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Well like I said I didn’t have any recording equiptment so I couldn’t transcribe the interview with Greg from EA, but I did make some notes so that’ll have to do.

Well the first thing I asked him about was this years cover stars (which by the way have not yet been revealed) he actually yold me who they were, which came as a surprise. As I expected Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney and AC Milan’s Ronaldiniho are once again gracing the game’s cover. I kind of expected it but it still comes as a surprise.

I then moved on to animations, something which Greg seemed really well informed about. He talked about how the guys in Canada used stuntment to perform some of the animations for tackles and players falling to the ground. From what i’ve seen they look really good and definityely add to the realistic feel the game is trying to put accross.

Now you might have seen that I have put some of the United squad’s overall ratings in my impressions post. I was talking with Greg about some of the ratings and ‘missing’ players. He told me that the build was not the latest build and that many of the ratings and squads would be refined and updated before the game comes out. He also mentioned that all of the summer transfers would be making it into the game for the October 4th ship date so there’ll be no squad updates at launch.

One of the best (and at times worst) features of FIFA 08 was the ‘Be A Pro’ game mode. I really liked the way it worked in the last game and I was told that now EA have expanded the mode to support 10 players on each team. That means there’ll be 20 PS3’s synching up at one time to play these macthes, which I assumed would cause problems. This is apparently not the case, Greg said that when this mode was being tested they (EA) were worried that it wouldn’t work and also that players would not stick to their assigned roles. Once again, this wasn’t the case and Greg said that he was pleasantly surprised how disiplined the players were and that they stuck to their assigned roles well and most of the matches players functioned as a team should. Another interesting new addition to the ‘be a pro’ game modes is that players will now be able to play 4 seasons as an individual player in the new ‘be a pro seasons’ mode. This sounds like it would be similar to Madden’s ’superstar mode’ and hopefully it will expand to be as big as the manager mode (15 years, i think).

One of the nice new things revealed was that players will have the ability to set what their ‘arena’ would look like. Greg mentioned that players would be able to have themed arenas e.g. a Mexican one. This sounds like an unimportant, but cool feature that allows players to personalize their game, which is nice I guess.

I asked Greg about the improvement of the game over the past few years and he commented on how PES and FIFA have ‘changed roles’ if you like, with EA’s game becoming more of a sim and PES becoming more arcadey. Greg said that this was a change that was very much liked by fans and also made people switch to FIFA from Pro Evo. He talked about the changes in 09 and said that the team had made 250 new changes to the game, how many of these will be significant is somewhat yet to be seen but they seem to be working well.

The last thing I talked about was the PS3 exclusive feature of FIFA 09, something which Greg would not divulge no matter how much I asked. I did ask if it was perhaps a ‘jumpers for goalposts’ mode within ‘Home’. He thought it would be a nice idea but also said that this was not the exclusive feature. he went on to say that we should hear something out of Leipzig about said exclusive.

Well that about raps it up. It is a shame that I couldn’t get a transcription of the interview but you still got all of the info from it in a more concise form. It’ll be cool to see what the exclusive feature is and it’s nice to see that the team are working hard on making this the best footy game out there and from what i’ve played it definitely looks like it could be.