FIFA 11 - A Game with Bags of Personality

To help you celebrate as the flood of FIFA 11 news begins to hit your screens, we bring your our own unique coverage of how we found FIFA 11 when we were lucky enough to get a whole week of game time recently out at EA Canada at the FIFA 11 Community Week...

by David Witts posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Poster - Rooney

From Monday 26th to Friday 30th April, 20+ key FIFA community members and Pro FIFA gamers from Europe and America were brought together under the roof of the amazing EAC headquarters in Vancouver, Canada to discover this year's incarnation, FIFA 11, and play it for a whole week.

The FIFA marketing team of Sam Cooper, Matt Grogan and Tim Matindas had the task of shepherding us through the week and looked after us excellently. Evening entertainment was taken care of by Mr Romily "FIFA" Broad from EA Football World and UK FIFA Community Manager Phil Wride as they looked after us away from EAC. There were also EA representatives Tim and Janis from Germany and Thomas from France who looked after their community guys and players (and not forgetting the mad German TV team).

Firstly on the Monday morning, we were introduced to the new game in an open forum session with the FIFA Dev Team of Dave Rutter, Gary Paterson, Aaron McHardy and Santiago Jaramillo. During the morning session they took us through the new features of FIFA 11. I am going to use their presentation as the means to update you all on the new features of the game and how we found them when we played them in the actual game.

I have to say it was brilliant to be able to play the first build and then feedback on its content and then play a new build on the Friday with some of our earlier feedback incorporated.

Caveats:

• Before describing these new and enhanced features, some were as shown to us during our week in EAC, some were in development and some still to be developed and in no way constitute what will be delivered in the final build that is shipped. We will ensure nearer the time of the final build we clarify which features described here are in and which are out. 
• Results described below are the views of our very good friend Rob "Wepeeler" Smith and myself as we collaborated throughout the week playing the game and feeding back on all features. What a team!

EA SPORTS New Feature Assessments

So what are those killer new features and bug fixes for this year then that we are allowed to discuss with you at this point?

Authentic Player Personality

This is the biggest new feature in FIFA 11 and is aiming to bring a real individual feel to the game where every player has their own strengths, weaknesses and key attributes and these become apparent in the game.

We bring you a list of these new features here and will expand on some of these over the coming weeks.

• Visuals 
  • Body styles 
    • New player modes
• Animations 
  • Trademark celebrations 
    • Easy to do a players default celebration by hitting the A button 
  • Dribble locomotion styles 
    • New dribbling styles introduced rather than the previous default 
• Attributes
  • Pro Passing Mechanics (described in more detail below in Pro Passing section)
  • Defending 
    • Tackling coverage 
    • Aggressive Tackles (Obi-Mikel) 
    • Block Coverage (Cole) 
    • New "interceptions" attribute 
      • Ability to read the trajectory to intercept passes 
  • Dribbling
    • Touch distance (Arshavin) 
      • A new attribute which distinguishes how close the ball stays to the dribbler. Arshavin is very skilled at this and keeps the ball very close to himself whilst dribbling. 
    • Dribble while bounced (Messi) 
      • This new feature means that players such as Messi are not so easy to barge off the ball now and they will start to have the influence on the game as they do in real life. Messi now bounces off tackles and barges as he dribbles along. 
    • Iniesta touches 
      • A new skilled dribble in the style of the Barca magician 
  • Shooting 
    • Agile 135's and 180's 
      • Top strikers now have more agility in the box and can complete some nice finishes when turning and stretching. 
    • Poaching Centre Forwards 
      • Poachers such as Ruud van Nistelrooy are much more effective in and around the 6 yard box as they pounce on loose balls and tap them home.
  • Positioning
    • Attacking work rate (Rooney v Berbatov and Clichy v Alves) 
      • The attacking attributes are very visible. You can see Wayne Rooney running around everywhere whilst Berbatov floats around with a minimum of effort. 
      • The same concept applies to defenders as Alves will fly forwards from wing back Clichy will be more defensive and protect his goal rather than press forwards. 
    • Defending work rate (Drogba v Anelka and Makalele v Ronaldo) 
      • The defending attributes are also very visible. Whilst Drogba will work back in to midfield to try and chase down an attacking defender, Anelka will stay up front and leave the defending to someone else. 
      • The same concept applies to midfielders as Makalele will sit and hold and chase down opponents, whilst Ronaldo will tend to stay forwards after attacking and not be too interested in defending. 
  • Goalkeepers 
    • Lots of improvements have been made to the keepers, with some great new features including: 
      • Coverage – much more agile to move around their goal mouths 
      • Keepers with better diving attributes will be able to reach farther for shots 
      • Reaction times based on reflex attribute 
      • Reading the trajectory of crosses and shots much better 
      • Different save styles - Acrobatic v Traditional (Van der Sar v Casillas) 
      • Agility in getting up and scrambling 
      • Kicks from hand are much better as you now have 2 options, the classic high kick or the new flat trajectory style (very nice).

Pro Passing

Passing has received a lot of attention and at the time of playing there was still plenty of development to be done to either refine or implement the new features.

In FIFA 11 a new Pro Passing Mechanics system is being implemented which delivers: 

• An Advanced Error System which calculates passing accuracy on: 
  • Over and under hitting passes 
  • Spin context 
  • Ball height - consecutive bouncing passes 
  • Context effect tuning 
• Swerve Passes - swerve to be safe 
  • A lovely feature is the new curved side foot pass where you pass to a team mate over a distance and it curves beautifully rather than just travelling in a straight line. The purpose being to keep it as far away from your opposition. 
• Driven lobs everywhere (Scholes) 
  • You can now spray lobs around the pitch in a Scholes style but requires correct strength and accuracy to complete. 
• Backspin Lofted Through Ball 
  • This was a new feature that we discussed with the Dev's which required the ability for the defence to lob a ball from your defence up to your attackers, for the attacker then to hold the ball up and bring in to play the attacking midfielders and your striking colleague. 
  • In the second build we played late on the Friday this feature had been implemented in a raw state but immediately provided you the ability to lob/drive a pass to the chest of your strikers. Nice
• User Skilled Through Ball 
  • The through ball now takes much more account of the skills attributes of the passer and will not find its way past the defender and in to the path of the attacker.

We also focus here on some key issues with passing in FIFA 10 that FIFA 11 is looking to address.

Ping Pong Passing 

• Problem
  • Too easy to make difficult passes - reduces the reward/emotion of creating chances/scoring 
• Solution 
  • Use contextual error to make passes less accurate 
    • Difficult passes 
    • More attribute effects 
  • Add user skill factor to powering a pass
    • Concept of under and over-hitting a pass to introduce lot more variability
• Result 
  • Much improved through implementation of the new strength and accuracy of passes features. You can certainly feel the difference now when you make a pass and you will soon get the feel for placing the right strength on a pass.

Manual Passing 

• Problem
  
  • Hardcore players like to play manual
  • ...but match up against assisted players
• Solution 
  
  • Coming soon... 

Other Passing Developments

• In FIFA 10 you used to get too many wayward passes on auto. At this point in the development cycle we still found too many passes go to opponents feet. Also, when attacking you need the ball played in front of receiver and presently too many still go to/under the receiver's feet and you lose momentum. Something we know the guys are working on. 
• As a lifelong striker, a valued tool of the trade was moving towards the passer when receiving the ball to make it difficult for the defender to get between you and the ball. As in FIFA 10, we still found that it is not easy to make the receiving player move towards ball. If you attempted to move the player towards the ball it affected the accuracy of the pass. Still the defender steps around the receiver as difficult to get player to move towards the ball.

Customising Audio

This year the first (of hopefully many) capabilities to customise the game using your own preferences have been implemented. This year they have introduced audio customisation where you can create and manage your own music playlists for menus and matches, adding your own custom chants for different teams and making each team have its own customised lists. Specifically: 

• My FIFA 
  • Edit menu and favourite team music 
• Virtual Pro 
  • Edit VP and Online Pro Club Music 
• Leagues and Teams 
  • Edit team specific audio

We are working with EA to try and make this feature as easy as possible for you to share playlists with your friends.

We hope you found this a useful first summary of how we found FIFA 11 during our week in EA Canada. We have lots more coming as soon as we are able to release it for you, including: 

• Too easy to defend with less depth and effects the speed of the game – we will explain how this is being addressed 
• Hardcore players like to play manual passing but match up against assisted players – we will explain how this is being addressed 
• Plus much more...

Also, check out all the great new launch screenshots we have for you in our brand new FIFA 11 Gallery. 

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