Stevivor spoke to Nick Channon, Producer on EA Vancouver’s FIFA 17, about the impact DICE’s Frostbite engine had made upon the popular sports game.
Unsurprisingly, Channon echoed the sentiment DICE’s Lars Gustavsson shared with Stevivor only minutes before: everyone that’s using — and innovating — the engine ultimately wins.
“I think that we’ve got so many different technologies at EA and we’ve seen the success that DICE team has had – that Battlefield has had – even Dragon Age on the [Frostbite] engine,” Channon began. “There are so many benefits we can get by collaborating with all the smart people from around the company.”
“Once we started to make that move, we also thought, ‘Hey, this is going to give us all these new tools that we haven’t had before,’ and one of the things we’ve always wanted to do is something like The Journey,” Channon continued.
The Journey is the franchise’s exciting new single-player career campaign mode, detailed in the trailer below.
“We’ve always wanted to do something with characters, with story, with dialogue, with scenes. We were like, ‘This could be our tool-set to do that.’ That’s what Frostbite gave us,” he continued.
It’s not just about the technology. Channon said that The Journey has been designed to resonate with each and every FIFA 17 player.
“Originally, we were trying to figure out what we wanted The Journey to be, because it could be so many different things,” he said. “There’s this whole RPG feel. We wanted to make sure that we’re focusing on character, on narrative, but still have some of the mechanics to make it feel like it’s your own.”
Channon then paused.
“We didn’t want it to be like you’re just renting a movie and watching it,” he asserted. “You can influence [protagonist] Alex’s personality with the ways you’re answering questions, the ways you’re interacting with your teammates or your coaches, and then the way you play on the pitch. That all directly influences how much better you’re getting, how the manager views you and is giving you playing time, your status within the team and also some different story elements that happen throughout the course of The Journey.
“For me, it’s a nice mix of cinematic character driven stuff, but with some of those elements that make it your story and not someone else’s.”
FIFA 17 heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 at the end of the month. A demo is expected next week.
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