"you need that emotional connection to the real world"ĮA decided to test the waters with Ultimate Team for FIFA 09, which had been released in October 2008. "The obvious solution would just be using in-game renders, but I think the game would not have grown into what it has become had we done that." "One of the key things that I fought tooth-and-nail for early on was getting the real-world player photos in the game, because I think you need that emotional connection to the real world," said Prior. He added that because Ultimate Team was inspired by a connection to the athletes on real-life trading cards, he wanted to put all the real athletes' photos on the in-game cards. For one thing, FIFA's collection of real-world athletes is many times larger than that of the UEFA Champions League alone, and Prior believed it was important to get everyone - including no-name players from smaller leagues around the world - into the mode. Transitioning Ultimate Team from UEFA into FIFA was not without some significant challenges. Wilson became the head of the EA Sports division in 2011, and was named CEO of EA last September. It was Wilson who realized what Ultimate Team could become, and it was he who greenlit the mode. It was Andrew Wilson who realized what Ultimate Team could becomeĪccording to Prior, Ultimate Team was "showing a negative profit" initially, but the calculations were based only on unit sales, not the potential revenue from microtransactions for purchases of card packs. "I wrote a design based on that new space, and then we put that towards our at that time, who was Andrew Wilson, and, to his credit, he saw the potential in it," said Prior. At that point, with the team being in the middle of the FIFA development cycle in 2008 and looking to come up with something new, Prior suggested revisiting the old Ultimate Team concept and bringing it into the FIFA franchise, but doing so digitally. "The idea originated around that kind of philosophy: really capture that emotional connection, that excitement and compulsion of opening a pack, that disappointment getting no one you wanted or getting that superstar, that kind of thrill and excitement."Ī few years later, EA was working on what would have been Champions League 2009-2010, but the publisher chose not to renew the UEFA license. "It was largely based upon the whole emotional connection to trading players in the playground when you're kids," said Prior in a recent phone interview with Polygon. And they trade unwanted cards with other players online in an effort to fill out their virtual collection. They play games against the CPU or online, with "contract" cards enforcing a finite number of matches an athlete could partake in, to earn in-game currency to spend on packs of additional cards (or pay real money for those packs, if they want to accelerate the process). Users put together clubs with virtual trading cards for players, staff, stadiums and more, and attempt to maximize their team's attributes by maintaining team chemistry based on players' nationality, formation and position. The core of Ultimate Team was all there in the feature's original incarnation. Ultimate Team actually originated outside the FIFA series: It debuted in the Xbox 360 version of UEFA Champions League 2006-2007, which was released in March 2007. On the eve of Ultimate Team's fifth anniversary, we spoke with two individuals from developer EA Canada who have shepherded the mode along and helped turn it into the massive success it is today: Matt Prior, the producer who first brought Ultimate Team into FIFA with FIFA 09, and Adam Shaikh, current creative director for the mode. FIFA Ultimate Team catapulted the series into new levels of global popularity, and heralded a new paradigm in game development just as the industry was shifting into a digital future. The mode offered a new, engrossing way to play the beloved soccer game, but it ended up being much more than that. Five years ago today, Electronic Arts introduced the Ultimate Team mode in its main FIFA franchise.
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