It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new FIFA street game kick around on major platforms, and that has most likely been due to previous attempts being considerably less than stellar. Developer EA Canada is busy polishing the game for its release date in March, and claim to have learnt from past mistakes made in previous titles.
“FIFA Street 1 and 2 actually did quite well. They were very popular in terms of sales, but the thing is, they were not that popular in terms of their overall quality,” producer Sid Misra said in an interview with Gamasutra.
“FIFA Street 3 in particular left a bad taste in people’s mouths. The art style wasn’t really well received, and I think that’s partly an indication of where the overall game quality was.”
“Those teams took on the additional challenge of using rendering engines from other games and not the gameplay engine from FIFA – basically, they were trying to build a street football game without a football engine underneath it,” he said.
“That’s partially why we used the FIFA engine for our game.”
Misra then spoke about how the development team faced certain challenges when attempting to make a FIFA game that was both different yet familiar to fans of the long running core game franchise.
“For us to make a good street football game, we had to have an engine flexible enough to do a physical game like they play in London or a stylish game like they play in Rio,” Misra said. “We think that the things people can do in street football already are pretty amazing.
“If we can capture that properly, by definition FIFA Street will be a more arcadey game.” Personally, I’m not that big a fan of Foosball, with the FIFA games being a trifle too technical for me.
But if FIFA Street can ditch the high-end sim aspect of the main franchise for something a bit more accessible, I’m certainly game for it. After all, I’d love to kick a few touchdowns and conversions into the net, just once.
Last Updated: January 11, 2012
