EA Sports have promised to deliver a complete overhaul for FC 26 – but the voice of Derek Rae is one thing that will stay the same.
The 58-year-old joined the best-selling franchise for FIFA 19, before replacing Martin Tyler as the lead commentator two editions later.
Since then, Rae has been the voice guiding players through the biggest overhaul in the game series’ history.
Football’s governing body, FIFA, previously restricted what their name is associated with, but the rebrand to FC has allowed the publishers to develop a far more unique product.
That has led to Rae uttering lines during recording sessions that couldn’t be further from what he usually says during live matches.
During an exclusive interview with talkSPORT.com in May, the Scot opened up on the differences in the process between real and virtual.
He said: “When I’m commentating live, and I work a lot in Germany as well as other countries, but especially in Germany, obviously, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least I have the game in front of me.
“When we’re doing the video game, there’s a lot of visualisation going on and imagining scenarios.
“You do have to rely upon the imagination to a large extent, because we are going over different scenarios in a game, and then quickly coming up organically with words, pictures of those scenarios.
“It’s actually great fun. I find it a very creative process with a terrific team on the audio front.
“We all work together as a team, but ultimately, they want it to sound like me and not like anyone else.
“I try to come up with things that I would say naturally, as opposed to what somebody else might say.”
The trailer release of FC 26 promised an ‘overhauled gameplay experience, powered by feedback’ from the gaming community.
However, Rae has also included a new addition to his commentary that was powered by feedback from his production team.
The Bundesliga commentator has his own distinctive reaction to watching Harry Kane and co. fluff a sitter.
On the funniest lines he’s recorded for FC, Rae added: “The one that I will share with you is that we’ve added this actually into the game in the last few months.
“It’s something that I started saying, particularly when a player had a bad miss. Maybe the goal was gaping at him and he couldn’t score.
“I’ve actually borrowed it a bit from my German colleagues, because I work in Germany a lot. Often what you’ll hear there is ‘Ay Yai Yai’, something like that.
“There’s a few other variations on that. I remember saying that one day in the recording studio, and our production team said, ‘Do that for me again.’
“So I did that again. They said, ‘I quite like that. We might put that into the game.’ You will now hear that.
“Not too often, but you might hear it if somebody misses a chance.
“I think it is about trying to be as organic as we can, and make it sound like I would sound doing a live game.”
That authenticity falls in line with a commitment from EA to provide new Competitive and Authentic gameplay presets for FC 26.
Rae has always been one step ahead of the publishers in that regard, having long prided himself on his accurate player pronunciations.
He explained to talkSPORT: “It is something I put a lot of time and effort into, and it comes down to this.
“I know that it’s an iconic game that goes around the world, and I want somebody playing the game to be able to say, ‘Oh, that commentator has got my name right’. We do have a checking process. A lot of the checks are done by me, so that when I get a list of players, I go through them all.
“Luckily, I speak a few languages, so that does help. For languages I don’t speak, I have some sources from different countries.
“We work as a team to try to get that right as much as possible. There still will be names that occasionally will fall through the net.
“Sometimes, when a player arrives, especially here in England, they will change the pronunciation of their name subtly, or at least the pronunciation will be changed for them.
“That can sometimes lead to difficulties, but we try to be as accurate and as authentic as we can.”
One of the chief examples is Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes, whose name is read as if he is Spanish, not Portuguese.
The 30-year-old is referred to as ‘Fer-nan-des’, despite the man himself phoneticising his surname as ‘Fer-nanj’.
Rae told talkSPORT, ahead of the release of F1 25: “I was doing the pronunciation of his name long before he joined Manchester United.
“It was a bit of a shock to me that he was no longer Bruno ‘Fernandsh’, because that’s what he’d always been in the video game. That was what I had verified beforehand.
Rae’s FC predecessor, Tyler, once revealed he deliberately mispronounces Fernandes’ name because he would get ‘laughed out’ if he said it the Portuguese way.
But when asked about the players that are grateful for the correct pronunciation, Rae added to talkSPORT: “There was a player, actually, in Scotland, when I worked in Scotland a few years ago, who thanked me.
“His name had basically been said wrongly, even by members of the team he played for. I just happened to ask him, ‘What’s the pronunciation of your name?’ He told me, ‘Farid El Alagui’.
“People hadn’t been saying that name, so I said, I’m going to say it on the air tonight. I did that, and then we bumped into each other a few months later.
“He said to me, ‘My dad was visiting from France and heard you say the name. He was so happy and so proud to hear that.
“That made me feel very good, because it made me think, this is why we try to get these names right. It’s about respect.”