FIFA 14 News & Discussion Thread

Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

I appreciate that - but of those things, not a single one actually made the game more realistic or in-depth as a football sim. Maybe a bit more interesting as 'some game', but as a football sim it was no closer to the holy grail of a fun football sim. Some people may disagree, just as FIFA 13 + assisted + career mode was excellent for a lot more people. A lot of people go through life happy with mediocrity :)
 
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Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

I've been playing PES2013 for the last two weeks clocking up 78 hours so far, after playing PES and all it's glaring omissions, annoyances, glitches and general shoddy, amateur design and implementation I'll have quite a hard time thinking negatively about Fifa again, certainly I start to see more and more of the positives and be thankful for them when I know what the alternative is.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

The alternative is not playing a poor, mindless football game, whichever company has produced it. I play FIFA and PES very sporadically now, but I struggle to finish more than two or three games because while the first match might have the odd encouraging moment, the second and third remind you why you left last time. I'm far happier playing one of the many games in other genres that don't disappoint me so regularly - or doing something other than playing games at all - than lowering my standards just because I have to choose between two dire attempts at recreating a sport I love.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

Suuuuupertalk said:
I'm gonna get hammed for this but I tried my old copy of FIFA 11 the other day, and really enjoyed it. I prefer it over 12 and 13. Since 11, they've done something to the balance of the game that I really don't like. FIFA 11 feels far less open and end-to-end, play takes place more in midfield than the other two since. Granted, it's a bit more old school but you can't get the ball and double flick the right stick to run half the length of the pitch in 11, the balance for that sort of thing is just right. Maybe it's the introduction of sliders and the close control button, but even without using the sliders something doesn't feel quite right.

My hopes currently cannot be any lower for 14, I seriously do not like the direction they've taken the game. FIFA 13 was the worst game in the current gen line up, IMO. Hated it, sold it after a weekend. Just my opinion though :)
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What I miss about 11 is the very thing that people at that time complained about most, which was the defensive pressure. In 11 you got closed down so quickly by the AI and people asked (not without foundation, certainly) for it to be toned down. Unfortunately this exposed the slack positional play even further, and now we have something too open and unsatisfying.

Of the last five versions, I've enjoyed 09 and 11 the most. 10 I didn't like, and 12 and 13 have been quite unsatisfying. And whatever you do with the sliders, you still can't tighten it up enough.

I'm playing neither series at the moment, instead getting my digital football kicks from a long-running FM save, while crossing my fingers for what either might bring for 2014. If they can offer proper ball physics and intelligent positional play, I'm in.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

Still playing manual seasons and clubs mode also fully manual.

I think 13 has been great this year, just not sure what to do about 14. I won't be able to resist buying it before next gen, unless pes is really good.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

nerf said:
What I miss about 11 is the very thing that people at that time complained about most, which was the defensive pressure. In 11 you got closed down so quickly by the AI and people asked (not without foundation, certainly) for it to be toned down. Unfortunately this exposed the slack positional play even further, and now we have something too open and unsatisfying.

Of the last five versions, I've enjoyed 09 and 11 the most. 10 I didn't like, and 12 and 13 have been quite unsatisfying. And whatever you do with the sliders, you still can't tighten it up enough.

I'm playing neither series at the moment, instead getting my digital football kicks from a long-running FM save, while crossing my fingers for what either might bring for 2014. If they can offer proper ball physics and intelligent positional play, I'm in.
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I think you've hit the nail on the head there, it's the defensive pressure and somehow they ruined the balance after 11. As I mentioned, I hate how you can double flick the right stick and power into open space to the extent that you can run half the length of the pitch with someone fast. They just don't get that level of space in real life, or in FIFA pre-2012. I also think the ball physics in 11 are better, far less floaty and beach ball-like.

An no matter what I did with the sliders it seemed to make the game even more unbalanced.

My favourite FIFA this generation was undoubtedly the World Cup 2010 edition, loved it from the gameplay to the presentation. Going back to it now, it feels too fast, but at the time I absolutely loved it.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

romagnoli said:
A weekend is nowhere near enough time to judge a football game. It's not enough to judge a demo of a football game. Edit: though pushing yourself through a long period of time while hating the game isn't a particularly good idea to be fair.
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That fair enough, but in just a weekend I could tell I hated it. It was WAY too fast, the ball didn't feel right, my games I played just weren't enjoyable, even in one solid weekend in playing. If that was in the first few days, I doubt I'd have grown to like it. I just couldn't get over the speed of the game, felt like it was pelting along at a thousand miles an hour.

I also really disliked the visual look of the game. In bright sunshine, players had an outline around them like it was a cartoon or something. 11 looks much better IMO which shouldn't be the case.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

Placebo said:
I've been playing PES2013 for the last two weeks clocking up 78 hours so far, after playing PES and all it's glaring omissions, annoyances, glitches and general shoddy, amateur design and implementation I'll have quite a hard time thinking negatively about Fifa again, certainly I start to see more and more of the positives and be thankful for them when I know what the alternative is.
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This is not about Pes and ı am not a Pes fan in this gen.The thing makes me sad and crazy is the quality of Fifa before 13.They were all amazing games and EA tried to make their game as realistic as possible.But 13 is huge letdown in the series in every way.
 
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Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

is fifa 3 online, but is possible that faces in fifa 14


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Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

There's still a distinct lack of next gen footage. Disappointing but I'm still expecting this to be a great game of football.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

I really liked 13 on Placebo's sliders (thanks!) but still feel that the 'most important part' of football is broken - scoring goals.

Shooting just doesn't feel right to me. I'm almost 100% convinced the outcome of a shot is determined before you take it, and they just wrap the appropriate shooting and goalkeeping animations around that outcome. So sometimes you curl it towards the far post and the keeper moves a tiny bit and it goes in, and an identical time you curl it and the keeper moves at absolutely lightning speed and gets a hand to it.

And some matches against the CPU this turns into utter ridiculousness, when you appear literally unable to score from great chances - hit the pots 4/5 times in a 10 minute halves match, and only score from a reasonably unlikely long ranger.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

beachryan said:
I really liked 13 on Placebo's sliders (thanks!) but still feel that the 'most important part' of football is broken - scoring goals.

Shooting just doesn't feel right to me. I'm almost 100% convinced the outcome of a shot is determined before you take it, and they just wrap the appropriate shooting and goalkeeping animations around that outcome. So sometimes you curl it towards the far post and the keeper moves a tiny bit and it goes in, and an identical time you curl it and the keeper moves at absolutely lightning speed and gets a hand to it.

And some matches against the CPU this turns into utter ridiculousness, when you appear literally unable to score from great chances - hit the pots 4/5 times in a 10 minute halves match, and only score from a reasonably unlikely long ranger.
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I don't think I'd just limit it to scoring goals, I think it's about the ball in general. That it's not its own physical entity and is constantly being manipulated to go where the game decides it should go, rather than obey physics. Like it's magnetically attracted to players, goalposts and touchlines.

I'm convinced that if they freed the ball, it would be a significant step toward making the game feel more fresh, varied and unpredictable. Which is surely what we want.

A football is inflated, smooth, elusive, bouncy and unpredictable for a reason - it's the fundamental building block of the sport. The simulation should revel in that. But it frequently feels like the game goes out of its way to fudge and fabricate it at any opportunity, no matter what your controller settings are.

They say they have new shot physics for 14, but it remains to be seen whether that's genuine, or whether they're doing nothing more than just fudging a couple of extra trajectory styles when the game feels like it. My money's on the latter.
 
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Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

Where are you at currently with the development of next-gen FIFA?

We made a big deal about announcing EA Sports Ignite [at E3], which is sort of like EA Sports' answer to Frostbite and allows us to do numerous things around physics animation across FIFA, UFC, NBA and Madden. It allows our teams to be much closer together and share a lot, which means our architecture can stop worrying about base level technology and create better games.

We've got FIFA running at 60fps on Xbox One - right now. It runs to a level that is playable and fun already, and we're months away from releasing it. So we're exceptionally excited about having that base architecture to share and being able to actually show our fans the living worlds, 3D crowds and ball boys running off the pitch because it's a home game and their team is 1-0 down...

Our players now turn and move so much more realistically, based on a new Locomotion system. It feels so much more responsive and human-like... using new AI systems players can now anticipate collisions and move out of the way. We're so excited and our fans are going to love it. As football fans and gaming fans, it's our dream come true to be able to release and talk about this.

The only thing I would warn you against is when you go and play next-gen FIFA and go back to playing gen-3... you will notice it.

"WE ACTUALLY PUT TOGETHER THE SOFTWARE TOOLS TO ENHANCE [SKY'S] BROADCASTS. WE DID SOMETHING FOR THE INSTANT REPLAY TOOL THAT GARY NEVILLE USES... THAT'S THE FIFA GAME"

How crucial is it that EA invested in that new engine technology in preparation for the new consoles?

It's unbelievably crucial. A lot of us worked on that last console transition and... it didn't go well for EA. We decided to rewrite everything and it didn't go well - we played catch up for the first four or five years of the console cycle.

Now we have positive paranoia to a certain degree. When we rebuilt the FIFA engine from scratch about five years ago, we were thinking about building it off of a technology base that was broad enough that we could keep on building on it, rather than having to keep on throwing everything away.

It's been crucial and it's put us in a position where we've got the game playable right now. Part of the reason that the team pushed to get it running was because we wanted people to get their hands on it, give us feedback and allow us to tweak and tune. If we hadn't made that tech investment, we wouldn't be in that position now.

So the new FIFA clearly looks better, but how does it feel to play compared to current-gen?

It's not a fundamental difference in control and feel. The difference is in the atmosphere and the environment; having 3D crowds stand up and sit down based on the intensity of what's happening on the pitch brings you so much closer to the action... that immersion when you see the way the players react and anticipate the opposition.

We've added over a thousand new animations to the game. A lot of people don't realise this, but when you go up for a header in gen-3 FIFA... only two players ever go up for a header. In gen-4, there are now four or five players going up for a header at once.
You need to put that on the back of the box! You could call it 'Headering AI' as your feature buzz word.

(Laughs) That's my job!

Once you get in to it and start playing it, you start to understand that by having real, believable characters - going from robots to humans with intelligence - means that your responsiveness improves because of that. When a player goes from standing to defending or attacking... historically if we were aiming for responsiveness we'd actually cut animations out, but now with the Locomotion and physics you actually see the player lean down and burst into a sprint.

Does the new engine mean that you can now be more dynamic with your presentation? We noticed camera shots that were actually in the crowd, for example.

It does, and you'll see a lot of that over the next few months. We base it a lot on watching sports on TV and Sky Sports. With a lot of our instant replays historically we've asked, 'should we do what they do on TV, or do what TV would love to do?' And I think what we're going to end up with is a middle ground - use the TV cameras to set the scene, but then use the ability to get in close to show new angles that TV couldn't show.

What the new consoles allow us to do is remember key moments that happened during the 90 minutes, like a skill move, and actually start cutting them in to the instant replays as well. We've referred to the overall package as 'beyond broadcast' - it will give you what you sense from watching Sky at the moment, but it will also get you closer to places where the TV crews can't go.

In January we actually had one of our art guys spend two days with Sky at two different matches to get reference photos and understand how they shoot the match. It helped us understand not just the camera angles but why they were there, what perspective they were looking at, what parts of the action they were looking to capture and stuff. He brought all of that home.

We didn't realise your relationship with Sky went that far...

We refer to it as a 'technology partnership'. Via the Premier League we work with pretty much all of the clubs in England and broadcasters like Sky. We actually put together the software tools to enhance their broadcast. We did something for the instant replay tool that Gary Neville uses... that's the FIFA game. We actually developed that tool for them, but no money exchanged hands.

For the clubs... when people are playing our FIFA game, we know where they are around the world and we know their favourite team. So we can actually say to Manchester City for example, 'here's a spread of your fans around the world' and then they use that in their marketing campaigns.

We also use a lot of our game assets and create videos for most of the clubs. We've only been doing this for two years now but all of the clubs have a lot of interest. Manchester City use our game as a training tool for their youth team. Ole Gunnar Suskiar has gone on record as saying that he prepares for his matches by using FIFA, because the database is so accurate and he then knows which players to watch out for.

I think as we go in to the next generation of consoles our game is going to be even more intelligent and accurate, so the use that teams around the world will have for the game is going to be much more than gameplay, such as practice and education.

At the same time, with the huge amount of teams and players you have in the game, does that pose a challenge for your teams in terms of bringing the assets up to next-gen standard?

It creates unique challenges but we're about a year and half ahead of where we were during the last cycle, so we've taken some teams and captured them, plus developed new techniques that make that quicker and easier to do. That actually came from sharing something that the NBA team was able to do.

It's created challenges that our team has quickly overcome and we've found a scalable solution that we feel pretty good about. We may not get to the Nicaraguan third division any time soon, but certainly the Premier League, Bundesliga, the Italian clubs and the big teams in the world... we'll get them.

What about the number of stadiums in the next-gen version? Do you have ambitions to be more comprehensive than you have been in the past?

What we've actually done is develop all of the stadiums and art assets in the highest resolution, and then both generations can benefit from it. So if we design something based on the highest spec hardware, we can then downscale it to the lowest spec.

For example, a lot of the assets we currently use in FIFA we also use in our mobile game - they're just scaled down based on the resolution. A lot of clever people have come up with the ability and tech to do that which means that we're not throwing away assets but continuing to build on them.

How do you prioritise which stadiums you're going to add or teams you're going to scan for the next instalment?

There had been an issue of storage capacity [on current-gen]. What we're prioritising now is consumer demand and the favourite teams of the people who make the decisions... so Tottenham will be in there because I'm a Tottenham fan (laughs). I'm joking!

The biggest ones that everyone dreams about playing in such as the Nou Camp go to the top of the list. But it's all driven on fan feedback and that's something that the team prides itself on - we always listen to the fans. With this new technology there's also the opportunity to add more content over time. I think people will be pretty happy with who's going in.

http://www.computerandvideogames.co...iew-ea-sports-on-the-next-gen-fifa-challenge/
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

YouTube - FC Barcelona vs Santos AI Insanity of HG 4.6 patch

This is what I need. No sliders, nothing. Just make AI more aggressive/play to tactics and add more midfield play/time wasting.

This for me was the best FIFA had to offer. Ever.

2nd to that came RegularCat DB + AI edits and 3rd Erevos patch (only DB table edits).

Those small changes made HUGE impact on gameplay. Plus it was very rewarding experience.

I can not get the same feeling on FIFA 11 (consoles) and next iterations (12 & 13 consoles & PC).

They are lacking momentum, AI pressure, AI is too stagnant and sadly it plays to the same scheme (get ball on wings, cross).

Heh. EA PR is great, selling all bullsh*t as gold. They never will make fundamental changes to gameplay (which is not great imo), but will appeal to casual crowd (80% of people playing FIFA I would say?).

Hardcore gamers have it tough :(.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

romagnoli said:
The alternative is not playing a poor, mindless football game, whichever company has produced it. I play FIFA and PES very sporadically now, but I struggle to finish more than two or three games because while the first match might have the odd encouraging moment, the second and third remind you why you left last time. I'm far happier playing one of the many games in other genres that don't disappoint me so regularly - or doing something other than playing games at all - than lowering my standards just because I have to choose between two dire attempts at recreating a sport I love.
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Word. I used to play FIFA/PES year-round. Now I play FIFA barely into Spring and PES hardly at all. (Meanwhile, though I'm now very selective with what I play, games in other genres continued to impress me up to the end of this gen.)

Right now I'm just trying to be optimistic that more realistic player movement physics combined with next gen tech will give FIFA the upgrade that I need to remain interested in these games.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

Scutch said:
So we're exceptionally excited about having that base architecture to share and being able to actually show our fans the living worlds, 3D crowds and ball boys running off the pitch because it's a home game and their team is 1-0 down...
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Next gen baby.
 
Re: FIFA 14 - Game related talk only!

I think all those tiny little additions and bells and whistles actually sound awesome. They're not going to make the gameplay any better or worse, but they'll help me get lost in the game and buy into the feeling that im watching a live game. The highlights package at the end of games sounds like a nice touch... i just hope its better at selecting highlights than current gen. So many times i hit the bar or score or come close and at full time my replay is a cross that missed everyone and went off for a throw :(
 
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