EA SPORTS: Off the Ball Control figures to revolutionize soccer gaming. What can you tell us about that?

Pierre Hintze: Off the Ball Control is a suite of controls that allow you to control the player off the ball. Remote Receiver Control lets you select one of the attackers -- or a midfielder -- and run him into space; you then release the button and the ball gets played through to him. Also, during corners and free kicks, you become the guy in the box, jostling for space and trying to fight for that perfect goal.

99 percent of soccer is played away from the ball, and we thought that FIFA Soccer 2004 deserved that treatment.

EA SPORTS: Career Mode finally comes to the FIFA franchise. How deep will it be, and what can players do with it?

Pierre Hintze: We?re trying to provide the user with all major managerial tools a modern-day Top Division Manager has to his disposal. We?ll enable him to set training schedules, fulfill board objectives and continue to build up enough prestige to successfully lure new talent to his club.

The key will be the user?s ability to translate his understanding of the sport/team into success/prestige increase to maintain the positive momentum for his club. Consistent failure will result in getting fired and pretty much reflects what most of the coaches experience during their careers.

EA SPORTS: Last year we saw off-the-foot dribbling. What new gameplay, physics and graphical enhancements will we see this year?

Pierre Hintze: We continued exactly where we left off last year. The dribbling responsiveness and an improved pass/shot model are only a few of the features we considered to expand upon this year. We also pushed hard to integrate Attributes into our gameplay and a new type of player/user interaction, but I don?t want to elaborate too much on what both features are.

EA SPORTS: Will it be easy to change strategies and tactics on the fly during the game?

Pierre Hintze: We hope so, considering we re-introduced the good old trusted In-Game Manager. The user will be able to choose now from a number of offensive/defensive strategies on the fly, without having to go to the Pause Menu.

EA SPORTS: Any new additional leagues or players? What about custom tournament capability - any changes there?

Pierre Hintze: Absolutely, but I don?t won?t to bore you with numbers here. Let?s just say: ?With FIFA, we aim to be the most comprehensive soccer product out there?. We will have more leagues, teams and players than any other title, by a wide margin.

EA SPORTS: Any new stadiums in the game? What about team-specific crowd interaction and chants?

Pierre Hintze: Yes, we definitely added quite a number of new stadiums and dramatically improved all the major European venues.

Team specific crowds are one of the new visual additions, which co-inside with fixture specific attendance displays and 3D crowd sequences. The crowd sound features will surpass the already very impressive atmosphere of last year?s game. Our sound team went absolutely all-out and spent months in Europe to record team specific chants with fans of all the major teams. The results are absolutely breathtaking. I stood up many times when the Liverpool fans start our ?You?ll Never Walk Alone?? in the game.

EA SPORTS: FIFA goes online this year for the PlayStation®2. What sort of modes will be available online, and what other capabilities will that function provide?

Pierre Hintze: The online feature will hopefully turn out to be another killer feature for FIFA this year, considering we?ll be the first major soccer title that allows users to play across borders and stands head and shoulders above our nearest competitor with regards to feature quantity and quality. (I look forward to seeing the matches between Germans, English and Dutch fans...)

The variety of online gameplay is vast. Users will be able to play straight up matches against one another, which can be played as ranked or un-ranked matches. They will also be able to create straight knockout tournaments, which can be resolved within a reasonable amount of playing time and both features will feed into a leaderboard system, which reflects the user?s online gameplay history.

There will also be a web-based component, which allows any console owner with a PC to create Knock Out tournaments. These features will be visible on the PlayStation 2 and any PlayStation 2 FIFA user can join them, providing they are not protected by a password. The password feature will be very important for special event tournaments, which will be sponsored and have prizes for the winners.

The PlayStation 2 will also have a number of community tools, which allow users to chat and challenge each other via a messenger interface. This interface will also provide the user with the ability to create buddy lists with his favorite opponents/friends, which he can track across other EA SPORTS Online products.

EA SPORTS: Do you get feedback from gamers and real soccer players, and how do you incorporate that into the game?

Pierre Hintze: We do, especially via our fan-site soccergaming.com, which has proven to be a strong supporter of FIFA over the years. The guys there are a very good sounding board for us and we have a close relationship with guys like Matt Holmes.

We also continued last year?s approach to seek council of current and past professional players and coaches. This year?s adviser was the very experienced German Coach Erich Rutemoeller. He helped us tremendously to get an insight into the mind of a professional coach and his experience with the German National Team, and a number of Bundesliga Teams helped our Strategy & Tactics group a great deal.

EA SPORTS: Will we see the same sort of Club Championship feature, where the big clubs are highlighted and given more depth?

Pierre Hintze: Partially. We decided to continue our focus on the major clubs but we merged the Club Championship Tournament together with out custom tournament feature. We felt that this would help us to bring this area of the game a bit more to the foreground, considering it?ll allow the user to re-create pretty much any major soccer tournament of the world.

EA SPORTS: Anything else you want to add about FIFA 2004?

Pierre Hintze: We are very excited about this year?s progress because we feel we continued where we left off last year and FIFA will be again in a position to contest for the title of ?#1 Soccer Game? this year. We intend to create another very important milestone in the history of the FIFA Franchise and the soccer video game genre.