Re: FIFA 09 Discussion Thread
Yeah, I know you appreciate AI still has a role to play, even if all players are supposedly human controlled.
I was taking the opportunity to emphasise the fact that the EA AI (copied from Konami) still chooses to favour one team over another at any given period in a match, and your controller input will be completely disregarded at times when your team is on the wrong side of this AI control.
I don't, for one second, think that EA will have removed this hideous feature from their game and I fully expect to find many 10v10 matches to be rendered annoying and worthless because my team is not the chosen one, and likewise, expect to see many opposition players quit as they realise their team is never going to win, no matter what.
Writing "morale" and "mentality" into the gameplay will always result in the sentiment of "why should I bother playing on when the cpu is scritped against me?". I'm sure I'll still be quitting lots of games half way through when it's clear the AI model has already decided my team's morale is such that they will not be allowed to score.
I will be much happier when both EA and Konami realise that scripting mental aspects into the gameplay is utterly false and the very antithesis of gameplay. I have my own mind, I don't need it scripted.
I'll agree, that is really not desirable.
I am sort of for moral and such, but it needs to be designed in a way where it's not just a thing the AI can use when it wants you to loose.
First of all, it needs to be displayed quite clearly. ISS98 etc has morale in the form of a colored box in the substitution menu etc. If you got a few goals against you, the morale would drop (I don't know what effects it had, like certain stats dropping or such). But there you could at least see where it was at, and you could also sub in a player of certain qualities and immediately get a morale boost.
Plus, in the case of PES and FIFA, the players have Mentality stats of various designs. They don't seem to be used in this manner at all. PES' "mentality" stat has been said to make the player react to adversity. Bad mentalty = worse performance when under pressure, Good mentality = improved mentality when scored against.
If this does work as it should, at the very least I would like some graphical or visual cue to see what is happening. Like seeing just how the stats have changed in the formation screen.
I say this simply because I've often been ahead 1-0 against some crappy team, and the crappy team often finds some reservoir of strenght when they are down 1-0, whilst my players just seem to stop trying (in PES). If the mentality thing worked as it should, after 1-0 it should become even more effortless, since the crappy team has crappy players that shouldn't respond well to pressure, and I have an ML team that I've developed for 20 seasons and consists only of all-star players and stat monsters.