Fifa 11 Xbox 360/PS3

glen said:
I am fairly confident its one team.

Why there is a difference is two fold. The first being that the WC game was engineered for a more "fun" experience. The second is that the code was probably "branched" and the things like chesting were added to the WC branch and not merged back in to the main FIFA Gameplay branch for technical or time reasons.

There may have been some resource allocated to supporting the WC game but they would of been working off the main trunk of code and then adding to their branch.
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To be fair I read there were two separate teams. I can't see how one dev team would have the time to make FIFA10 and the WC game within a few months of each other. I think it's always been this way, I never played it but people claimed the last Euro 2008 game was better than the FIFA games back then too. For whatever reason they just don't get to make the full, annual game.

I definitely think WC2010 is a lot better than FIFA11. It's more fluid, granted it has faster gameplay, but this can be slowed down by yourself anyways. I think there are far more varieties of goals from you and the AI, less pressing without making the game much easier than it is right now, and yeah, I prefer the graphics in WC2010 too. The atmosphere was brilliant, loved the cut scenes of players when the ball went out of play, loved the scenes showing the crowds and managers, the goal celebrations, and tiny details like how WC tournament matches have ticker tape all over the sides of the pitches, or how the England qualifiers begin with their old kit before having the option to change to their latest one after a certain period of time etc. The commentary was miles better, crowds seemed more dynamic, and the game simply allowed a greater scope for playing creatively and rewarded you for trying to score that 'perfect' goal.

For me, almost all of these things are absent in 11. If only they could port over the WC game, slow it down to 11 speeds, and retain all the minor details, match presentation of WC2010, then I'd be perfectly happy. In fact, I'd absolutely love the game.
 
There is one gameplay team.

There are 2 "modes" teams, Rutter was the producer for core FIFA and Simon was the producer for the WC game.

You wouldn't need 2 gameplay teams. Just like you wouldn't need 2 player moddling teams or 2 sound teams.

Basically Simon or Rutter would submit feature requests to the gameplay team. If it was a version specific change they would just change that version (in standard software development this would be things like adding x to V1.1 where as the current version is v2.0)

Again it wouldn't make sense to have 2 gameplay teams essentially duplicating the majority of eachothers work.

Remember EA is fairly "economical" in its development practices hence the shared Menu's for example.
 
They need a separate team purely for Career Mode because the job they've done the last two years in a row when they actually said they were improving on the mode has been fucking horrific.
 
Yeh actually I was quite annoyed with fifa 11. I had been playing WC2010. And was looking forward to fifa 11 being similar to WC2010 but with all the club teams.

But when I got the game it felt really different.

However I stuck with it becuase I want to do career mode and like club teams and mates play it online. SO I kinda quit wc2010 altogether but I think it is a better game and I dont know why but the gfx are more fluid and better. FIFA 11 looks more chunky and cartoony. Liek I think the players seem to be double the size in fifa 11 mayeb my imagnation?

How on earth they can go backwards is beyond me?
 
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Placebo said:
They need a separate team purely for Career Mode because the job they've done the last two years in a row when they actually said they were improving on the mode has been fucking horrific.
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Is there not a dedicated CM team? Simon is now in charge of the offline modes, and since CM is pretty much the only offline mode that requires much effort, sounds to me as if there is a CM team for all intents and purposes.

And considering the entire CM team was apparently made up of Marcel and only Marcel previously, EA should be applauded for doubling the size of the CM team by adding Simon!

Seriously though, CM over recent years reeks of not having the necessary resources and manpower to get the job done. Adding Simon is certainly a positive move IMO, but it's not enough unless Simon alone is good for an additional three or more features.
 
glen said:
There is one gameplay team.

There are 2 "modes" teams, Rutter was the producer for core FIFA and Simon was the producer for the WC game.

You wouldn't need 2 gameplay teams. Just like you wouldn't need 2 player moddling teams or 2 sound teams.

Basically Simon or Rutter would submit feature requests to the gameplay team. If it was a version specific change they would just change that version (in standard software development this would be things like adding x to V1.1 where as the current version is v2.0)

Again it wouldn't make sense to have 2 gameplay teams essentially duplicating the majority of eachothers work.

Remember EA is fairly "economical" in its development practices hence the shared Menu's for example.
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Fair enough. That does make a lot more sense. So would the producers then be directly responsible for the gameplay changes? Do they basically project manage or would the game be a result of THEIR creative input? If so, Humber does a much better job of that than Rutter. Though if Humber is in charge of the game modes and not core gameplay, then we'll probably be stuck with the way FIFA's been going the last few years.
 
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mfmaxpower said:
Is there not a dedicated CM team? Simon is now in charge of the offline modes, and since CM is pretty much the only offline mode that requires much effort, sounds to me as if there is a CM team for all intents and purposes.

And considering the entire CM team was apparently made up of Marcel and only Marcel previously, EA should be applauded for doubling the size of the CM team by adding Simon!

Seriously though, CM over recent years reeks of not having the necessary resources and manpower to get the job done. Adding Simon is certainly a positive move IMO, but it's not enough unless Simon alone is good for an additional three or more features.
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The issues as far as I can see is that improving / creating a proper new CM required financial investment they refused to give, it doesn't just need a Marcel adding or a Simon adding (IE producer/designers) but it especially needs funding in terms of programming hours committed to ensure that what is designed and planned is integrated properly, it shows that this especially was where it all fell down when feedback from the Q&A team following 10's release was that essentially they reported all the same bugs we found and listed on release, but they found them alpha and pre-beta, but the dev team refused to commit programming hours to fix them before release or even after. All this bullshit about patch limits, or number of update limits is just that bullshit, if they wanted to fix the bugs they'd have been fixed before release, all it would have took would have been the commitment of resources in terms of programming hours which obviously they decided was better spent elsewhere.
 
Agreed, and though EA seem to be the main culprits, this culture seems to have seeped into most games companies these days. I know someone who's been working on a very high profile game that's coming out relatively soon, and he himself has spotted a significant bug. He told the relevant people well in advance, told them he could fix it in isolation without altering any part of the rest of the game, yet bizarrely they've completely ignored his request to fix the bug. It's madness. Lazy, cost effective, typical of games right now.

However the problems EA have had with CM in the last couple of editions of the game are bizarre. It's not like they're creating some ultra complicated thing. There's nothing remotely original in the format of what they've been doing, heck, a decent career mode has been available in older versions of PES and FIFA going back to the days of PS2.
 
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LTFC said:
Agreed, and though EA seem to be the main culprits, this culture seems to have seeped into most games companies these days. I know someone who's been working on a very high profile game that's coming out relatively soon, and he himself has spotted a significant bug. He told the relevant people well in advance, told them he could fix it in isolation without altering any part of the rest of the game, yet bizarrely they've completely ignored his request to fix the bug. It's madness. Lazy, cost effective, typical of games right now.

However the problems EA have had with CM in the last couple of editions of the game are bizarre. It's not like they're creating some ultra complicated thing. There's nothing remotely original in the format of what they've been doing, heck, a decent career mode has been available in older versions of PES and FIFA going back to the days of PS2.
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Tell me it's not TW12.
 
Ha no it's not, can't really say but rest assured this sort of thing goes on all the time, especially when close to release.
 
Why does the midfield keep such a big gap between them and the defence when the opposition are deep in the final third?

http://www.ea.com/uk/football/images/ugc/70174204

http://www.ea.com/uk/football/images/ugc/70173645

And two pics showing how Scholes moves as Van Persie attacks:

http://www.ea.com/uk/football/images/ugc/70174496

http://www.ea.com/uk/football/images/ugc/70174523

This is a mixture of me vs CPU and CPU vs CPU, Utd playing a 4-2-3-1, with a DMF and a CMF. The DMF (Rodwell ;)) is on high defensive workrate and low attacking. Team mentality is neutral. I don't see what slider setting could affect this really, but I tried both wide and narrow defence settings to see if that affected compactness up and down the pitch as well.

This is something I remember Klash complaining about in the past - midfielders seem happy to leave the defence to it unless tracking a runner from deep. You can see in a couple of those pictures my midfield is actually stationary, content with being more than 10 yards from the defence who are left to fend with almost as many attackers. Defensive midfielders in a balanced formation would never stand (and I mean stand) that high up the pitch, nor should centre midfielders. It leaves such an enormous gap for the attack to do as they please, and means that if my defence does get caught out by a clever turn then there's nobody around who can even try and cover for him.
 
Width doesn't affect vertical compactness. I think if you lower Pressure and Mentality then the lines might play closer together.

Did your formation have any arrows?
 
The issues as far as I can see is that improving / creating a proper new CM required financial investment they refused to give, it doesn't just need a Marcel adding or a Simon adding (IE producer/designers) but it especially needs funding in terms of programming hours committed to ensure that what is designed and planned is integrated properly, it shows that this especially was where it all fell down when feedback from the Q&A team following 10's release was that essentially they reported all the same bugs we found and listed on release, but they found them alpha and pre-beta, but the dev team refused to commit programming hours to fix them before release or even after. All this bullshit about patch limits, or number of update limits is just that bullshit, if they wanted to fix the bugs they'd have been fixed before release, all it would have took would have been the commitment of resources in terms of programming hours which obviously they decided was better spent elsewhere.
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Can we get that on record? And send it to Watchdog/Consumer rights with a request for money back?! ;)
 
I'll look at pressure, but again that makes no sense. I wouldnt have expected arrows to just be on 24/7, the point of them is to indicate runs not change the permanent position.

I know you can lower mentality but that gap isn't indicative of a balanced formation at all. Midfield's do not leave a gap as utterly massive as that, especially when you have a DMF. They take the same sorts of lines if the opposition is on the edge of the box running at the defence. No effort to help out at all.
 
The FIFA team could maybe learn a thing or two about realistic momentum/inertia when players move around if they took a look at Top Spin 4. Imagine if the FIFA floating and physics defying movement was in that game, it would be the difference between arcady and realistic.
 
romagnoli said:
I know you can lower mentality but that gap isn't indicative of a balanced formation at all. Midfield's do not leave a gap as utterly massive as that, especially when you have a DMF. They take the same sorts of lines if the opposition is on the edge of the box running at the defence. No effort to help out at all.
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I'm not disagreeing, I think your point is valid... just exploring the issue.

romagnoli said:
I wouldnt have expected arrows to just be on 24/7, the point of them is to indicate runs not change the permanent position.
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I'm not so certain this is an accurate assumption. The description of arrows in-game is: "Use this to tweak your formation when attacking and defending". A defensive arrow cannot indicate a run, I think it adjusts their default position when defending. Put a defensive arrow on a midfielder and he will adopt positions slightly deeper than his fellow midfielders.

I haven't tried this since FIFA09, but in that game it was possible to position a CDM (very) deep, give him a backwards arrow, and he would essentially play as a centre-back when defending.

Here's an example of midfielder dropping between the lines, from a previous post:
nerf said:
young1l.jpg

Again, just wanted to point out Newcastle's two banks of four. The LM has dropped deeper in order to fulfill his responsibility of getting goal-side of Albrighton, who has just received a crossfield pass.

young2.jpg

Newcastle's RCM (substitute Tiote) has a backwards defensive arrow in their default formation, so he starts to drop into the space between the lines. RM Gosling tucks infield to get goal-side of the abandoned Delph. Tiote's naturally high defensive work-rate means he breaks into a run...

young3.jpg

...and so arrives on Carew as the ball does. Again, any static touch or forward touch means he loses the ball.
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In fairness, for such an instruction to be worthwhile, there does need to be a gap there for him to drop into. But I would agree that as a default gap for a Neutral mentality it does look wider than it ought to be.

I wonder what you'd see if you gave your DMF a backwards defence arrow? Might be worth a try to find out. I believe high work-rate just means that he'll sprint when chasing back, rather than affecting the positions he takes up. I also don't think that making him a CDM instead of CM will make him play any deeper (unless you drag his positional dot significantly deeper), it's more likely to mean that he just has less freedom to move into attacking positions off the ball.

In the bigger picture I think that these clean lines are more preferable to the horrendous run-anywhere-cluster-f**k that was FIFA10/WC... but that's not to say it's perfect.
 
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TikTikTikTikTik said:
Can we get that on record? And send it to Watchdog/Consumer rights with a request for money back?! ;)
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Unfortunately that's just how games dev works, it's all about managing constraints. There's a limited amount of manpower available and that is distributed for maximum return.

Games are increasingly more complex, which requires more man-hours to develop, which raises costs. It's an increasing trend these days that publishers will happily waive more and more bugs if it means they can hit that all-important street date and not damage their sales return. Everyone does it now. And because the increased complexity means there's probably more bugs to start with, it's a double whammy.

It's impossible to have sympathy for such corner-cutting when your behemoth is shipping 8 million copies, however... I think you can afford some extra man-power in those circumstances, no?
 
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And which is why I would be all for turning CM into a paid DLC. I'd rather pay an extra five or whatever to get a decent management mode, thus making my original investment worth it for me.

It should be fairly clear to everyone by now that EA have little interest in matching our expectations for an offline single player mode, so we might as well figure out how EA can turn a profit from CM. Hell, at this point I'm not so sure our best chances aren't that EA will just build a more robust single player experience into UT.
 
mfmaxpower said:
And which is why I would be all for turning CM into a paid DLC. I'd rather pay an extra five or whatever to get a decent management mode, thus making my original investment worth it for me.
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I already did, it was part of that £35 (or whatever it was) I handed over. Considering it's really the only mode I play, you could say I paid more than a fiver.
 
@nerf: I can definitely see that there is some fairly competent defensive tracking AI when there are runners from midfield, and provided my CB isnt running deep to play everyone onside (the Covering option is a write-off) then a midfielder tracking a run can end up playing the role quite well. But otherwise it can leave you utterly baffled when you look at it.

I guess I can see what you mean by work rate, I was kind of seeing it as mentality. As for the position arrows (the formation had nothing set btw) it probably does improve things, but at the same time it's the fundamental job of a defensive midfielder to protect his defence - leaving Nasri to muck about with the defence like that is bizarre. It's unnecessary micromanagement to have to tell a DMF how to play as a DMF. Like having to set a left or right arrow to tell a keeper to save shots!

Pressure made no impact. Ultra defensive seemed to improve things to an extent, which is probably why a lot of people online use it by default.
 
From my friends' experiences working in the industry, I actually really feel sorry for the game developers. They're basically gamers themselves, and just want to make as best a game as they can. But it's the publishers at fault, I've heard some crazy shit a out how they treat dev teams, from refusing to allow time to fix bugs, ordering the complete alteration of plots and in-game features, right down to cancelling months and months of dev work after it's been completed. As costs and manpower rise, so publishers seem less willing to release a decent product.
 
I'm sure i read somewhere that publishers can make devs work as long as they want them to because they're under time constraints (which i guess can almost definitely lead to lack of caring if they're forcing them to work for too long continuously)
 
Yeah that's correct. Referring to my friends again, they will work long weeks on a certain part of the project for months, only for the publishers to announce to them that the work they've been doing for months has been cancelled, and that they have 2 weeks to re-do parts of the game, meaning people work from 9am to midnight, and no weekends, all in the knowledge that some really good work has all gone to waste. It's crazy.

Acutally, speaking of that, didn't some leak come out of EA a few years back from the wives of the developers complaining about how EA were treating their staff? I'm pretty sure it'll be around if you google it. Makes you think what goes on with FIFA, especially given that this game comes out every 12 months. If publishers pull the kind of stunts that I've mentioned on games that take 2 years or more to make, imagine the pressure on developers for an annual title. That reinforces my belief that to get a really top quality football game again, EA and Konami should rease a title every 2 years, with some added DLC in-between that updates kits and rosters. Of course money talks and that will literally never, ever happen. But if you imagine that other top games, like, say, the Drake's Fortune series, come out at nearly 2 years per development, then it shows the quality that can be had if game companies take their time.
 
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The difference at EA is that they are both publisher and developer.

They will have "crunch time" like every other software company but with a title like FIFA that is annual they will be better at smoothing the work flow.

If you google EA Spouse you will see the article you mention that also lead to a successful Class Action lawsuit.

Generally I think we are seeing a drop in quality in all the titles recently (last 3 years), Heavy Rain was awful at launch when it suffered from really bad stuttering that had to be patched out (at launch). Obviously the team knew there was a problem but had to make the certification deadline for launch.

I have several friend who are games designers/developers and it unfortunately seems to be the nature of the beast that they struggle to catch or fix all of the bugs.
 
nerf said:
I already did, it was part of that £35 (or whatever it was) I handed over. Considering it's really the only mode I play, you could say I paid more than a fiver.
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Oh, c'mon now, you know what I mean. Besides, we're in the same boat, you and I, and at some point you've got to admit that your boat is sinking quicker than you can row, lay down your oars, and figure out how to plug the holes. (I'm not sure whether that metaphor fits but I'm going to run with it.)

If you consider MM/CM's development over the last several years, there's every indication that what Placebo wrote is the logic driving development: EA have crunched the numbers and aren't interested in committing the necessary resources to create a quality management mode; with the popularity of online gaming, not to mention the revenue generated by UT, the reward is just not worth the cost of sinking resources into CM.

All I'm saying is that if we look at the cold-hard reality of gaming today, DLC might be our best hope if we wish to ever play a quality, deep, full-featured management mode in FIFA.

Clearly EA is not seeing a proper incentive to invest in CM like we'd like them to. Clearly they do not fear the loss of our business - obviously they must figure gamers like you and me are merely a drop in the bucket of FIFA's fanbase; that their bread and butter are the kids playing online and UT. It's basically the Pareto principle.

Though some consider it to be total bullshit that companies are releasing paid-DLC the same day as release, we're now entering into a new era of gaming, one in which DLC makes up content that once might have been expected to be included in the full release. Maybe CM now falls into this category.

Gaming used to based on the single player experience, because that was the primary mode of play. Thus a deep and satisfying single player experience was necessary. Times have changed and that's no longer the case.

I don't like this. At the same time, out of the last half-dozen games I've purchased, I've actually spent the least amount of money playing FIFA (I don't buy packs in UT) than any other game, despite having spent countless more hours playing FIFA. For other games, I've spent money on map packs, gear, and story-based DLC. In the new reality of gaming, I've actually earned my money's worth from FIFA far better - FAR better - than any other game out there. Even if I drop an additional 5 on some form of CM-based DLC, the value of FIFA in an hours-played cost analysis still would out-perform other games by a massive margin.

In the end, considering how many hours I spend on FIFA, I am okay paying a little more for an improved experience. And even if I wasn't okay with having to pay more for what once was considered standard, it might just be time to face reality. And if the new reality is that EA simply do not see the required incentive to invest adequately in CM's development, because it no longer considers the single player experience the foundation of its business model, then maybe it's time to help them find a new incentive to improve the offline single player experience for those of us who still base our gaming around it.
 
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Nick Cave said:
I guess we keep praying as we do every year that Konami bring out a product that can hit EA in the only place they seem to care about.. Sales...
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As I said before the hardcore curve must be challenged again. The hardcore are still dormant in the animation matrix of FIFA. Only if KONAMI brings pes to the lever of physics and animations of FIFA the hardcore will start to shift the casual masses back to pes.
 
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