GameSpy: Are you concerned about adding more depth and sacrificing accessibility?
Francois Giuntini: We spent a lot of time working on that. It's difficult, because that's always been something that we've tried to balance. I hope I'm right, but we believe that it's not really hard, it's just a matter of pressing the button in advance doesn't make the game harder, just more realistic.
GameSpy: The most difficult part I felt was that having played the previous game, I had to learn something new that was contrary to my prior experience. If you come in without that experience, it may be easier.
Francois Giuntini: I agree with you. You have to unlearn what you knew before. Usually from what we've seen from journalists or other players, is that it's another ten or fifteen minutes to "get it" and then it's simply a matter of experimentation and improvement. We believe that it's rather easy to pick up, you don't have a barrier to get into it, but getting beyond that, and into the depth of the game, it's really impressive. We play the game for hours and hours in studio, and we keep finding new ways within the system to counter. There's no one strategy that works all the time.

GameSpy: Well, you can always just pick Federer to win.
Francois Giuntini: Even then, there are ten different ways to beat Federer. That's part of what we like. Top Spin has been an online-focused game, and playing online is perfect for tennis. Direct opposition. We wanted to make sure that every single match, online or offline would be different. From what we've seen so far, that is the case. We're pleased with that.
GameSpy: While I was tooling around with the character creation and leveling systems, I was reminded of Dungeons & Dragons, the pen-and-paper role-playing game whose creator (Gary Gygax) died just a short time ago. With custom-made players and stat improvements based on experience, are you saying that the time is right for a tennis role-playing game?
Francois Giuntini: No, I wouldn't call it a role-playing game. We have some game mechanics, of course. Myself and the people around me, we're all fans of games in general, not just videogames. We played a lot of those role-playing games and tabletop games, all of that. Good ideas and mechanisms are everywhere, and we'll use them where we can in our videogames.

We have character development, and we know people love that. It's not just a matter of role-playing games. It's a matter of taking a character, in whatever form, and building up a story where that character evolves. It can be an adventure game, a tennis game, whatever. The way to develop a connection between a player and this 3D character is to build systems so that the player and character progress together.
GameSpy: How is that implemented in the game?
Francois Giuntini: We just tried to make it simple and easy. We want people to be able to experiment and try something so that it's not a burden to take different approaches. It's very simple, the better you perform, the more experience points you earn. You can spend those points to increase your attributes. It's very basic and intuitive. We wanted to make it efficient, so you can clearly define where you want to allocate points. The more opponents you beat, the more matches you win, the more points you earn. Very basic, but very satisfying.
GameSpy: How will online play improve in Top Spin 3?
Francois Giuntini: We changed leaderboards significantly to improve online play. Leaderboards are a double-edged sword. It's fun to compete with and compare yourself against other players, but with so many people online, you'll hop on and only see that there are so many players better than you. If you're player 90,000 in the world, it's like, "wow, what an achievement!" That experience can be discouraging.

We'll still have leaderboards, but the competition online takes place in two week-long seasons. When you create a player and develop them online or offline, as experience points are earned everywhere. You are ranked by performance in that particular season. This way, players will always have a chance to be competitive. There won't be any one person always on top, a situation where the first players who get a game or those who play the most would normally always be on top.

It's like the ranking systems in tennis, where at the start of the season everyone starts off fresh. We believe that this system will make online play more satisfying.