UEFA EURO 2008 PS3/360 developer blog

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Electronic Arts introduces us to the new Captain Your Country mode

Matt Prior, UEFA EURO 2008 (Xbox 360, PS3)Associate Producer

Obviously when making a game like EURO we have to include the tournament and the qualifiers and we’ve done a lot in terms of making the environments, weather, and the gameplay match the teams you are up against. But at the same time we felt that a lot of this is expected; so why not let gamers play the game from a different perspective and experience the highs and lows of a EURO campaign from the point of view of an individual player.

The “Be a Pro” feature in FIFA 08 was well received, but they didn’t have development time to also have a focused game mode based around this -it was just one-off games. We were convinced that “Be a Pro” had potential to be really fun but without any real reward/failure mechanic there was no urgency to come back. We wanted to make a game mode where you had to earn the right to play and really cared how well your team was doing as well as your own performances and add in a little bit of an RPG element too. So from this we came up with the mode called Captain Your Country.

When we first spoke about Captain Your Country it was going to be a one player only experience, but we were so sure that the multiplayer experience would be significantly better that we investigated co-operative play for the mode. Now doing this sounds easy on paper, but there are so many other aspects that go in to making a game mode work for both single and multiplayer such as cameras, feedback, HUD, screens and of course how all this affects the gameplay.