FIFA Heroes interview: Andy Tudor discusses appealing to a younger generation by using whacky collaborations

FIFA Heroes is set to release next month on mobile and pretty much everything else. I came away fairly impressed with it, albeit slightly concerned that the ambition might outweigh the core gameplay. Still, the focus on collaboration and dozens of modes is certainly intriguing, so I sat down with Game Director Andy Tudor to discuss all of this and more!

Could you please introduce yourself and your role on FIFA Heroes?

I'm Andy Tudor, Game Director on FIFA Heroes. I've been in the industry for 20-odd years, working on film and TV franchises like 24, Fast and Furious, The Walking Dead, and then big racing franchises like Need for Speed, Test Drive, and Project Cars.

Despite being a license and organisation, FIFA carries a lot of weight as a name in video games because of EA. Did you feel any pressure when working on Heroes as a result?

This is almost like a blank slate, right? Electronic Arts moved away from FIFA, and obviously, it's now FC. FIFA themselves, especially with some of the controversy from the past, there's almost like a blank slate across the whole corporation, wanting to do new things, there's a World Cup coming out, and it's in America. You know, they want to make new games and everything, so it's a breath of fresh air, actually. So it feels like, ‘oh, there's less pressure actually.’ And especially because we're in a completely different genre than FC and eFootball. It's not like we're competing; we're not going, ‘oh my god, there's a minimum benchmark we need to hit.’ No, we're kind of going, that's not how Gen Alpha and Gen Z are playing football.

Like, one, they're not going to the games because they're too expensive. Also, they're English, and they're supporting Real Madrid as opposed to supporting their local football team, so that doesn't even work anyway. And also, they're still playing Roblox and Fortnite and other indie titles and things like that, so they're not even playing the AAA games. So we've got carte blanche to make games for them, and also without the pressure of having to compete with all the big titles as well.

So yeah, it's been great actually.

FIFA Heroes is coming to other platforms alongside mobile. Do you see mobile as the main place to play?

We're making them concurrently, so I've been playing the game on Steam for the last four months using an Xbox controller and the same controls that we've taken from other people's games, so you don't have to relearn anything. Day to day, I'm playing on both mobile and on PC currently, testing the game, and therefore, there's never one preferred platform. 

The reason we're doing iPhone and Android at the moment is because everyone's got one in their pocket, and the World Cup is coming around. And therefore, we want parents and grandparents to be able to play with their siblings and nephews and nieces and sons and daughters as well. And also, the arcade nature of it really works well on the phone.

So you can pick up, like, the Motorola Razr or the Razr Fold, and the graphics are clear, and the action is smooth, and it plays really well on that form factor, but then equally, when you go home, and you have a sit-back experience with a controller, it works great there as well.

Based on the demo I’ve played, there wasn’t a tutorial. Do you have one elsewhere? Because I would argue that it’s not entirely needed, and it’s quite fun to discover the various hidden nuances.

We do have a tutorial, and yeah, exactly for that reason, we're not teaching you everything. We're teaching you some things, and then some things are that surprise and delight of, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ We don't teach you combos, for example, which you can do. You can magnetise the ball, then do a through ball to somebody, and then you're pretty much clear on goal.

We're not teaching you that. We're not really teaching you abilities, to be honest. There are various ways of passing the ball, like if you hold down the button, eventually, a target reticule will appear, and you can lob it over things, like little things like that.

Right or bounce the ball off the walls.

Bouncing off the walls, yeah, exactly. We know that everyone will just like move the joystick, press pass and shoot, and have a very basic game, and then people who put in the time or learn tricks or whatever it may be will be able to finesse their way around the pitch.

Were there any particular inspirations for FIFA Heroes? The obvious guess for a lot of people would be FIFA Street. Is that a comparison you’re happy for people to make?

The worst thing we could do is copy other people's football games, so if you look back at the work I did on Need for Speed, we took inspiration from Resident Evil. So when you're driving at night, it feels scary, and the headlights of your car are like a flashlight going through the woods. For FIFA Heroes, we talk about MOBAs. So we talk about cooldown timers, spatial awareness, team composition and things like that, as opposed to formations.

It's more about your team composition, the stats, your awareness of where everybody is on the pitch, knowing how long your cooldown timers are and what exactly that ability is, knowing how long your skill move is and what it does. It's a different way of thinking about football. We're not talking about strikers and defenders. We're talking almost like a tank, ranger, healer kind of mentality.

Do you have any plans to make the goalkeeper more than just a goalkeeper? Because obviously that's the one role people don't control.

We're adding squad play, so you can play as the goalkeeper eventually. I won't be picking that, but some people definitely will be. And they'd better be saving my goals eventually when they do that. But, yeah, we're going to be adding squad play, so everyone can pick a very specific person on the team. And that leads us into esports stuff.

Is there any particular reason you thought, 'we're going to do arcadey five-a-side rather than even arcade 11-a-side?'

Five-a-side because we are all inspired by Mario Strikers and NBA Jam and games like that, which are fast-paced, action-oriented. So our brains naturally went to five-a-side. We did look at three-a-side, which wasn't great.

And we did look at six-a-side at various pitch sizes. And five-a-side just felt about right. When we were thinking of esports, we were thinking, yeah, five-man teams are a good team size as well.

It just naturally settled on five-a-side. And then we ended up scaling the pitch to be the right size, and it felt good. But in future, we're going to have bigger pitches so we can do 11-a-side potentially.

Can you tell us when we can expect the game to release? Likewise, will there be a soft launch, alpha, or beta testing phase?

We're live right now in Malaysia and Singapore. So we're just getting data purely off does the game load? Is it stable? What's the latency? Are people getting through the tutorial? Things like that. Then we are updating the game, I think, in two weeks' time with more features.

We go live on April 28th, ahead of the World Cup. And then we are updating the game every single month from now until, well, through to the Women's World Cup next year. We've already planned out the rest of this year.

We already know that we are going to be having whoever wins the World Cup 26 in the game as well. We've already worked out who's going to be in that very first season pass. It's going to be people that everyone loves. And then we've got, obviously, every month new game modes, new events, limited-time events, new abilities, and new celebrations, but we can act quite quickly on this stuff.

For example, I saw Ronaldo the other day score a goal, and he started doing a dunking celebration. We're like, right, we'll have to get that in the game. We can turn it around in, like, a week and get it in the game straight away.

With game modes, do you have any plans to have temporary ones that flip into a different sport? It's a good-sized pitch for ice hockey, for example.

Yes, we've got a glacier pitch in the game. And the question was, ‘Should we make it slippy?’ So it's like Mario in his ice levels? And we were like, no. But it started making us think, like you're saying there, maybe, you know, during the first week of the World Cup, the glacier pitch or a specific game mode has all icy pitches in there. And, yeah, that is exactly the kind of mentality that the game ethos is all about.

We want the crazy things to come in, like new abilities which people will initially think are OP and, really, broken and break the game. So everyone goes, ‘Oh, my God.’ And then you start getting viral clips of it going around. And then people realise, ‘Oh, no, it's not because I can counter it with this thing over here.’ But don't worry, next month as well, there's another crazy thing that's happening in there. 

And, yeah, the community can ask us, ‘Oh, we really want X in the game.’ We can get them in the game with so-and-so celebration and a crazy new ability. And then all of a sudden the community are making the game with us, which is really cool. 

So, community feedback is going to be a big thing for you?

Yeah, exactly. Games take too long, and they cost too much for you to make the game in the dark. Making the game blindly as a 30/40-year-old game developer, you shouldn't be doing that because we're not making the game for us. We're making the game for our kids, right? So we want them responding to our TikToks and our social media feeds and going, ‘Oh, I want Conor McGregor in the game.’

We would not want to be telling people from the top down, from a corporate level, what should be in the game. We want it from the ground up, from the grassroots. Like, have our players tell us what they want.

The big question whenever anything comes to mobile: How will Fifa Heroes be monetised?

So I've made many free-to-play games in the past, and you just have to be responsible, you know? I have a 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy. They don't have credit cards, so therefore, you know, I, as a parent, are responsible enough.

But if they came to me every month and said, 'Dad, Ronaldo's in the game.' And I'm like, ‘Yep, okay, how much is it? $10, 10 quid or something like that?’

Absolutely. He can go away, he can earn Ronaldo and all the crazy stuff that was in that season pass. Have a great time, play with his mates responsibly, and buy things using the in-game currency that you naturally earn from playing.

And then next month, if he comes back to me again, I'm more than happy for him to pay that. You've just got to be not evil with his stuff, right? You've just got to be nice.

I’ve had a few games that have ended just as I’ve shot, and then my goal didn’t count. Are there any plans to tweak that?

We want those buzzer beaters, definitely. That'll be in the future version of the game.

And then, likewise, are you happy with games just ending in a draw, or are there plans to add golden goal?

We're adding golden goal. Yes, exactly. We're used to draws as English people, but then some of the Americans are like, ‘Well, no, no, it has to go to, like, a penalty shootout or something like that.’ We're like, ‘Oh, interesting. So, yeah, but we're adding golden goal.’ It gives you a bit more of a dopamine hit.

We've mentioned a few of the potential collaborations. How silly are you happy for that to go?

Incredibly silly, yes. We've got major film and TV franchises. Major upcoming movies that are happening. Major gaming franchises that are doing things soon. Celebrities, influencers.

Obviously, we've got the mascots in there, but what's stopping us from having mascots from other sports in there, which would be crazy? Yeah, the sillier the better. If you could have… I don't want to… who can I pick?

I'm just going to randomly pick Darth Vader, because that's just coming to my mind. If you could have Darth Vader going siu on a crazy pitch, having turned everyone into fish on the pitch or whatever. Something crazy, bonkers, right?

The more the better. Because that kind of crazy combo of things, as long as it's not game-breaking, is what my kids are wanting right now. It's the kind of thing that goes viral on social media as well.

And it's the kind of thing you can't get in anybody else's game, right? Yeah, we're all for crazy. That remix mashup mentality is one of our mission statements.