Re: Fifa 11
Speaking of keepers, I thought user controlled ones were supposed to be added in 10 but never happened. Man it would be hard controlling them and I personally don't think it's that great an idea unless it's not too hard (I tried it in NHL and it was solid). Are they ever going to add this option?
I've thought about it myself, but the control scheme would be hard to get right. If you make it too easy (one button for saving for example) it would get boring really quickly. But if you make it too controllable, doing reflex saves can be complicated if you have too many buttons to choose from.
Also the camera angle is important. Using the in-game camera (for example if you are playing 4 people on one console and one wants to be the goalie), would make it hard to position the goalkeeper and move him to save longshots. It is very easy to accidentally move the keeper a bit too much to the side, and once a longshot comes, your keeper can be hugging one of the posts rather than being positioned between them. You could use a button to autoposition the keeper, but that again takes away some control and perhaps makes it a bit boring.
Also online, if you play Virtual Pro, the latency alone in some of the matches would make goalkeeping a nightmare. You literally couldn't react quickly enough to any mildly surprising medium-range shot from a decent player.
Some games have tried the manual keeper approach before, and the ISS games worked well I suppose, but they used a one-button auto-save, so as long as you reacted quickly enough when pressing the key, you didn't need much else than decent positioning.
Though if I had to give my preference, I would use the right stick for diving or saving in various directions, and the triggers and bumpers for various modifiers (holding LT will give you a crouched alert-stance, hold LT+RT for sidestepping on the line, bumper buttons for additional behaviors, for example holding one bumper if you want the goalkeeper to parry or catch, etc). You could put even more specialized moves on the ABXY buttons aswell. The main thing for me is that if they go for manual goalkeepers, there should be alot of possibilities and little tricks to learn, but the basic saving could be done just with the right stick. Considering the downtime often associated with goalkeeping, I would like to be able to sit down in the goal and relax, lean against the post, hang from the bar, go to my water bottle and get a drink, you know, fun stuff like that to pass the time.
You could give the goalkeeper extended control of the defensive line so he shouts out commands, for example one press on any direction on the d-pad will have one intended function for the defensive line, push up, drop down, hold the line, or something like that (I'm not a goalkeeper so Dusse can most likely come up with alot more appropriate stuff

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