It’s blog time again for FIFA 10 Ultimate Team.  As I sit and write this down, the team is madly working and discussing fixes and solutions around me.  Nearing the completion of a game is always an interesting time; pressure is high, hours are longer, and unexpected issues/bugs pop up that we quickly need the team to find solutions for and fix. It’s a lot of fun though because it’s exciting to know that soon you guys are going to be able to enjoy what we have been working so hard on for the last year.  Let’s get to the blog though…

My name is John Shepherd, and I’ve been the producer in charge of the front end (menus, UI, look and feel of the screens, etc.) for this year’s Ultimate Team.  I can’t share everything about the game right now, but it’s exciting to be able to share some new info with everyone and there will be lots more detail coming in the next few weeks.

I believe in Paul’s last blog, he mentioned that we had really stepped up and increased the amount of players and leagues in the game.  During that time we were still working with a number of groups internally and externally to try and get even more.  I’m happy to say that we’ve increased what we said previously from 27 to 29 leagues and from 7,000 to over 7,500 players. Players and leagues are obviously a key part of the game, and we wanted to ensure we had as many as possible in our mode.  This will definitely make building a squad - AND multiple squads - a lot more interesting.

Today I’m going to chat about the building of your Ultimate Team in FIFA 10.  Similar to last year, you can build your team through getting packs in the store, or you can choose to find new players on the auction market.  Let’s chat about the store first.

We’ve put a lot of effort in to the store this year to make it more robust and more user friendly.  One of the things that I’m excited about is the ability to update the store post-launch with new offerings. Unfortunately I can’t talk about any of our specific plans right now, but I’m very excited about the surprises that will happen over the course of the year.  To ensure you know when these new offerings are available, we have a really cool messaging system in the Main Menu of our game.  With this system we can put in whatever messages we want after we ship - it’s exciting to have a channel like this in the game and we plan to use this to communicate all the special offers and other interesting news throughout the year.  The last tidbit on the store is we have introduced the concept of ‘rarity’ among all items received in packs this year. Rare items are visibly different than common items, and also have distinct advantages within the game.  For example, for healing items, a rare item would ‘heal all’, rather than just heal a leg injury. For players, a rare player may be one of the higher rated bronze players, or a player with great height, or even a player that has a very high pace attribute. The rarity concept works with all the items in the game, and it has really added some great depth in building your team.  Also, not to be forgotten, it has definitely made opening up packs a lot more interesting!

The auction market has also received some new features.  We definitely heard from a lot of you (and we experienced the same issues ourselves), that the auction search filters from last year needed some work. This year you will be able to filter by ‘buy now prices’ and also have more filters for clubs and leagues when it comes to kits and badges.

The ‘Watchlist’ is also a new feature that has been added to the trading area. For any auctions that you are interested in you will be able to add them to your Watchlist. This will essentially act as a shortlist for all of the auctions you are interested in.  No longer will you have to remember and fiddle around with previous searches; everything you are interested in or have bid on will be available in one place.

Being a big trader in the game last year, I’m also very excited about something new that solves a big annoyance that I and many of you told us you had from last year.  In many cases in FUT 09, I’d often find myself bidding on an auction I really wanted, only to have someone ’snipe’ my auction at the last second. The worst part of it all was I NEVER got the chance to respond and missed out on a great deal.  This year, if someone bids in the last 15 seconds of an auction, the auction will extend back up to 15 seconds.  It’s a simple idea, but it’s been so much fun to play around with at the office - and it’s great to feel like you always have the option to respond if you want to.  The pressure really increases, and it really feels like an auction, almost like a live auctioneer counting down for those last few seconds. The team also did some really cool presentation aspects around this whole scenario that I’m really proud of - the background lights up and there are some cool sound effects. It’s quite the intense experience and adds a lot of fun to trading this year!

There’s one more thing I want to quickly mention as well.  After Ultimate launches near the end of Feb, we will also be releasing new versions of players, and also updating any players that have transferred clubs.  So if a player has a great week, we may select to release a new version of him through the packs in the store. We are still finalizing and buttoning down plans for all of this, but it’s exciting to know that we will be able to involve the community and have something that is constantly updating throughout the entire year.

That’s it for now - I need to get back to work to get this game ready for end of Feb! Look for more information in the coming weeks from some of the other guys on the team.

Cheers.

John