Yesterday you read Part 1 of the juicy details that FIFA 10 Line Producer announced and today you can now read Part 2.
Responding to Feedback:
So as I’m writing this we’re nearing the 300 millionth game of FIFA. What a number. And what a lot of feedback. For me feedback has taken 2 forms.
1 – Frustrations
2 – Requests
and I’ll take each in turn…
Frustrations: I’m on the forums a lot, posting and reading. There are a lot of people who love the game, and there are a lot of people who discover, report or exploit things in our game that they’re unhappy with. So, we really want to make the people who have legitimate gripes happy, and the exploiters play fair. Some of the things we’re changing are:
Stopping lofted through balls leading to 1 on 1 with the keeper.
Preventing goals being scored from kick off
Improving shooting so you don’t hit the woodwork so much
Making our movement animations look better
Working to make offsides less frequent and the advantage rule more intelligent
Starting to remove scripted graphical sequences and adding quick free kicks.
We’ve done a lot more too – but this should give you a sense of how much we are actually listening to the frustrations people are telling us about.
Requests: The second part of responding is requests. This year we’re proud to announce that we’re including a Practice Mode within FIFA 10. Using the Back/Select button from the 1 on 1 arena, you’ll be able to bring up a menu enabling you to choose to play a practice match or set pieces. You can change the number of players on each side, and a little blog exclusive here – it’s multiplayer too. Only locally though – you can’t have your online friends join your practice match. But 5 v 5 outfield players, on a full size pitch is now a reality.
Innovations
This year we really wanted to change the way the game played. One of the big things we wanted to do was firstly change the player control mechanic, but also to give people more freedom to express themselves realistically on the ball. We’ve managed to do this in 3 ways this year:
360 Degree Dribbling
Skilled Dribbling
Freedom in Physical Play.
360 Degree Dribbling:
Believe it or not the players in FIFA 09 could only move in 8 directions. Up/Down, Left/Right and Diagonals. You might not have noticed it, but at times this led to a feeling of frustration in the way players dribbled and turned with the ball. 360 Degree dribbling totally frees you from those 8 directional constraints. It’s the first time ever in a football game. Literally a super fluid way to move with the ball. We’ve introduced a larger area of ‘control’ in front of the players, wider dribble touches and a much more responsive and accurate pad reading system to allow you to go wherever you want. With practice it’s even possible to switch the ball from one foot to the other.
Skilled Dribbling:
In addition to the 360 system above we wanted to give skilled dribblers the ability to rapidly move the ball laterally. Imagine you’re down near the corner flag and are being pressed by a defender. By pressing the top left bumper you can take rapid, high fidelity touches of the ball to jink left and right to throw defenders momentum. It’s also useful in other areas of the pitch. I like to think of it as a more accessible skill move.
Freedom in Physical Play:
With the wider dribble touches we added a new collision sharing system. In combination with the increased area of possession you’re looking at ‘overlapping’ areas of control. A true fight for possession when you’re shoulder to shoulder. It’s more varied, and when the players are evenly matched, can lead to some great extended and less predictable physical interactions on the pitch.
It’s not just all about gameplay though.
Manager Mode:
We’re fully aware on the team that Manager mode is HUGELY popular. Outside 1 v CPU and 1v1 play it’s the most played gamemode in the game. Using our ‘responding to feedback’ tag line, we just couldn’t ignore the volume of requests coming in to address a number of areas in this mode. We’ve improved 50 major components to Manager mode in the following areas:
Match Realism
Transfers
Player Development
Football Atmosphere
Match Realism:
We’ve totally reworked our simulation engine. Results for Sim’d games are now generated minute by minute and are based on individual team strengths and weaknesses – down to the level of individual players, defensive, midfield and attacking lines, and formation. From the simulations we run here – we’re really happy with the realism of the results we’re generating, and our league tables look pretty believeable too
Authentic Transfers:
In 09 we were guilty of using financial clout as the main decider for transfer success. This year there’s more decision points. Whilst money is still very important, career prospects and squad opportunity also play an important role in the success of a player’s decision. You’ll also have much more intelligent AI competing against you.
Player Developments:
We wanted to make sure that players developed believably for FIFA 10 – so we’ve invested heavily in making intelligent player growth curves based on a number of factors. These physical, mental and technical curves effect how well a player will develop, as well as where the developing player is based and how we’ll they’re performing.
Football Atmosphere:
The world of football is constantly changing, at a high and low level, and we wanted to inject some much needed authenticity here. You’ll see AI rotating squads based on match performance, have real-time transfer updates on a week by week basis and summaries of what’s going on in your football world.
The Future:
We’re looking at Manager mode as a multiyear investment for us. It’s going to take us a little while to get to a Manager mode that matches the quality of our on pitch gameplay – but we’re really committed to pulling this off.
In Closing:
As I mentioned that’s about all I can talk about at the moment – and I know the guys here will be doing more in-depth blogs concerning their ‘features’ as the weeks and months go by. We’ll also be releasing more info on what’s going on regarding our other ‘unannounced features’ over the coming weeks too.
That’s a lot of information to take in. But a lot of very interesting information. Let us know if you are looking forward to FIFA 10 in a comment below! I know I sure am!
