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Fifa 11 Xbox 360/PS3

It's almost like the screwed up the Forums on purpose due to the overwhelming amount of negativity on them! Conspiracy? EA scared to face the music?

It's been like this for almost 3 days now with no information on why the forums have crashed! EA Sports can't get anything right atm!
 
I preferred the audio in FIFA09 to 10 and 11. The crowds really differed depending on if you were home or away. Score a goal away from home, and the celebrating crowd really sounded like the noise coming from a small section of away fans in an otherwise quiet stadium. The crowds also had a more 'real' sounding atmosphere to them, in terms of volume and context.

I think that authentic chants need to be given way at least in some part to more context sensitive crowds. That would make the game feel far more immersive and realistic. For example booing when the ref gives a decision against you and you're at home, home crowds trying to put off an opposition penalty taker, more excited crowd celebrations if you score at the end of the game, applause when someone tackles back, makes a good pass etc, excited, urgent sounding shouts of encouragement from the crowd when you've put on some decent pressure on the opposition.

To me this is more important than hearing Man Utd chant 'Rooney'. However, if games continue to go down the custom audio route then I can't see this happening. Don't get me wrong, custom audio is great, but I still can't shake the feeling that by adding extra audio, I'm doing the developer's job for them.
 
Absolutely agree that a crowd that reacts to the play, that seems to be watching what you're watching, that feels like a stadium of fans kicking and heading every ball rather than just chanting at random, would be an absolute revelation for football games. I do think it ties in with how easy the gameplay itself is though - it'd feel a lot better to be applauded for a good long pass or a good piece of interplay if that was an achievement in the first place...!
 
It's amazingly far off at the moment. I guess the problem is probably just in how the crowds are handled. A goal is scored - start this sound. Winning 3-0 - start this sound. That's oversimplified but not by much.

Whereas, I think it's better to think of a crowd as a symphony. It needs to be composed by some artificial intelligence - it has a general theme, the winning team, the home team, will tend to dictate the sounds - but when one team gets on a break their crowd will pick up the sound immediately... when a player makes a mistake he can be jeered, or booed.

They should look to mimic something like Left 4 Dead's procedurally generated soundtrack. Currently I feel that the chants themselves aren't the problem - it's the general noise levels and pitch of the crowd which just isn't dictated by the tempo or happenings on the pitch bar the goals.
 
Absolutely. But at the same time what we all want starts to move towards needing a more complex audio system which will need CPU time that I doubt EA will wangle out of a multiplatform setup. My fear at the moment (purely personal, not based on any secret knowledge) is that these things like AI and audio intelligence may not have a chance to materialise as we want until the next gen - and if it doesn't appear in the first iteration or two there, then it may be hard to get EA to put the focus in then.
 
I'd love to know what you guys think about the commentary. Does it add anything to the game at all for you?

Personally I turn it off within the first week of play. Perhaps it isn't needed at all? God knows the resource it uses would be better spent elsewhere.
 
I now have it on after years of automatically turning it off. it's as repetitive as hell, especially with any side outside the top leagues but I set it as more of background noise to add to the game and poor match audio...
 
I do have commentary on. I don't think it is awful - it has bad spells but it has plenty of good moments too, particularly if you play with a wide spread of teams - and I do think it at least takes the edge off of the bad crowds.

A mate of mine said there was a very interesting read somewhere about the future of sports commentary AI in games. I can't find it at all but I imagine it is going to be much as Rod suggests, an overarching storytelling AI that would be given loads of shorter, nonspecific lines to tie to specific players at the right time, rather than fixating on bulldog-like approaches or holding minute-long after dinner speeches about Liverpool's history.
 
The repetition gets to me a bit, but the commentary always feels so lifeless to me. It sounds exactly what it is - 2 guys reading from a sheet of lines given to them in a sound booth somewhere.

It would help things a bit if they got genuinely excited when someone scores, or if you have a shot that whistles past the post etc. As it stands right now the ball might get cleared off the line from a corner and Andy Gray will tell you that it was a real waste of an opportunity - how is that contextually accurate?

Also, while I don't want to seem hyper critical of any attempt to add variety but I really don't know what value there is to talk about club histories etc. What I'd prefer is some emotion in the commentary.

Going back to the above point, the key to creating a good basis for the commentary in my opinon would be to ensure that there is emotion in the commentary. If Gray/Tyler just speak the lines without any of the emotion they put in when commentating on a match in real life it'll never add anything to the game.

*edit - just saw Rom's post which came in while I was writing this one*

Definitely takes the edge off the crowds, but if I'm honest I have the volume down quite low these days so it is audible but it's not at regular volume, especially if I've got my headset on. If either added much to the atmosphere I'd definitely have the volume turned right up!

It would be brilliant if the crowds did react as suggested above, is it beyond the current computational limits of the current gen? I have no idea, i'm no techie and if it is then we have at least a 5 year wait to find out if the next gen can handle it. :(

Riche
 
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Depends if people have already allowed or planned for it. I'm sure EA said there was a new AI logic to the commentary, this year or last.

I felt Tyldesley did quite well in the WC game - he gave it some for a lot of the phrases. Certainly for FIFA I agree though about the emotions being flat. I also think that what the commentators say for goals is a bit pap. They always launch into some overly wordy soundbite, rather than doing what they typically do (in the UK) - shouting something like '2-0!....' and using that pause and the sound of the crowd to think of something emphatic and snappy to say.

There are a lot of little things like that, but to be honest I think a lot of it may possibly be hampered by the French logic being the same as the Mexican and the English and German logic. I don't see EA working on so many separate commentary systems at once. I may be wrong though.
 
The logic may need a little tweaking, on occasion they would be mid waffle about some club footnote and the commentary team would almost completely ignore the fact I've hit the post/forced a great save etc. I can't give a more specific example though as the commentary has been off for months.

Great point about the work involved, in my ignorance I completely forgot the game was multi-lingual and as such work on commentary logic is more complex than it appears. /foolish

In another admission, I never played the WC game. I just felt it was unfair to charge £40.00 for it and never got around to trying it before FIFA 11 was out. It sounds however like they should use the same ethos and attempt to get the most out of the commentary team for FIFA 12.

Whether this goes against the grain or not I don't know but I think they should boil the commentary down in the first instance into simple but emotive phrases "So Close, Great Save, off the bar etc" - all the usual clichés and concentrate on making sure those work in the right situations, just like you've said above really - you score, Tyler chips in with 1-0, 1-1 etc and then Gray pops up with a comment on the goal.

I suppose the difficulty really for varying commentary comes because the CPU isn't 'rating' your goal, or how bad a foul is etc so it can only give a stock response. There is no distincation between a 30 yard belter or a 2 yard tap in. A goal is essential just a goal, a foul a foul, a save just a save. I guess that is why they sometimes have difficulty. One phrase which made me laugh - forgive the poor recollection but I think Andy Gray says something about almost putting one over the bar, laughably this will also occur if you roll one into the net along the floor?

How would the CPU determine the difference between a good goal and a poor goal or a bad foul and a situation like yesterday in the Man U v Sp*rs match when Andy Gray was pretty much berating the referee for sending off Rafael? Without some kind of system it's hard to see how the commentary system will ever be more than stock phrases and wordy soundbites, even if it should and could be more emotive.
 
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groovemaster said:
I'd love to know what you guys think about the commentary. Does it add anything to the game at all for you?

Personally I turn it off within the first week of play. Perhaps it isn't needed at all? God knows the resource it uses would be better spent elsewhere.
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I Switch to the Spanish one, then french, then well whatever, i just keep changing the language :)

At Least FIFA has a solid commentary and sound system, PES's one is pretty dire and always has been! Especially the well, broken commentary!

I agree there needs to be some AI developments in regards to it! So the crowd would follow the action more and not just randomly chant. There's been some very good posts here on the subject which i agree with! Then again there are more important things for EA to worry about! :))
 
I always have the commentary on, even though I know everything by heart and often say Andy's lines before he does I feel it adds so much more to the atmosphere to make it seem like a match you're watching on Sky.
 
I had the commentary on when I played FIFA 11 (kind of stopped now), but, controlling Man Utd, I had to actually drop Rio Ferdinand because I was being driven crazy by the commentator saying "the challenge by Rio Ferdinand a strong one" every time he made any kind of challenge. I'd have thought EA would have learnt not to do this after FIFA10's "Tevez, with his bulldog like approach" which again happened almost every time he touched the ball.

I don't think putting context sensitive crowd noises are that difficult to be honest, you just need the same staple sounds for every team (okay, they'd need to vary depending on the nationality of the club teams for example - Serie A crowds would sound different to Premier League), but games could at least make a start by having certain specific events trigger specific crowd noises.

Like I said before, it can't be that hard for a game to calculate that. For example,

(a) you are the home team + (b) the away team have a penalty = (c) trigger the crowd booing the penalty taker to put him off.

or (a) a team scores a goal + (b) it's the final five minutes of the game + (c) the scorers either equalise or take the lead = (d) the crowd have a specific wild celebration to imitate them thinking they've just stolen the match/saved the game from defeat.

If the game can sometimes trigger a celebration at the end when you are losing and score near the end of a game, whereby it shows the player running and picking the ball out of the net before carrying it back to the centre spot, then surely it can do this with audio, even on an initially limited basis? Somehow FIFA09 made a better job of this, presumably because it didn't seem to overly concentrate on making the audio authentic by including player specific chants. They're a waste of time in my opinion. What use is the game having a Drogba chant, because if you then sell him or he gets injured in your career mode, or if Drogba were to move clubs in real life, then either the game can't use that chant any more or it sticks out like a sore thumb because Drogba's no longer in the team but the chant is being sung anyways. All you then have is poor general audio and a chant that used up valuable sound design time, that isn't even being used in the game.
 
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Fuck this game.
I didn't play it for about a month or two, and just picked it up again. Now I realize why I stopped though, it's just fucking back and forth over and fucking over again. I can string together some nice passing, make some space then BAM someone fucking flies through me to take the ball. Then on my end I just get near them and the defender automatically pokes the fucking ball away.
I don't know if I can play this shit anymore.
 
"I think we did a great job with the Personality Plus feature [in FIFA 11]," he said
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I think you did the bare minimum on a feature that should have arrived years ago, not 'a great job'.
 
Quoted from that article;

"Those moments where you take one [player] tp his old club and the boo boys come out, or his old team are more aggressive in the tackle towards him. SO you think: 'Wow! FIFA understands not just the game of football, but the sport and passion behind it'."

What a load of bollocks. EA said pretty much the exact same last year. We all know what will happen. Extra features that are more gimmicks than real game enhancements, broken game modes all followed up by a lack of communication to their customers and a patch that will fix barely 10% of the game's bugs. It's happened for two years in a row now. EA are yet again championing features that will make the game feel more 'authentic' in the incredibly short term only. At the moment, FIFA's empty nature is created from problems with the gameplay, and this can't be solved by little gimmicks. And the feature suggested in that quote above, I can already predict, won't work. People either won't see any difference, or they'll be some kind of development problem that is never fixed. I don't want gimmicks. All I want is solid gameplay and actual game modes that work as they are advertised on the back of the box. After the last two FIFA games (and the World Cup game that played well but was bugged all over the place), EA clearly cannot provide that, yet somehow get away with it.

Guaranteed; for all the game's new gimmicks and add ons, many new features will suffer from bugs and problems. Game modes will suffer from bugs and problems. And the core gameplay will still suffer from relentless superman defenders, the ability to make every player sprint non-stop for 90 minutes with absolutely no consequence to the gameplay whatsoever, predictable AI and broken online modes. EA will be everyone's best friend on the forums, playtests, roadshows, then once the game is out and people line up outside their door with massive programming bugs, they'll have buggered off once more.

This might be very negative but that's just my reaction to seeing EA utterly fail to provide any support to their customers by failing to fix main game modes in FIFA11, then fall silent on the subject, now they creep out of the woodwork with more bullshit lies to start the FIFA12 hype machine. It's so infuriating. Unless something amazing happens with this game, it's getting a wide berth from me. I'm currently stuck with a game that's broken, I can't sell it for hardly anything because of that EA pass key being used, and no incentive to play. I want to play the Career Mode, but can't be bothered because there are such huge, massive flaws. What's the point in taking over Arsenal, say, if the likes of Wilshere will never, ever improve? Or what's the point when half of the game's famous players can never be bought because of a bug whereby they'll never leave their club they signed for this summer?

This quote about the game recognizing that you're playing against old team mates/clubs is total rubbish. I remember the whole press thing they gave out about how their World Cup game's core gameplay would be dependent on where in the world you were playing, and the altitude at pitch level drastically altering stamina levels, meaning if England were to play Peru in South America, you'd need to adopt very different tactics than if you were playing at Wembley. This was given as a major selling point of the game. In reality, altitude made no difference to gameplay at all. Likewise, but on a lesser note in FIFA11, personality plus is barely noticeable. The only difference between players are the ability to dribble and turn at high speed, or jump and win headers. That's literally the only difference. Xavi, therefore, feels exactly like almost everyone else in the game, because EA's engine is only just trying to make Peter Crouch feel different than Leo Messi. Anything in-between is ignored.
 
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Frankly, at this point I think most hardcore gamers are just praying that PES's revival continues - because the case with FIFA has become a simple: Everything we do is completely overridden by the idiocy of someone else.

Nothing wrong with what is said in the article in terms of improvement: set pieces need a total overhaul and it sounds like interrupts midgame may be on the out - in both cases that's great news. As for their statements about how good FIFA 11 is... pfft. Don't get me started.

If Personality+ is the finished product in terms of individual personality, we might as well slit our throats. I want to stay faithful and I want EA to make a great game - but it's harder to believe moment by moment. They seem to no longer care about feedback - they seem to no longer care about us. What is left? All I keep asking myself is this: is there anything else I/we can do, or are we completely screwed?
 
I genuinely can't see anything in Personality+. There is still almost no difference, for me, between most players except dribblers and target men/big centre backs. The rest all act, feel, and even look the same in terms of motion and attributes.

I don't mind games companies releasing details of what improvements are being made, but it just seems really odd that one of the very first announcements is EA enthusing over improving set-pieces. Not when the current game is full of problems, both in terms of gameplay and offline/online modes simply not working properly. That's not to mention micro pausing for a lot of people, something that will never be fixed. Set pieces are the last thing I'd be looking at if I were making FIFA12. Now of course EA aren't going to come out and say "good news, this year's game modes aren't broken", and I'm sure that new CM features will be released in time, but core gameplay problems like stamina, sprinting, rampant herds of AI defenders, second man press, the ease for both teams to tackle resulting in what looks more like rugby league than football, the lack of decent AI in terms of keeping possession, or attacking for example desperately need changing. For EA to ignore all their customers frustrated with the gameplay, and totally blanking all those customers whose games are totally broken, then expect us all to get excited because set pieces are being improved, well it all feels like EA are taking the piss.

Simply put, I don't see a reason why anyone should trust a single word EA say. Not even when they announce new game features. I simply now refuse to even think that they will work properly. I'm not being pessimistic, just going on the last three copies of their game that I bought. That's roughly £120 spent on three titles that had major bugs and absolutely no proper support in terms of decent patches etc.

I'm not going to turn this into a PES vs FIFA debate because it's not the forum to do so, but I love how EA have the balls to sell their current game on features that have been in PES for years, without so much as a peep from them. Things like player individuality, even down to being able to save a replay to your hd and customising audio. Customising audio was another major feature EA were peddling this year, and that even had glitches.

I too hope PES continues to go down the right road, it's far more fun (for me at least), far more realistic, game modes work, and patches released actually seem to have fixed things. PES has at times annoyed the crap out of me this year, but at least I know I won't get a broken product. FIFA has left me with literally nothing to do but play friendlies. Online is a mess. Career Mode is a mess. Virtual Pro is a total mess (unless you like sprinting all over the pitch in an effort to win the game on your own because the AI can't replicate a decent match). And I haven't even had the last patch screw up my game because of micro pausing.....
 
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It's obligatory "we're awesome but working to be awesomer" PR fluff. I don't think you can read too much into it.

It is depressing though. The forums are a complete waste of time; the feedback forum doesn't seem like it is coming back as things stand, and the GC's are getting next to no input from EA besides one or two questions a few weeks ago about audio or whether one or two VP accomplishments were too hard/too easy.

I knew the most depressing day of the year was this month, but I thought it had been and gone.
 
I think gamers like me, who don't enjoy quick arcade thrills but rather appreciate games based on their depth, attention to detail and realism, can wave goodbye to the FIFA franchise for a while.

It's clear where EA are heading and who their intended audience is, and it most certainly is not football purists. No effort is even made to accomodate for people looking for a simulation...

Agree with LTFC about EA's marketing and how it's sad that their main additions/improvements that they kept banging on about in the build-up to FIFA 11 were Personality+ and Pro Passing (both of which were screw-ups in the actual product).
What the hell? That's like the devs of a racing franchise coming out and saying "This year we've added exciting new features such as steering and braking!"
How obvious can it be that in a football game, passes should go astray, and that players should have very apparent strengths and weaknesses, yet EA hardly seem to grasp that!

Undoubtedly for FIFA 12 they will harp on about how new "additions" that should have been fundamentals of any decent football game, and then fail to execute them in their implementation...
 
It's simple, I won't buy Fifa12 this year, unless it completely changes its current focus on the sport. They won't, so I won't buy it. Rodelero asked what can we do, and that's it: don't buy it and buy the other footy game if it turns out any good.

If PES does another big jump in technical quality, purists will have a good option there. If not, it's better to play something else before giving money to Ea again until they deliver.
 
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One simple request for fifa12:

PLEASE PUT SEPARATE ONLINE RANKED MANUAL HEAD TO HEAD MATCHES. We dont want to search for hours someone to play manual ranked head to head...We need a quick ranked manual match option...

And why not buy fifa12? Why to complete change something very good? Manual/Slow fifa11 is a very addictive and realistic game. All it needs is some little touches here and there. And thats what fifa12 is all about...
 
I would also need a separate onlike ranking for full manual players who don't use secondary pression, don't abuse lobbed passes and don't use tackling like a maniac in the midfield...
 
Been a while since i've peeked into this forum. I think almost every single Evo-web player is in the same boat - FIFA releases have become tales of broken promises. Credit to Rutter, he talks a great game, but keeps releasing the same broken one. And keeps getting great reviews, and loads of cash.

Until we stop buying it, the same'll happen. I have some hope for a PES comeback, but not loads. For whatever reason, game makers don't seem to be able to capture football on this generation of consoles in a way that is both fun and realistic. Sad really.

When you look at the evolution of the NBA 2KXX series, it's just staggering how buggy and amateur Konami/ EA's football efforts are. Moreso when you think of hte global fan base of each sport.

Anyway, at least they'll have a full year of production this time.
 
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