This year we’re really pleased with the pro skills moves; it’s a fully developed system using a new organic building block method to enable people to combine tricks and skill moves. Skill moves are created through the dribbling engine which enables us to interrupt animations at any time to transition into a new move just as a player would do in real life.
The new system puts control of the moves in your hands- it’s intuitive and gives you the freedom to play how you want with the game responding accordingly. In previous games the skill moves required a couple of buttons presses to decide which skill move to make but for FIFA 08 next-gen skill moves are all about timing. With the building block concept you can combine moves to create your own specific player style; you’ll feel the difference immediately and keep learning as you play more of the game; the system is designed to evolve as you improve.
While we developed the skill moves we wanted to make sure there was still a good balance to the system. One way we worked this was to limit the speeds at which the skill moves could be performed. The one thing to be aware of when attempting skill moves is your pace as you’re only able to trigger the moves when your player is jogging not sprinting which is pretty true to life. You can’t perform a skill move at top speed in real-life. We wanted to replicate how players speed up and slow down as they perform tricks in a match. In the game we give people full control over their skills and full control over the speed to give a great range of control options.
Other than the skill moves, one of the biggest things we’ve worked really hard on is to make sure the gameplay is unpredictable and never falls into a pattern. We didn’t want a scripted game so we avoided using any scripting and went for a systemic approach. When you use scripting, no matter how many thousands of sequences you have developed, at some point it gets repetitive. The next-gen consoles are so powerful that we’re able to do many calculations for each situation to create different gameplay experiences with skill moves being one of the best examples of this. If you can combine moves together you can create different paths to beat a defender but if you use scripts then you just have a series of moves to choose from. With the context-based decision system we use there is an infinite number combinations available to the gamer.
