Hi everyone - I’m the Line Producer for FIFA 10 Ultimate Team (or FUT 10 as we call it internally). This is the first in a series of blog posts that will be coming from the production team leading up to the launch of FUT 10 in February 2010.

In this and future posts, we will give you more details about game features and also the reasons behind them. First off, all of us who worked on FUT have been really excited by how much you played and enjoyed it; we really appreciate all the feedback FUT 09 gamers provided. By reading your feedback, sifting through usage data and playing FUT 09 a lot ourselves, we came up with tons of ideas of how to improve the game for FUT 10. From all of them, we focused on a couple keys areas:

- Making the game more authentic.
- Providing a deeper experience that lasts longer.

If you haven’t already, you should check out our screenshots and press release, as well as the sizzle video.

For those not familiar with Ultimate Team, here’s a quick overview. FIFA 10 Ultimate Team is a game add-on for FIFA 10 where you build your squad (i.e. your Ultimate Team) through opening packs and picking up items through the auction system in order to compete in and win tournaments. You start with a basic pack of items that is enough to get you started and field a team. As you play matches (either one-off or tournaments, and either online or single-player) you earn coins. With these coins you can buy more packs of items (like players, managers, contracts, training, etc.) or get specific items from other gamers. You can also buy packs for money. The key to building a successful team is getting great players that play great together. This second part is key. The ‘chemistry’ system lets your players play above their normal level when they are playing in formations and positions they prefer, and playing beside other players that they have links with. But enough about the basics, let’s move on to what’s new in FUT 10.

First off, we’ve made a lot of improvements to the chemistry system based on your feedback. This is an area where we added a lot more authenticity with two big, fundamental improvements. First, the relational chemistry is custom to each formation, giving your squad chemistry for links between players who play near each other (as compared to the defenders/midfield/attackers system from FUT 09). This means you can build great chemistry up the right side of your squad if they have some relationship with each other. This relational chemistry is now broader than just nationality. Players can earn relational chemistry by sharing the same nationality, and by playing in the same league, or, better yet, the same club. Second, the system now rewards you for partial chemistry matches, as well as the normal full chemistry. If a player’s preferred formation is very similar for their position to the formation you play them in, they will get some chemistry, instead of none. This also applies to player positions. Together these changes create a much more flexible, authentic system that will let you create more unique squads.

This year, we wanted to give you more exciting and interesting things to do with your squad. This is where our tournaments come in. In FUT 10, some tournaments now have entry requirements for the squad you use, and there are now better rewards for winning. For the entry requirements, each competition can have up to two criteria (e.g. max three-star team, or max four players from the same country), but not all will have them. This came from the feedback that people loved the squad building in FUT 09. Many gamers actually deleted their team and restarted just to go through the squad building process again. In FUT 10, you aren’t building just one great team, you get to field many great squads from your club and show how you are the best at putting together a squad no matter the criteria, finding the best ways to max out your chemistry. In order to make this work, we made two other changes to the game. First, you can now build multiple squads and have them saved separately. Second, you can put any of the players in your club (previously called “Collection”) in any of your squads - your players are never stuck and unusable. You can even put one player in multiple squads. Now that’s a lot of freedom! Finally, coming back to the rewards in the tournaments, each tournament will now have different coin multipliers for the different rounds of the tournament, as well as a lump-sum coins bonus for the best squad in the tournament finals. When you start playing, you’ll see some tournaments award coins evenly throughout the rounds, where others have a really big pay-off, but only if you make it to the finals. On top of that, we want to create even more fun over a longer time for you, so in addition to all the online and single-player tournaments that will be available straight away at launch, we will also release one new online and one new single-player tournament each week. These Featured Tournaments will normally give higher coin rewards, but each will only be available for a limited time to play.

Finally, keeping with the themes of more authenticity and a deeper experience, we announced that we significantly increased the number of players and leagues in FUT 10, to over 7,000 players and 27 leagues. We’re super excited about this as it will let more gamers build really cool teams with more of the game’s best footballers.

With the holidays approaching, the team is doing a great job working hard on fixing bugs, polishing and tuning the game, stress-testing our servers, and preparing for FUT 10 launch (and post-launch) activities. Once we return in the New Year, you will see more blogs and updates from the production team, diving into more details around what we’ve done (and why) to let you Build, Manage and Create your Ultimate Team with our focus on authenticity and giving you more to play.

That said, there are some fun details you’ll just have to wait until launch to find out. :-)

Speaking of which, the game is coming out in late February on PS3 and Xbox 360 as an add-on to FIFA 10. There is a five-match free trial, and it only costs 400 MS Points/4.99 Dollars/ 4.99 Euros /3.99 Pounds - half of what FUT 09 cost!

Happy holidays.

Paul