PC vs. 360/PS3:
And saving the best (or hottest topic) for last, I’m going to give you the straight goods here. We heard you last year when many of you on the forums were asking for “NG on PC”. On FIFA 08 360/PS3, the gameplay and the rendering were both different than FIFA 08 PC. At the start of the FIFA 09 PC cycle, we looked at what it would take to get 360/PS3 gameplay and rendering to work on PC. What we learned quickly is that there is a big difference between the gameplay and the rendering. For the rendering, it was very scalable – same as Crysis, CoD4, etc. The better your graphics card, the better we could make FIFA PC look. If you didn’t have the best card, the game would play the same, but wouldn’t look as great. That’s what you expect for any PC game. When it came to gameplay, the story was different. When we re-wrote the gameplay for FIFA 360/PS3 a couple years ago, we took full advantage of the multiple, multi-core processors (actually 3 essentially dual-core CPU’s on 360, and 6 available Cell processors on PS3). The bottleneck for getting “NG on PC” was the CPU (i.e. It was AI, not graphics). Unfortunately, unlike graphics/rendering, you can’t scale gameplay depending on the CPU in the machine because the game needs to “play” the same on each machine – you can't just turn off the decisions, positioning, or inverse kinematics for some of the players. Why does FIFA 360/PS3 gameplay use so much CPU compared to Crysis, CoD4, etc.? It’s because of the depth of the gameplay (21 players making 1,000 decisions/second, the new animation system, etc.) – very different from the amount of gameplay ever running in an FPS. This meant if we ported the 360/PS3 gameplay to PC and optimized it, we would have to increase the minimum spec on the CPU to a level where only around ~5% of FIFA PC gamers would meet it. As much as any of us wanted to do this, it did not make sense.
Instead, we decided to do the work of bringing a big improvement to the graphics (as many of you have noted), further polish and enhance our deep gameplay engine, and work on some PC-specific features. We didn’t want to just give you a port, but rather the best experience for FIFA on the PC. This included the mouse controls for the keyboard gamers, the online widgets, the higher-res menus, and fully customizable controls.