Improving crowds not a priority for FIFA 13 developer

By: Musa Afridi

  |   July 27th, 2012   |  

News, Uncategorized

It seems that gamers will be complaining about the 2D crowds in EA Sports’ FIFA series for one more year until the next generation of consoles is released.

Year after year, one of the demands from the legions upon legions of FIFA fans is for the developers to work on the in-game crowds in the stadiums. With the game perfecting or improving nearly every other feature, it seems that crowds will remain the sad pieces of cardboard that they have been for all these years.

David Rutter, the executive producer behind the FIFA series, was on hand to comment on how making the crowds look more realistic was not on the developer’s agenda at the moment. He began by acknowledging one of the most common requests from fans when he said, “Well I know what everyone wants us to do, which is make the crowds look good.” Before adding, “Our crowds are not that great, but improving them is not a priority on our list of things we need to do.”

The executive producer did go on to comment that one of the reasons behind the lack of interest in the crowd may be down to the limits of the current generation of consoles. Rutter hinted at the possibility of the crowds being improved with the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 as the consoles would come with more power.

He said, “Having more power would probably allow us to do that as well as a number of different things, but for now we are just focused on our current project.”

Rutter also pointed out how the code behind the game was developed in a modular way, which meant that new features could be added or removed without affecting the rest of the game. According to the executive producer this meant that developing a FIFA title for the next generation would not pose too much of a problem.

“So, theoretically, we could adapt to such things on more powerful systems” explained Rutter, before adding that the EA Sports Montreal team was focused on nothing but the next iteration of the FIFA series, “but it’s not something we’re doing at the moment.”

Gamers will be expecting another highly polished title from the studio that brought the ground breaking title, FIFA 12, but this time around the game’s closest competitor, Pro Evolution Soccer, seems as if they got their mojo back.

This year may be a great one for the football simulation genre as two of the biggest players in the game are set to give it all they have with EA Sports set to continue the evolution of the series while Konami plan on bringing a revolution with Pro Evo 13. It will be interesting to see which game finishes at the top of metaphorical table.