After playing quite a few games of FIFA 09 I've decided to perhaps buy it for a spin when it gets released. Or maybe after my A Levels are over, hurr. It just feels more... organic? Dynamic? It's a little of the pitch-to-player ratio, the animations, the movements, the right-stick control all together. Admittedly the graphics (from what I've seen on the demo) aren't as sharp with my current PC as PES08 is, but I can forgive that. The game is indeed very deep, and goals are harder to come by than in PES, I'd say, having played ever since PES3/4 came out on the PC.
Edit: Just saw jonneymendoza's post. Um you do understand that people with "gaming" PCs only constitute a small percentage of the market for FIFA09? So "ALOT" of "gaming" PCs means very little in numerical terms when you look at the PC gaming market on the whole. Also, even if graphics are scalable to configuration, again it must be emphasised that the AI cannot. Having looked at how the AI of the console versions work I have no problem believing that each player on the pitch has to make 1000 decisions per second, and that's not counting the physics engine which takes into account what's on, for example,
http://www.soccerballworld.com/Physics.htm . Now, think about it for a moment. If even "gaming-class" PCs now require PhysX(either through the Ageia card or through CUDA on ATI/Nvidia cards) acceleration for improved physics AND cannot do it through the processor, what makes you think FIFA09 on the console will work for "gaming" PCs?
I understand you've some programming knowledge, but games nowadays are all about economics as well, and the more accessible the product, the more money you make, especially when it comes to games. FIFA09 is not just competing with PES09 on the PC, it's competing with casual games too like Bejeweled (which is still insanely popular) and Peggle and whatnot, all of which have really low system requirements. Low being a generation or two back in terms of processors and graphics cards, maybe even RAM. Go out a bit and you'll realise that most PCs aren't even equipped with last-generation CPUs, let alone Core 2 Duo or quad cores.
Also, sigh, you need to understand that World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2 and even Call of Duty 4 are all popular because they feature an important thing: advancement. Also, they are played by single persons controlling single characters. This kind of interaction is significantly more difficult when it comes to a game of football, because the mechanics to make things work will be at least 11^11 times more complicated. It's about teamwork restricted to a current team, and people will have different preferences in different roles; attacking fullbacks vs defensive fullbacks, defensive central midfielders vs holding vs attacking ones. Each position on the pitch presents almost unlimited permutations, and since you're a programmer I'm sure you can calculate what (and this is just a minimum estimate) 11 players^11 x 11 different positions^11 x virtually infinitesimal playing styles comes to. Team dynamics, etc have to work just right to produce a good team.
Even if you're talking about just 1 player controlling each team, football is still too limited in terms of online gaming due to the nature of football itself. Featuring 'level up's and 'bonus abilities' will only unbalance the game or make it less realistic, apart from the whole thing being highly time-consuming while repeating the same things.
So yeah, hope you get the points finally, whew that was a pretty long post.
