EA Mobile talks UEFA Euro 2008: 'We're not trying to dumb down football'

It's fair to say football purists may be wary of EA Mobile's UEFA Euro 2008 game. It's not just FIFA 08 reskinned for this summer's England-less tournament, as you might expect.

Instead, it monkeys about with the very mechanics of a mobile football game, introducing a new control scheme that eschews frantic button-pressing in favour of slidey bars and – gasp – regularly pausing the action.

"We're not trying to dumb down football," says producer Adrian Blunt. "We're just trying to make it accessible, and show users another way of playing it."

A quick explanation: the way UEFA Euro 2008 works is that instead of you pressing specific buttons to shoot, cross, tackle and do skill moves, an icon pops up when you're in the right position.

Hit '5', and the action stops dead while a slidey bar pops up, with you having to press '5' again to stop a moving pointer in the green section. Get it right, and you execute whatever move it is successfully. Get it wrong, and you don't.

"We acknowledge that the sort of player who's going to be playing this game isn't necessarily a core console gamer," explains Blunt.

"They're more likely to be a football fan for whom this may be their first experience of a football game on any platform. We wanted to give them something they can easily get into, with single-button gameplay. Rather than try to come up with a system where the game chooses things for you, we went down the route of the user-timing mechanic."

It's certainly a departure from FIFA, although EA Mobile's willingness to experiment won't come as a surprise to anyone who played its UEFA Champions League 2006-2007 game last year, which used innovative card-based gameplay.

Clearly the UEFA licence gives EA Mobile a bit more freedom to experiment. "We do have more latitude to try new stuff than with a FIFA game," agrees Blunt.

"With those, you have a very core FIFA consumer who has a very high expectancy of the style of gameplay, but with something like Euro that's very much championship-focused, it's a different type of player, so we can try different things."

Blunt says the slidey bar mechanic has other benefits, giving players a clear indication of success or failure, and also helping EA introduce skill moves into the game, without having to map them to separate buttons.

He also thinks the one-button controls highlight the realistic data behind the game, since the bars show that it's demonstrably easier to do a stepover with, say, Cristiano Ronaldo than it is with John Terry.

That's not the only change, mind. UEFA Euro 2008 is also deliberately easier to play than FIFA 08 was.

"The game is quite easy, certainly on the easy levels," Blunt confirms. "That was done on purpose to allow people who just want to take their team through and score lots of goals to do that. We have kept the more difficult modes in there to provide a challenge, but we were consciously making an easier game to play."

It's clearly true that UEFA Euro 2008 will attract more casual gamers than a FIFA game might, but that surely won't stop hardcore FIFA fans from buying it too. What will they make of all these changes?

"I think somebody that's very used to playing football mobile games will find it… different," says Blunt.

"It is a different way of playing the game, and I do think it will take them time to adjust to it. But we've spent a lot of time with the tutorial system to get them up to speed, and we've focused on the game's entertainment level. That's where we think we're rewarding the player for changing their preconceptions of how to play a football game."

The final selling point for UEFA Euro 2008 is the dedicated mode to set up your own tournament. It's suddenly become a big deal, since it allows people from countries that didn't make it to Euro 2008 to rewrite history and qualify.

Countries like… well, you know. So was this mode introduced purely to spare the blushes of us poor England fans?

"Not at all!" laughs Blunt. "We always knew there would be nations in Europe who wouldn't get through. It's just unfortunate that it's the English market who'll have to enjoy this feature."

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