Line Producer Blog – Europe launch week
David Rutter
So it’s been a completely action packed few months for us. From E3 way back in May through to the producer tour around Europe, GamesCom and then the Demo launch and shortly the full version – we’ve barely had time to take a breath.
So what’s been happening?
The Demo
The demo went live a few weeks ago – and what a reception. In the first 2 weeks we had more downloads than any other EA demo in the same period of time. Ever. We witnessed an unprecedented level of excitement. By the time the demo hit 360 and PS3 we’d almost finished the entire game, and were anxiously waiting to receive feedback. By the point that you guys were playing the game we’d already removed a bunch of issues in the game: making sure dribbling was smoother than ever, that the ball was trapped even more effectively, headers were stronger from defending players, and that crosses weren’t as exploitable when played in early. We’d also spent time tweaking first time passes and shots to make them ‘feel’ better, and had fixed a couple of crashes too. So it was nice to see some of these ‘complaints’ raised on the forums, and know we’d already fixed them. That said, we were receiving a huge volume of posts, Twitter and the like. Thank you everyone.
The Final Version
At the same time this was going on we were preparing for our submissions to first party. First Party in our case is Microsoft and Sony. They receive versions of the game (builds) and test them very thoroughly for 2 weeks or so to make sure people buying the game don’t have lots of bugs in their finished game. Thankfully – for our October 1st launch in Europe and launches for the rest of the world later in October, Microsoft and Sony didn’t experience anything that would have delayed the launch of the game. During this time we also continued to test the game, read your feedback, and even fixed a few issues. Which issues?
Title Updates
These last minute fixes will be delivered to you in an update available at launch, or very, very close to launch. We’re going through the ‘First Party’ testing at the moment as I write this, and believe that we’ll get through that rigorous testing in time to make it available for the 2nd October. So although I’m reading a lot of additional feedback about the finished game (which we’re not sure how you’ve got hold of yet), you’ll still have to wait until October 2nd to benefit from it. Of particular interest to some of you will be the tuning we made to Finesse shots from distance, which having seen the feedback we knew needed to be fixed – in particular for online and ranked play. Similarly some problems in penalty kicks in shoot outs, corner goals, and balancing of professional difficulty have been addressed. We believe we’ve also made invisible players disappear. Which we’re very happy about, and hope you are too.
Post Launch
We’ve got a fully loaded team of clever people now on 24/7 server watch to make sure you’re game playing is going to be uninterrupted. We’ve been testing the servers with approximately 100,000 automated players on 360 and PS3 EACH – and we’re pretty confident that we’re more prepared than ever to deliver an unparalleled online gameplay experience. That said, with the buzz around FIFA 10 being so high we’re anticipating server demand to be at an all time high. Watch for our new ‘Dynamic Messaging’ in the game with updates if anything wonky happens. Similarly we’ll be monitoring the forums here:
http://forum.electronicarts.co.uk
And you can twitter me (ruttski), Rom our Football World Guru (EARom) and Phil our UK Community Manager (EAUK_FIFA) at these twitter names.
We’ll be monitoring as many avenues of communication as we can over all the world wide launches, and as ever we’ll be gathering feedback immediately on things we can look to improve for FIFA 11.
Hope you all enjoy FIFA 10
D
Electronic Arts
