Patrick Söderlund: EA "playing it safe" with FIFA 17

EA Sports is responsible for some of the biggest sports franchises in video games, one of which is FIFA, and we sat down with EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund at Gamescom last week to talk about the changes coming to both Madden and FIFA this year, and it looks to be a promising time for fans of the latter.

"For us, obviously, like every year we have reoccurring titles in our sports brand. This is a special year for us because it's the first year that we get Madden onto Frostbite, and it's the first time we have a story mode in Madden [...] So that's cool, you know, and it's like, last year we got FIFA onto Frostbite for the first time, this year we'll see the second version of it on Frostbite which, you'll see, looks a lot better, plays a lot better, and is more of a complete transformation from what the game was, which was always going to be the case. When you move technology platform like we did on FIFA, you have to balance risk vs reward, and you have to make sure the game actually works and that you don't screw things up that were good in the previous generation, but still improve. So we had to play it a little bit safe with last year's game, FIFA 17, and with FIFA 18 this year we can go all in, and you can see it. You can see the game looks better, plays better, we've been able to take more risk and push the engine harder, which I hope people are going to see."

What do you want to see from FIFA 18 to be convinced that EA has gone "all in"?