Rivalry With PES Hasn’t Diminished — EA Sports

Last year’s installments of PES and FIFA were both great in their own right but FIFA 11 had just a little more going for it as well as the team licensing, which is like money in the bank, to edge ahead of PES 2011 in most people’s eyes as the better game.

Speaking to CVG, FIFA senior producer David Rutter said that the “intensity of rivalry” between PES’s Konami and FIFA’s EA Sports Vancouver “hasn’t gone anywhere”, a statement which funnily enough displays the sporting nature of the rivalry. Unlike the FPS crowd who are constantly hacking at each other’s necks.

“I think that anyone that would underestimate the quality of a passionate game developer [like Konami] who really wants to make the best game in a battle like the one we have would be somewhat short-sighted,” said Rutter.

“We pay a great deal of attention to what those guys do because we want to make sure we’re not caught up to by complacency.

“One of the brilliant things about this team here near Vancouver is that there’s a lot of different nationalities on this team, we’ve all been imported pretty much into Canada because we’re the best at what we do in the world.

“We’re all mad football fans and gamers so I think those two things plus the fact that we’re good and moved overseas makes us naturally competitive regardless of what the competition is; be it Konami or Call of Duty or watching TV, we want to be the thing that more people in the whole world want to do than anything else. I don’t think you’ll see that motivation drop because everyone here is super-competitive.”

FIFA 12 promises to be the big step forward that we’ve been waiting for since FIFA 08 with the all-new Impact Engine being a key part of this whereas PES 2012 should be a more than worthy adversary but has yet to really show us what it’s packing since the announcement video released.

Both games are due out this spring on PS3, Xbox 360, PC, PS2 and Wii with FIFA 12 also branching out onto the 3DS and Vita (Sony NGP) while an iOS version is also in development.