Captain Your Country
 Obviously when making a game like EURO we have to include the tournament and the qualifiers and we’ve done a lot in terms of making the environments, weather, and the gameplay match the teams you are up against. But at the same time we felt that a lot of this is expected; so why not let gamers play the game from a different perspective and experience the highs and lows of a EURO campaign from the point of view of an individual player.
The “Be a Pro” feature in FIFA 08 was well received, but they didn’t have development time to also have a focused game mode based around this; it was just one-off games. We were convinced that “Be a Pro” had potential to be really fun but without any real reward/failure mechanic there was no urgency to come back. We wanted to make a game mode where you had to earn the right to play and really cared how well your team was doing as well as your own performances and add in a little bit of an RPG element too. So from this we came up with the mode called Captain Your Country.
When we first spoke about Captain Your Country it was going to be a one player only experience, but we were so sure that the multiplayer experience would be significantly better that we investigated co-operative play for the mode. Now doing this sounds easy on paper, but there are so many other aspects that go in to making a game mode work for both single and multiplayer such as cameras, feedback, HUD, screens and of course how all this affects the gameplay.
So what is Captain Your Country?
 Captain Your Country allows up to four gamers to take their player from a B-International (essentially a fringe player in the international set up) and work their way up to not only becoming a regular, but also captaining your country to glory and seeing yourself lift the trophy at the final in Vienna.
You can either create yourself as a brand new player and build yourself up over multiple campaigns, or if you fancy a bit of a head start you can pick a real life player and maybe even help England make it to the finals this time round!
The real fun though comes with creating yourself and watching your player grow not only in stature, but also in quality, as every time you perform well you’ll not only get a good match rating, but you’ll earn XP (Experience Points) to improve your attributes.
As I mentioned you get a match rating and this is key to not only improving your player but also getting picked to play. Perform well in the B-International matches and you’ll be selected for a Friendly match, do well in those and you could be given a shot in the qualifiers, then as captain and eventually captaining the side at UEFA EURO 2008™. That is assuming your team makes it, which is something to consider because even though you’ll rise up to the ranks of captain quicker for say San Marino, it’ll be much tougher to qualify. Of course if you’re not good enough you’ll miss the matches and even if your team does make it, you won’t be going with them.
 To add competition to the mode as well as making it far more fun we not only added competition from other gamers, but if you don’t have 3 friends handy, you compete with 3 other CPU controlled players. Having that competition really affects the gameplay as you are constantly looking and comparing your match ratings (which we show throughout the match on your player name indicator) and wondering if you should pass to your team mate because even though your team needs the goal, you just can’t bear him getting the man of the match and taking the captain’s armband from you! In fact in one of our own encounters whilst 3-0 up in a qualifier we were determined to stop one of our work colleagues from getting a hat trick by fair means or foul. Needless to say he didn’t score, much to his dismay and to our amusement! Of course we would never condone the use of foul means when you get to play the game for yourself!
We also allow you to compare and contrast stats – highlighting the winners in each category so you can point the finger at your mates for their woeful shooting accuracy, or show off the fact that every pass you hit found a team mate!
 To add to the competition there is also an ongoing score which not only decides who wins the mode, but by uploading this score for your country in our Battle of the Nations feature allows you to compete with others worldwide and help your represented country top the leaderboards (a future blog will have more detail on this, so watch this space)
To make the game work in multiplayer we had to add a new camera which is called the Co-Op Camera. The Be a Pro camera really takes you in to the moment of playing as an individual, but it doesn’t work for multiplayer, so we set about making a slightly more zoomed out camera that at the same time didn’t compromise the frame rate. We liked the camera so much that it’s even our default camera in regular play!
We still kept all the call for a pass, switch camera focus, and other specific controls from FIFA 08 and also the “Be a Pro” camera, but to make the experience even more enriching we needed some other key elements. Examples of this are picking your commentary name, newspaper headlines, an ongoing news ticker on the central hub that keeps you up to date with all the goings on in your tournament, and last but not least the cut scenes and commentary both alluding to your player’s progress. The latter not only includes your commentary name, and showing you in the line-up but also goes as far as commenting on your performance or the ultimate which is actually seeing your carefully created likeness lift the trophy – I know I particularly enjoyed it when the virtual me stepped up with the captain’s armband to hold aloft the EURO trophy for England, I may have to wait some time before Steven Gerrard can emulate me! Matt Prior
Associate Producer
Electronic Arts
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