FIFA 10

[TikTikTikTikTik]

Sounds good, although Im a little dissapointed with the new "mode" being setpiece creator. Wouldn't call it a mode myself, as it's not. Its an editing addition in the game. But it will be enjoyable setting it up for different teams, against teams with big defenders or small defenders, finally having my big CB coming up as the focus of the attack instead of my 5'8" nippy winger.

Hopefully a lot of MM info will be getting released in the near future.

 

[Radiation]

That's my huge worry as well. I'm a bit dubious about that feature.

So no more news on MM then? Just the set-piece creator and a few new screenshots?

I can just imagine it now. Every free kick set piece will position 2 men next to the goal keeper to glitch him and stop him from diving and if that bugs fixed for Fifa 2010 (Yes I'm calling it 2010!) then they'll find another way where they pull 2 men out of the box dragging the AI defenders out leaving huge gaps in the box.

It seems like as usual the games giving all of these options to the attackers and the defence side is ignored.

 

[Chris Davies]

I don't know if the mods over at FSB and sites like that actually think that the game is headed in the right direction or if they just wanna keep the relationship with EA in good standing because by all accounts most people seem to think that what EA's done from 08 to 09 was good and that 10 will be even better.

I've been a member here for a ridiculous amount of time and, I would hope, I've built a reputation for myself of being honest and not bullshitting (as I said earlier on today when I admitted that Rob had a point about the test of time a game has to endure before you can really rate it - although I should point out that Suff played the game over the course of 2-3 days in Vancouver originally).

FSB is independent - it's true that we have a good relationship with EA in as much as that they'll invite us to playtests etc., but all the sites get invited to playtests and we get treated no differently from anybody else. If I disliked something then I would say it, as would the other guys.

A little example from the last article is where Suff says "when we first saw the set piece creator we thought 'exploiter heaven'" or words to that effect. If we were worried about upsetting EA then we wouldn't say that.

Our main concerns currently are the set piece creator introducing any exploits, not being able to avoid the assisted players online completely (good news that the search is being refined but is it enough when you may still find yourself playing against them), and some fundamentals still being missing from the Manager Mode (such as no more than two loans a season being allowed, and we've not been able to test the MM yet for ourselves).

Again, not sure if it'll happen one way or the other but it would really help if they could actually let us take a look at these new improvements at some point before August. They're what, 3 builds in now? Practically done with the game.

If you're referring to videos, the release of videos etc. isn't up to us, it's up to EA (or anyone prepared to incur their wrath - and as independent as we are, we don't want to leak something because then we'll be giving up our playtests ).

I think they're waiting until they're 100% happy with things like the ball physics (which they're tweaking practically every day) before allowing any gameplay videos to be taken.

set piece creator could be exploiter heaven

It may be disabled online, check out the following quote from David Rutter (producer)...

"At the moment we're not sure if we're going to allow these to be used online. It depends on how testing goes."

 

[pboreham]

Release date, Oct 2nd.

Was that already known?

 

[Chris Davies]

Yep, see the post underneath the latest post on FSB.

 

[andish2001]

Who bloody cares if the away fans are 8 sections over from where they should be..there are bigger issues to worry about.

The set piece creator could be exploit heaven, but I think for those that put 11 people in the set piece - while the 2man aerial battle exists it wont mean a thing. You'll get the ball back and run up the other field and score and they will quickly learn.

Doesn't matter for me anyway since I rarely play online due to my old connection .

 

[Chris Davies]

So no more news on MM then? Just the set-piece creator and a few new screenshots?

Currently yes, they've still not finished with the MM and they want to hold back more information until they've confirmed things. Take a look at the quote below:

Just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for your interest in FIFA 10 and specifically the Manager Mode. Your comments and suggestions really help me to figure out what we need to focus on for the final sprint of this development cycle. Also wanted to mention that you are all showing great patience, trust me I am doing my best to answer all your questions... For those of you that can't get enough, we've got a Manager Mode blog in the works that will have a bunch of more information on the main features of the mode.

Also, posted along with that was some more news...

1) Whilst playing MM, I notice that no matter what team I am playing against, what the scoreline is, or what league/ cup game I am in, the CPU seems to only attack a certain way. They will get it out to the wing, cross it in and attempt to score. Rarely do I actually see the CPU attempt a shot on goal from distance or show any authentic build up attempts to shoot. They simply make a pass or two in midfield, pass out to the wing, and cross it in for a header. Will this flaw in the AI be addressed? Will the CPU build up attacks, randomly and realistically so it doesnt feel as if all they know how to do is cross in for a header?

The CPU has different build-up styles depending on the team’s team tactics, so they will feel different. Player personalisation / attributes will add another dimension. I personally notice a lot that I have problems with strong teams (i.e. Bayern Munich), as I prefer to play with small&fast players.

2. Will the CPU actually attempt skill moves this year? Step overs, roulettes, etc.?

Yes, CPU players will perform skill moves this year. Of course skilled players (i.e. Ribery, Kaka) will try them more often than not so skilled ones.

3. This is not a question, but more of a request to add the ability to turn off the little marker that shows you where the ball is going to land. This was added in 08 I believe and I have never liked it. Its sooooo PES... Can you please look into having this as an option, you can put it right under the option to turn on/off the radar, which I also despise and turn off.

Good idea, I like my HUD clean as well... But we won't have this option in FIFA 10.

4. Will weather work this year? No matter what view or anything else you choose?

Yes, nuff said.

5. Will the extra time clock be handled any differently this year? I would like to actually be able to see how much extra time I have. Or will it still be a mystery?

Like last year it will show the amount of minutes that were added, but the clock will stop at 90 minutes. Added time is more up to the ref's discretion anyway and not an accurate science.

6. During your MM, it was quite odd that you had really old players on teams you played against. Will teams bring up youth players and transfer in new talent and refresh their squads?

Squad rotation and the transfer system has been discussed a lot already, highly rated clubs try to weed out older players and introduce fresh talent into their squad as part of that. In addition the new player growth system will result in a player's overall rating going downhill as he gets older due to his athletic abilites dropping off - this will further contribute to top clubs trying to replace older players.

Oh and Andish...

The set piece creator could be exploit heaven, but I think for those that put 11 people in the set piece - while the 2man aerial battle exists it wont mean a thing. You'll get the ball back and run up the other field and score and they will quickly learn.

Doesn't matter for me anyway since I rarely play online due to my old connection .

See the following.

It may be disabled online, check out the following quote from David Rutter (producer)...

"At the moment we're not sure if we're going to allow these to be used online. It depends on how testing goes."

 

[Radiation]

Who bloody cares if the away fans are 8 sections over from where they should be..there are bigger issues to worry about..

The concern would be how are EA able to look at factual evidence that shows CLEARLY where the fans SHOULD be and somehow screw that up and place them somewhere else.

If they're able to screw things like that up where really they have no excuses then the 'bigger issue' would be they can screw anything up. They're saying "Oh we've improved A and B and it's going to be great'. But when they can't even achieve copying from reference materials correctly it makes their claims hard to believe.

 

[Tim7]

CPU players doing tricks should be good .

 

[Shooto]

Please explain how FK creator would be exploited?

I think this is an amazing addition, especially as I cant score from FKs unless it is the hard shot to the keepers side.

The ability to setup you players to line up at the edge of the box and run in to attack the ball sounds much better than the useless option you have at the moment of floating the ball in and hoping you have someone attack it.

I assume you can then instruct your big CBs to come up for the FKs too.

Sounds great. When does the demo usually come out before relase?

 

[pepper63]

I don't know whether to be excited about this game or not.
A lot of the stuff they've added won't really matter if they havn't fixed most of what was already wrong with the game.

360 degree dribbling - Could be ruined by extreme ease and effectiveness of sprint closing down and double pressuring.

Set piece editing - Could be ruined by the shitty headers (no downward headers), wrong players "locking-on" and players not throwing themselves at the ball enough, plus the 2 player limit for aerial battles needs to go.

Practicing free kicks in the arena with a wall - The ridiculous ball physics (like you're hitting one of those really cheap plastic footballs).

Manager Mode improvements - The mode will still be worthless if the AI is as boring to play against, no matter what they do to the off-pitch stuff. This goes for all offline game modes.

Any online modes - Assisted wankers will no doubt fuck it up, as well as the inevitable glitches people will find.

etc...

It probably won't be much better than 09.

Rob let the game come out first mate.Then slaughter it.

 

[Radiation]

Please explain how FK creator would be exploited?

As the human player who is defending has seemingly no control over his men other than the 1 he is controlling then you're left hoping and praying that the defending AI is up to scratch and has been built around the endless possibilities that a 'create a set piece mode' can offer.

For example will the AI track and follow every attacker or only some of them? Will it know which players to pick up and which to leave and will the defenders mark the tall players or the nearest player or the attacker with the good heading stats.

Now let's take all of that and now start to move out attackers around. Let's say you pull all of your attackers out of the box - now will the AI defence follow them out of the box or will they ignore them? Ignoring them leaves the attackers with a wide range of passing options outside the box. Chasing after them pulls the defence apart leaving huge gaps in the box.

It's only a matter of time until someone figures out which attackers get tracked and which are ignored in the AI scripting. And then they will pull the tracked players to the far post making the defence follow them and pull the unmarked 5 foot tall player to the front post unmarked. With the way Fifa goal keepers are made so they always think that they're stood on the goal line no matter where they actually are stood. The short arse can get one of those quick turn tap in goals over and over.

 

[voile]

I'm a little bit disappointed about the new feature, don't get me wrong it is an amazing feature, but at least I already new about the new option to set pieces, so the editor was pretty obvious to me. I just wanted to be more surprised I guess.

It is really good to finally get real confirmation that the CPU will do skill tricks, for me this will add so much to the game. Maybe now players like Ronaldo actually acts a little like the real person, and this will make you as a player more careful because you don't know what he might do next.

I think it is pretty safe to say that if they allow set pieces online someone will figure out some sort of glitches. But I think this is something we should risk really, because if people DO figure out glitches they can be completely fixed for FIFA 11. I just would hate to see a game not evolve because of people being afraid that it MIGHT be abused. EA will never be able to figure out the glitches themselves, so what are we going to do, remove set pieces from online games forever? That's just crazy. What they could do is add some logic in the code so they can disable set pieces online with an update if it gets super glitchy, I think that would be the ultimate solution.

Tiktiktik: They are actually not calling it a mode, Rutter says it is a feature (a special feature). Maybe the fan bloggers called it a mode, but their words are not official. I am still pretty sure that the new mode will be revealed in august like I've said before and this was the new special feature.

Radiation: exactly. And what happens if they make it so every player stand in front of the keeper screening him so he can't get to the ball? In real life this is a freekick, but in FIFA 09 there are no freekicks for doing something like this.

 

[Shooto]

As the human player who is defending has seemingly no control over his men other than the 1 he is controlling then you're left hoping and praying that the defending AI is up to scratch and has been built around the endless possibilities that a 'create a set piece mode' can offer.

For example will the AI track and follow every attacker or only some of them? Will it know which players to pick up and which to leave and will the defenders mark the tall players or the nearest player or the attacker with the good heading stats.

Now let's take all of that and now start to move out attackers around. Let's say you pull all of your attackers out of the box - now will the AI defence follow them out of the box or will they ignore them? Ignoring them leaves the attackers with a wide range of passing options outside the box. Chasing after them pulls the defence apart leaving huge gaps in the box.

It's only a matter of time until someone figures out which attackers get tracked and which are ignored in the AI scripting. And then they will pull the tracked players to the far post making the defence follow them and pull the unmarked 5 foot tall player to the front post unmarked. With the way Fifa goal keepers are made so they always think that they're stood on the goal line no matter where they actually are stood. The short arse can get one of those quick turn tap in goals over and over.

I would assume they are working on AI for defending set pieces.

Either by implemeting zonal marking in the box or by going man for man just like in real footy.

I guess we just need to wait and see

 

[Chris Davies]

Six screenshots of the set piece creator HERE.

The podcast article should be next, not sure what time it's going up though.

 

[Placebo]

Player Manager 2 let you refine your tactics down to every grid of where the ball was all over the pitch, you could set where your players would be at every single point the ball could be at, and this was in the mid 90s.

Yes a free kick editor is a nice fun inclusion, but it's not a "mode".

A deeper iteration of the ever-popular Manager Mode features more than 50 major improvements.

Still waiting for numbers 8-50..........

 

[Placebo]

Six screenshots of the set piece creator HERE.

They ever actually going to let you try Fifa10 Chris?

 

[vitalic]

I see it as slightly superfluous. All that's needed is better control over who goes up for corners. EA said recently that you still wouldn't be able to change that and defenders would just automatically go up for corners.

If the feature is disabled online then what's the point, really? I guess it would add an extra element to manager mode but I'm sure people who use manager mode would prefer they concentrated on the fundamentals.

Please explain how FK creator would be exploited?

Just look at Football Manager. They've had the same exploit for three years, where if you set your best defender to "challenge keeper" they score 20 goals a season just from corners. It's an extremely difficult thing to get right, especially when you consider this set piece editor will let you control the exact movement of every player.

If it's enabled online there will be a major exploit within a month.

 

[Chris Davies]

A deeper iteration of the ever-popular Manager Mode features more than 50 major improvements.

Still waiting for numbers 8-50..........

Somebody's put together a nice little list on the EA forums, he's up to 20 so far.

• A more user-friendly manager mode hub/desktop
• More user-friendly navigation system
• Ability to edit kit numbers
• Improved Financial System
• New wage budget
• New board difficulty level setting
• New level of authenticity and realism with regard to signing players
• 2-tier bidding for players, first agree fee with club then agree terms with the player
• Manual growth removed but replaced with improved authentic/realistic auto-growth
• New scout ability to predict future growth of players
• Pre-season friendlies added
• Board confidence update after every game
• Ability to renogotiate with players immediately and not through negotiation history
• Transfer rumours
• CPU squad rotation
• Fix to the long-term injury bug i.e. there will be long term injuries
• No "available negotiations" cap, unlimitied number of transfer offers depending on your available budget
• Final decision on player transfers. You can bid for multiple players for the same position and if they all accept then you can choose which players to sign and which not to sign
• Manager mode will not end if you get sacked, your reputation will take a hit and you will get offers from other clubs
• Able to assign stadiums to clubs and rename

They ever actually going to let you try Fifa10 Chris?

Before Germany I've been promised (by EA, not by FSB).

EDIT: By which I mean before Gamescom, not that I'm going to play it before the whole of Germany...

 

[Murkurial]

I've been a member here for a ridiculous amount of time and, I would hope, I've built a reputation for myself of being honest and not bullshitting (as I said earlier on today when I admitted that Rob had a point about the test of time a game has to endure before you can really rate it - although I should point out that Suff played the game over the course of 2-3 days in Vancouver originally).

FSB is independent - it's true that we have a good relationship with EA in as much as that they'll invite us to playtests etc., but all the sites get invited to playtests and we get treated no differently from anybody else. If I disliked something then I would say it, as would the other guys.

A little example from the last article is where Suff says "when we first saw the set piece creator we thought 'exploiter heaven'" or words to that effect. If we were worried about upsetting EA then we wouldn't say that.

Our main concerns currently are the set piece creator introducing any exploits, not being able to avoid the assisted players online completely (good news that the search is being refined but is it enough when you may still find yourself playing against them), and some fundamentals still being missing from the Manager Mode (such as no more than two loans a season being allowed, and we've not been able to test the MM yet for ourselves).


If you're referring to videos, the release of videos etc. isn't up to us, it's up to EA (or anyone prepared to incur their wrath - and as independent as we are, we don't want to leak something because then we'll be giving up our playtests ).

I think they're waiting until they're 100% happy with things like the ball physics (which they're tweaking practically every day) before allowing any gameplay videos to be taken.

Yeah, I wasn't saying that the release of videos had anything to do with FSB so no worries there. It just feels like there's some serious undue praise coming from all over the place and there's no much of an indication that the core gameplay issues that plagued 09 have been fixed. To be honest it's less to do with the praise for what 10 could be and more to do with what I saw as not enough people taking issue with 09's shortcomings, and the devs seemingly content with last year's iteration as well.

You are right though that you and a few other guys on FSB have been just as critical of the game as most of us here and I in no way mean't to imply that you'd compromise your beliefs in favor of staying on EA's good side.

 

[Tim7]

MM sounds quite promising, like Rob, I just hope the AI is playable .

 

[tobi]

Very excited about the set piece creator.

I'm going to try and recreate the best improv FK I've ever seen by Deportivo a few years ago.

 

[Nick Cave]

Yes a free kick editor is a nice fun inclusion, but it's not a "mode".

A deeper iteration of the ever-popular Manager Mode features more than 50 major improvements.

Still waiting for numbers 8-50..........

yep, "It is no mode English"

As I thought the rest of the MM improvements will be small tweaks and fixes...

 

[Nick Cave]

Thank god the practice will be as in game the Arena crap sucked...

 

[Placebo]

Somebody's put together a nice little list on the EA forums, he's up to 20 so far.

• A more user-friendly manager mode hub/desktop
• More user-friendly navigation system
• Ability to edit kit numbers
• Improved Financial System
• New wage budget
• New board difficulty level setting
• New level of authenticity and realism with regard to signing players
• 2-tier bidding for players, first agree fee with club then agree terms with the player
• Manual growth removed but replaced with improved authentic/realistic auto-growth
• New scout ability to predict future growth of players
• Pre-season friendlies added
• Board confidence update after every game
• Ability to renogotiate with players immediately and not through negotiation history
• Transfer rumours
• CPU squad rotation
• Fix to the long-term injury bug i.e. there will be long term injuries
• No "available negotiations" cap, unlimitied number of transfer offers depending on your available budget
• Final decision on player transfers. You can bid for multiple players for the same position and if they all accept then you can choose which players to sign and which not to sign
• Manager mode will not end if you get sacked, your reputation will take a hit and you will get offers from other clubs
• Able to assign stadiums to clubs and rename

Isn't that done outside manager mode? So it shouldn't be on the list surely? As we were told it can't be changed in manager mode weren't we? Real shame, they should do it so that you have to save up x amount of money and can then move to a new stadium, surely couldn't have been that hard to implement seeing as the system for assigning/naming stadia is now in and past Fifas had the stadium manager upgrade system.......

But anyways, nice list, so 21-50 please

 

[Placebo]

As I thought the rest of the MM improvements will be small tweaks and fixes...

Well if you look at them individually it does seem like that, but take them all as a collective improvement and it does seem like the overall experience will be a greatly improved one, plus we still have another 29 to learn about

 

[mjsmith2k]

About the free kicks, have they removed that floating part before you can line up the free kick? It spans the area before you can aim. It is totally unnecessary.

 

[Tim7]

One of them will be about seeing the opponents starting line ups before the match won't it?

 

[Nick Cave]

Well if you look at them individually it does seem like that, but take them all as a collective improvement and it does seem like the overall experience will be a greatly improved one, plus we still have another 29 to learn about

I'm keeping my toes crossed, but I'll be moaning in here like a little girl, if that's all we get...

 

[Chris Davies]

Well if you look at them individually it does seem like that, but take them all as a collective improvement and it does seem like the overall experience will be a greatly improved one, plus we still have another 29 to learn about

Placebo in positivity shocker!

That's how I've felt all along, yes it's ridiculous that two season-long loans are still all you can do loans-wise etc. but overall it seems to me like a Manager Mode save will last me a lot longer than a few weeks now. They've taken out everything that ends up winding me up to the point of explosion, I just hope that the gameplay varies enough from game to game. I think if MM is truly playable now they have to focus on the gameplay and the AI.

About the free kicks, have they removed that floating part before you can line up the free kick? It spans the area before you can aim. It is totally unnecessary.

Good question!

One of them will be about seeing the opponents starting line ups before the match won't it?

Most likely.