The Retro FIFA Discussion Thread (All FIFA games by EA are welcome!)

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i've made a compilation of every single star celebration in the FIFA PS2 era (starting from FIFA 2004), feel free to watch
 
Hey guys...i m searching everywhere to find an editor for FIFA RTWC98 but no luck so far....can anyone help pls?
 
Sami 1999 said:
Decided to just buy a Xbox 360 to play RTWC 06 and World Cup 2006 since there hasn't been any progress on emulation for these two games.

Finally playing the next gen version I wanted to play since childhood. It just took me 17 years.
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Think it's the only way, how did it feel replaying it? Did it hold up well or did you find it lost its appeal after a few games?
Sami 1999 said:
World Cup 2006, FIFA 07 and UCL 06-07:
Art style for the first few fifa games on xbox 360 were pretty good, the later games looked progressively worse in comparison.
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It's really interesting how in one fell swoop we go from UCL 07 having great resolution, vivid colours and nice shaders to looking bizzare and washed out a few months later with FIFA 08.
 
Marlon Anthony said:
Think it's the only way, how did it feel replaying it? Did it hold up well or did you find it lost its appeal after a few games?

It's really interesting how in one fell swoop we go from UCL 07 having great resolution, vivid colours and nice shaders to looking bizzare and washed out a few months later with FIFA 08.
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World cup 06 is really holding up well. It's definitely an arcade game and no way feels realistic, but I was enjoying it more than later games. RTWC 06 is an unfinished game, it's still enjoyable but there isn't much to do, so I play that from time to time but not always.

FIFA 08 graphics is alright, the way the player models are lit kinda looks realistic, grass colors also look more realistic compared to 07. However, the lighting on fifa 07 definitely had more stylistic look and I kinda prefer that. Fifa 07-10 barely has any cutscene that you don't really see much of the graphics anyway and as a result also starts to feel boring pretty quick. You miss your shot, or get offside, get a corner and there are no cutscenes at all. So you don't feel any of the atmosphere in those games.
 
Managed to mod the cloth wrinkle files of FIFA World Cup 2014 on xbox 360.


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Looks so much better this way compared to the default cloth wrinkles.


I've also noticed another error on EA's end. I remember FIFA 14's demo looking better than the retail release of the game. The first reason was the cloth wrinkle normal maps. However, importing cloth wrinkles from the demo on the final build still did not look good enough. Reason for this is on the final build, the wrinkle shader intensity on the shirts have been significantly reduced. However the shorts still have the same shader intensity from the demo. This results in the wrinkles being barely visible on shirts.

This issue has not been fixed ever since on rest of the sequels [all the way upto fifa 19 legacy edition unfortunately] which seems baffling.
As expected, this carried over on 2014 world cup as well. However, it seems like only on night matches the cloth wrinkle intensity on shirts is correct and as a result, the jerseys look so much better on night matches compared to day and dusk, you can see that by looking at gameplay footage on youtube. I will try to take some screenshots and post it here for comparison if I get time.



Speaking of modding 2014 world cup, while I managed to replace some of the graphic files, I was unable to open the db files unfortunately. The db files refused to open via creation master 14, db master 14 and even cg file explorer 16. Would be nice if we can modify the db files, cause it will be possible to add new players in the game that way.
 
Sami 1999 said:
World cup 06 is really holding up well. It's definitely an arcade game and no way feels realistic, but I was enjoying it more than later games. RTWC 06 is an unfinished game, it's still enjoyable but there isn't much to do, so I play that from time to time but not always.
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Yeah you can't go into that PS2 to next gen transitional engine expecting a satisfying sim. They were very pretty to look at artistically and stylistcally. RTWC 06 was the first time they made a significant effort in the broadcast presentation standpoint and didn't return to it until FIFA 14 NG
Sami 1999 said:
FIFA 08 graphics is alright, the way the player models are lit kinda looks realistic, grass colors also look more realistic compared to 07. However, the lighting on fifa 07 definitely had more stylistic look and I kinda prefer that. Fifa 07-10 barely has any cutscene that you don't really see much of the graphics anyway and as a result also starts to feel boring pretty quick. You miss your shot, or get offside, get a corner and there are no cutscenes at all. So you don't feel any of the atmosphere in those games.
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Replaying 08-12 the cutscense drive me insane, especially the substituion ones where the camera pans the stadium while it's laoding the new player model. You can't skip them and the AI would never doa double substitution, it would do one back to back so if the ball goes out of play 3 times in the space of 40 seconds, your'e forced to suffer this painstaking delays.

Nowadays I wish football games gave you the option to switch off all cutscenes unless it's a replay of a goal or a shot.
Sami 1999 said:
I've also noticed another error on EA's end. I remember FIFA 14's demo looking better than the retail release of the game. The first reason was the cloth wrinkle normal maps. However, importing cloth wrinkles from the demo on the final build still did not look good enough. Reason for this is on the final build, the wrinkle shader intensity on the shirts have been significantly reduced. However the shorts still have the same shader intensity from the demo. This results in the wrinkles being barely visible on shirts.
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I just got a PS5 and I can finally enjoy FIFA 14 NG upscaled to 4K and 60fps, The PS4 experience is still in 1080p and 30fps and it's tough when we get so used to the later games.
 
Marlon Anthony said:
Yeah you can't go into that PS2 to next gen transitional engine expecting a satisfying sim. They were very pretty to look at artistically and stylistcally. RTWC 06 was the first time they made a significant effort in the broadcast presentation standpoint and didn't return to it until FIFA 14 NG

Replaying 08-12 the cutscense drive me insane, especially the substituion ones where the camera pans the stadium while it's laoding the new player model. You can't skip them and the AI would never doa double substitution, it would do one back to back so if the ball goes out of play 3 times in the space of 40 seconds, your'e forced to suffer this painstaking delays.

Nowadays I wish football games gave you the option to switch off all cutscenes unless it's a replay of a goal or a shot.

I just got a PS5 and I can finally enjoy FIFA 14 NG upscaled to 4K and 60fps, The PS4 experience is still in 1080p and 30fps and it's tough when we get so used to the later games.
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I personally think EA nailed the arcade gameplay in fifa 06 and world cup 06. Gameplay was quite primitive just few years before 06. It significantly improved since FIFA 2004, but on 06 you really get a sense of satisfaction from the overall gameplay.

Yeah, I can't believe, it took them until FIFA 14 NG to bring back decent broadcast presentation. And even on 14-16, the animations during cutscenes were very weird, it just didn't feel like rtwc 06 or even the ps2 games. Transition between each animation were janky to say the least. They finally fixed that with FIFA 17 after they switched to frostbite.
Being that said, the cutscene presentation on ps2 fifa games and rtwc 06 and wc 06 were more charming compared to even current fifa games. You can tell the devs really had fun with the animations back in those games, some cutscenes were pretty funny too.


Every time I play rtwc 06, I feel frustrated because this game really felt like what the rest of the x360 and ps3 gen fifa games were supposed to be like in terms of presentation and graphics. It's an unfinished game, that I thought would get finished and polished within next few years, but they completely ditched all the ideas from this game with 07 onwards.


I think FIFA 07 had option to disable cutscenes, but that probably only affects the match intro and outro scenes. I will give it a test. I personally like cutscenes, but I also prefer if the cutscenes can be skipped instantly if I dont feel like watching them. This was definitely possible on the ps2 games and rtwc 06, you press A on your controller and it skips immediately to gameplay without delay and that is good [except for the substitution cutscene which seemed to load stuff unfortunately]. On current fifa games, at least on 15-19, its also possible to quickly skip the cutscenes by spamming A, so this is a good design.


Speaking of 14 NG, this was the only NG fifa game where cloth physics were in the right direction even if it looked janky. From 15 onwards, the bottom end of the shirts remains stuck with the pants and it looks very off when the sleeves and the pants keep bouncing on and off. Wish pc got the NG port instead of the horrible last gen port. Maybe I will buy a ps4 if it gets as cheap as x360 one day to play 14 NG and PES 15-17 NG.
 
Some directly captured screenshots from modded 2014 World cup:
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As I've mentioned before, only during night time the cloth wrinkle shaders are at correct value. So the modded shirt wrinkle normal map which has higher contrast to compensate for day and dusk matches look way too intense on night matches. There really is no easy fix for this issue. I've been trying to open the shader files to make sense of why this mismatch occurred since FIFA 14 but haven't found anything useful.


Also it seems like 360 can actually handle higher LODs during gameplay at 60 FPS without any performance drops. However, idk if it's a good idea to stress out a 360 with high lods. Here are some screenshots with high lods from gameplay camera:
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Looks really nice though compared to default lods where the player faces looks very low poly and hair models get replaced by generic hairs. Also the cloth wrinkles move during gameplay with high lod.


Edit: oopsie
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Man, don't know if it qualifies as a retro Fifa in your eyes, but I find Fifa Street (the 2012 one of course) incredibly fun and entertaining, so well polished in gameplay and animations it feels practically like a current gen game (well, somebody could argue it's not so hard in the current football landscape, but still..). If they'd pick the futsal mode alone and sold it with a proper career mode today, I'd gladly pay it full price.
 
Madmac79 said:
Man, don't know if it qualifies as a retro Fifa in your eyes, but I find Fifa Street (the 2012 one of course) incredibly fun and entertaining, so well polished in gameplay and animations it feels practically like a current gen game (well, somebody could argue it's not so hard in the current football landscape, but still..). If they'd pick the futsal mode alone and sold it with a proper career mode today, I'd gladly pay it full price.
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Can't agree more. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to play it properly on PC.
 
Sami 1999 said:
I've also noticed another error on EA's end. I remember FIFA 14's demo looking better than the retail release of the game. The first reason was the cloth wrinkle normal maps. However, importing cloth wrinkles from the demo on the final build still did not look good enough. Reason for this is on the final build, the wrinkle shader intensity on the shirts have been significantly reduced. However the shorts still have the same shader intensity from the demo. This results in the wrinkles being barely visible on shirts.
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That's interesting, never noticed that. I remember FIFA 14 had bugged night shaders which resulted in boots being very dark and black goalnets. It annoys me to this day, but it never occured to me to compare it with demo. I wouldn't be surprised if EA did this on purpose to upsell NG version.
 
piospi said:
That's interesting, never noticed that. I remember FIFA 14 had bugged night shaders which resulted in boots being very dark and black goalnets. It annoys me to this day, but it never occured to me to compare it with demo. I wouldn't be surprised if EA did this on purpose to upsell NG version.
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EA's quality control is simply mediocre. It does seem like they downgrade their graphics on the old gen ports on purpose. They could literally copy paste previous games graphics and call it a day and yet they go out of their way to make it worse with each sequel.

This is not the first time EA fucked up the graphics on final build compared to demo. On PC port of FIFA 08, the demo build had lighting on the football. On the final build, the football itself was completely missing any sort of lighting. As a result it ended up looking like a flat 2D image. Only select few balls on the final build has the ligthing, but most of the default balls suffer from this issue. One of the 3 things you stare at for the majority of the time in a football game and they couldn't get that right.


Speaking of FIFA 14, I refuse to believe any human artist made the body and jersey models. Body proportions were never great in FIFA games, but FIFA 14 takes the cake. The whole jersey model looks like a cylinder, it doesn't look like a cloth. And since the final build fucked up the jersey wrinkle shaders, it looks even worse than the demo. They couldn't take 30 mins of their day to make a body and jersey model that looks human, heck they could have just copy pasted it from their older games too.
 
Many years ago there was this thread on reddit where various developers shared their experiences from the industry and I remember this story about FIFA 12 or 14 on PS2 (so basicaly OG "legacy" FIFA before even EA came up with labeling it as such), when one guy changed ball texture size from 64x64 to 128x128px (I can't remember exactly, but you get the deal) to make it look noticeably better, but it didn't get shipped on retail version because nobody cared. The classic case of new person on the project that could change something that got discouraged from doing so because reasons. While we can argue that doubling texture size on such old system like PS2 might be risky, it clearly gives an idea of inner culture: they have resources and ambitious people that want to improve things, but the overall goal is to release a product with as minimal fixes as possible to save time on testing etc.
 
piospi said:
That's interesting, never noticed that. I remember FIFA 14 had bugged night shaders which resulted in boots being very dark and black goalnets. It annoys me to this day, but it never occured to me to compare it with demo. I wouldn't be surprised if EA did this on purpose to upsell NG version.
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FIFA 14 for PC, while being a great game in my opinion in terms of gameplay, is abysmal in that kind of things.

As @Sami 1999 already said, kit wrinkles got downgraded big time, they looked worse than they did in FIFA 13 and they even looked worse than they did in the FIFA 14 demo.
Sometimes, during a substitution in daytime, the sky wouldn't be loaded (yep, you'd have sunlight everywhere but a totally black sky... This issue was in FIFA 11 too so I guess they never bothered to fix it since).
Black nets! Yes I remember them! But it wasn't only black nets: it was also the entire DOF system that was broken and nets would glitch during replays and not blend with the background at all.
On top of that, I'm experiencing a totally new bug lately (well, since I switched to my new rig which is equipped with Windows 10 and with a RX 5700 XT graphic card, at least): the crowd randomly disappears from the stands, leaving entire sections of the stadium totally empty.
They re-appear when the camera pans, only to have crowd in another place disappear, rinse and repeat.

They're just annoyances (the game is totally playable anyway) but it shows how little they cared about the "old gen" version of the game.
Probably they decided to just direct all their efforts to the Ignite version of the game (too bad it couldn't, and still can't as far as I know, be modded) and it's a shame because the core gameplay was very, very good even on PC.
 
The thing that baffles me is that they could literally copy paste the graphics from their previous games. Yet they went out of their way to make it worse. And it was also very late in production.

As I've already mentioned, the kit wrinkles on the demo looked better. The kit wrinkle shaders also got messed up on the final build. Because you can put the kit wrinkle files from the final build on the demo or older games like fifa 12 and 13 and you will see that it looks better there. In the final build, all the normal map shaders on the player shirts are very low contrast, thus ruining the intended effect. And this only affects the shirts, the pants are shaded correctly. Since the shaders on player shirts were bugged in final build, putting the kit wrinkle files from demo on the final build didn't help much because the kit wrinkles were almost invisible either way.


But that was the difference between the demo and final build. The builds older than the demo had even better ligthing as you see on some of the early screenshots of old gen version on internet. I genuinely believe they intentionally fucked up the old gen version. All of the issues I've mentioned could have been easily fixed with a patch or game update and it wouldn't even require them much time to fix it.




Also they finally fixed the 3D grass during cutscenes on the Wii U port of FIFA 13. But never bothered putting it back on FIFA 14 for pc. You could actually glitch the game into rendering the 3D grass back on some cutscenes [after getting injured or after quickly skipping instant replay in fifa 12, ball closeup cutscene before kick off in fifa 13, after committing foul in FIFA 14 world cup].

Ironically FIFA Online 3 and FIFA World on PC looked so much better than their main fifa games since the devs put enough effort to make sure all the graphical effects like 3d grass and lighting actually worked in game.
 
Did anyone here ever play any PSP FIFA installments? How do they differ from their PS2 counterparts exactly? Well, I struggle to emulate PS2 on my Galaxy M30 smartphone, that I'm not using as a dedicated handheld with RetroArch after getting a new smartphone in its place, as it was getting quite slow and the battery wasn't ideal anymore, so instead of PS2 I usually try the PSP stuff, since files are smaller and it runs better, even though most of the time developers just ported the PS2 version over to the PSP with as few changes as possible, I'm not sure if this was the case for FIFA aswell, but it does feel like it. I have a few memories with PS2 FIFA, mostly when my dad bought FIFA09 and both of us didn't really like it much... but I kept playing, because my local club was in it, that's when I realized the power licenses had, and over time I warmed up to that installment. I'm playing some PSP FIFA14 right now, the last not HD FIFA installment and probably the last ever release for PS2 if I recall correctly, and it's been fun so far, I know that this generation of FIFA is widely considered to be inferior to it contemporary PES installments, but they play some good football, and to be fair I'd rather play these than any Frostbite FIFA, I'm not kidding...
 

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I'm surprised at how much fun I'm having with PSP FIFA! I recall really wanting a PSP as a kid, though knowing myself well, I know if it had happened, I'd had a copy of PES with me, and not FIFA... that doesn't take away from how decent these installments are though, looking back at them now, with what we've got to experience in the last few years with football video games. I'm mostly playing FIFA12, as this is probably the only official football video game, alongside the other versions of FIFA12, with my favorite Coritiba F.C. squad ever, the 2011 one, and those lovely kits to match. A shame that PES overshadows it so much.

One thing I've been curious about though, is how different these PSP FIFA installments are from their PS2 counterparts... sadly I'm struggling to emulate PS2 on my old smartphone, it's clearly way more demanding than PSP is, but from the little I've got to mess around with FIFA12 on it, it feels the same, and feels different too, it's hard to describe, maybe if I could play it more smoothly, I'll try it on my PC when I can, but just wondering if anyone else on the thread has a few experiences with the PS2 and/or PSP FIFA stuff, and if there are any major differences between them, besides PS2 having a lot more options/content...
 

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MKC said:
I'm surprised at how much fun I'm having with PSP FIFA! I recall really wanting a PSP as a kid, though knowing myself well, I know if it had happened, I'd had a copy of PES with me, and not FIFA... that doesn't take away from how decent these installments are though, looking back at them now, with what we've got to experience in the last few years with football video games. I'm mostly playing FIFA12, as this is probably the only official football video game, alongside the other versions of FIFA12, with my favorite Coritiba F.C. squad ever, the 2011 one, and those lovely kits to match. A shame that PES overshadows it so much.

One thing I've been curious about though, is how different these PSP FIFA installments are from their PS2 counterparts... sadly I'm struggling to emulate PS2 on my old smartphone, it's clearly way more demanding than PSP is, but from the little I've got to mess around with FIFA12 on it, it feels the same, and feels different too, it's hard to describe, maybe if I could play it more smoothly, I'll try it on my PC when I can, but just wondering if anyone else on the thread has a few experiences with the PS2 and/or PSP FIFA stuff, and if there are any major differences between them, besides PS2 having a lot more options/content...
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I have FIFA 14 on Vita, it's great. I have FIFA WC10 PSP on Vita too.
 
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Does anyone knows if is possible to install FIFA 11 in 2 or more different folders? I wanted to do the same that i did with FIFA 14, to have different mods. But looks like it doesn't let you. Kinda sad because i wanted to have the 11 to 08 and 11 to 09 mods.

And about the other fifas games... i never really understood why EA downgraded their pc versions compared to the console ones. Even their 2001 game was... different compared to the PS2 one, all those ones were kind of better on PS2 and even had widescreen support. It took them until 11 to update it to the ''next gen'' (at the time) engine, and still was a downgraded version, and that's considering that they had that ''next gen'' engine since 2006 or whatever year came out Road the World Cup 06.
No sure how it is these days considering that i am not interested that much in modern football games. But knowing EA probably still doing the same practice.
Strange business decision tbh.

Oh... and i forgot that weird thing of putting a limit to the resolution to 4:3 ones. What were they thinking? lol
 
Johan_123 said:
Does anyone knows if is possible to install FIFA 11 in 2 or more different folders? I wanted to do the same that i did with FIFA 14, to have different mods. But looks like it doesn't let you. Kinda sad because i wanted to have the 11 to 08 and 11 to 09 mods.

And about the other fifas games... i never really understood why EA downgraded their pc versions compared to the console ones. Even their 2001 game was... different compared to the PS2 one, all those ones were kind of better on PS2 and even had widescreen support. It took them until 11 to update it to the ''next gen'' (at the time) engine, and still was a downgraded version, and that's considering that they had that ''next gen'' engine since 2006 or whatever year came out Road the World Cup 06.
No sure how it is these days considering that i am not interested that much in modern football games. But knowing EA probably still doing the same practice.
Strange business decision tbh.

Oh... and i forgot that weird thing of putting a limit to the resolution to 4:3 ones. What were they thinking? lol
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EA never cared about their PC ports. They always put minimal effort on the pc versions.

Their reasoning for porting old gen versions back in 2005-2010 was that most people can't afford to upgrade their pc to play next gen games. But people who couldn't really afford to upgrade to bare minimum specs that were capable of playing ps3/x360 ports wouldn't buy the game in the first place. They would simply pirate the game. So I find their reasoning to be BS.

Konami ported the x360 version of PES 08 on pc and also made it possible to run on intel integrated gpus. The game would get stripped of all the modern rendering techniques of that time to make it possible to run on potato hardwares. EA couldn't be arsed to optimize their game for pc and decided to make a half assed port instead.

And you are right, most of their pc ports have missing graphical features from console versions, even fifa 98. The only games that seemed to be on par with consoles are fifa 15,16,17. Everything else has one or two missing graphical features/ broken graphics on pc.
 
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