally better across all handsets, and we've completely redone our animation system. We had an animator working for ten months taking all the animations from the console editions, analysing the, and bringing them down to pixel art."

Blunt says EA has doubled the number of animations in FIFA 09, meaning more variety in the action - something shown off most in the action replays. Other presentational tweaks include the addition of a manager, who pops out of his dugout to offer advice and encouragement during the match.

FIFA 09 will continue to walk the tightrope between satisfying hardcore football game fans and new players who simply spotted the game on their operator's portal. The defaut difficulty level has been bumped up to 'Medium' for the former group, but there are hints and tutorials (and the option to set it back to 'Easy') for the latter.

So what about the gameplay itself? FIFA 09 has some significant new features, including the skill-bars that first appeared in EA Mobile's UEFA Euro 2008 game earlier this year. They're the little bars that pop up when you're performing an action, with you having to stop the marker in the green bits to succeed, rather than the red bits.

However, they're not being used quite as often as in UEFA Euro 2008. In FIFA 09, they're restricted to shooting and tackling.

"We had a good response from a lot of people to the clarity that the skill-bars provided, but core traditional FIFA players said they struggled a bit with the lack of choice," says Blunt. "Someone who's played football games before have a feel for when they're going to cross the ball. They don't need to be told. Having the element of choice is crucial."

So, when you press the button to press-tackle an opponent, a skill-bar pops up, with the size of the green section dictated by elements like the two players' stats, the direction they're facing, and the distance between them.

"Of course, you can just double-tap to do a slide tackle and take them out," laughs Blunt. Good news for budding John Terrys in the FIFA fanbase...

Meanwhile, for shooting the green bars depend on where the goalkeeper and defenders are positioned, as well as your attacker's shooting skills. "So if the goalie's on the left of the goal, there'll be a big green area on the right of the skill-bar, unless defenders are covering that side of the goal," explains Blunt.

From our hands-on with the game, the system works well in practice, especially with the additional option to tap the 'shoot' key to just do a quick shot at goal, or double-tap it for a lob - with no skill-bar needed in either case. Again, choice appears to be the watchword.

"With the fixed camera angle, if you're shooting, often you can't see the goal, but this takes out the randomness from the process," he says. "It gives you an idea of where the best place to shoot is, but there's still skill in there, and of course the player stats taken from the console game's database."

Other changes include the ball being in the air more than before - meaning more scope for headers and volleys - and the introduction of two skill-moves - a Zidane-style 360 pirouette, and a step-over.

Oh, and it's faster, too. "One of the things that came out of the research we did on last year's FIFA was that although the game felt realistic in the way players were moving, people wanted a faster more arcadey experience," says Blunt.

"We haven't gone mad and made it a game of ping-pong, but we've increased the pace of the game, worked a lot on sprinting, and on being able to move the ball quickly and fluidly around the pitch."

Passing has also been spruced up, with the introduction of one-twos to complement short, long and through-ball passes. All are handled with one button - a tap makes a short pass, a longer press hits a long ball, and a double-tap does a one-two.

Through balls are entirely contextual - if you see a player waving his arm and starting a run, pressing the 'pass' button knocks a through ball for him.

"The timing is the crucial thing, and we've worked a lot on the AI of the players to make sure they're making these runs at the appropriate times," says Blunt. "You feel like your team is moving around you much more. And we've worked a lot on the defensive AI too, in terms of how players react to what you're doing with the ball."

FIFA 09 supports landscape play on handsets that are capable of it, now with a choice of right or left-handed controls, depending which way you want to hold your phone.

One feature that's NOT in the game is Bluetooth multiplayer, in marked contrast to both Real Football 2009 and Pro Evolution Soccer 2009. Why not? Blunt confirms that EA "definitely thought about it", but decided not to include it.

"The thing that stopped us moving forward with it was really the way we feel people are playing mobile games," he says. "It's still quite a solitary experience, with people playing these games in their downtime. The chances of me and a friend going out, and both having the right phones to have that Bluetooth experience, are still relatively slim. We felt our time was better spent invested in the gameplay itself."

He doesn't rule it out for the future, though.

"Head-to-head multiplayer is very cool, and with iPhone and wi-fi, connectivity is becoming more popular - people are starting to use their phones in different ways to mass-market Java games. It'll definitely be big in the future."

EA also decided against emulating the one-button mode debuted in last year's Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (and refined for this year's version.)

"We thought long and hard, and prototyped it, but found that one of the real negatives was the lack of control," says Blunt. "If you use the same button for shooting and long passing, at some point the game is going to have to choose between those on your behalf. It can get it right most of the time, but when it doesn't, players feel like they're fighting with the game."

Konami and Gameloft will doubtless disagree on both the Bluetooth and one-button counts, but the real proof will come with the reviews of all three games. Needless to say, we'll be putting them through their paces in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for our verdict.