FIFA 11 Revealed : Personality Goes A Long Way

Apart from knowing how to make great football games, there are at least two other things that the team behind FIFA are very good at.

 

One is actually playing football, as they effortlessly demonstrated by taking our UK Press team apart in the final of a media tournament at their Canada HQ recently. The other is listening to FIFA’s massive community of fans and responding to their feedback, which stood out immediately after seeing FIFA 11 for the first time.

 

It can’t be easy to find things to improve when your last game – FIFA 10 – has clocked up a Metacritic score of 91, bagged 50 Sports Games Of The Year awards and been crowned the biggest-selling sports title of all time. But the team are a dedicated bunch and – rather than sit back and bask in the success of 10 – they scoured the internet in search of as much community feedback as possible on what they could do better.

 

First on the fix list was something a number of FIFA 10 fans refer to as ping-pong passing. You know… the ability to zip the ball about the pitch with just a few presses of the button, safe in the knowledge that they’d find their target most of the time and make your team look like Brazil, even if they were actually Bognor.

That’s all changed for FIFA 11.

 

The ability to put brilliant passes together is still in there of course, and quite rightly; after all everyone loves to play silky football from time to time, but now the success or failure of those passes depends on so many more factors than before, thanks to the new Pro Passing system that displays greater contextual logic when deciding how accurate the pass you’re attempting is going to be.

 

For example, you’re controlling Fabregas and you’re going to play a short pass to a team-mate standing thirty yards away who’s under no pressure from the opposition. That pass is going to be successful 99.9 times out of 100, just like you would expect in real life. But try the same thirty-yard pass using a player with a low pass accuracy stat, who’s being forced to use his weaker foot due to heavy pressing by the opposition, and there’s a far greater chance of you giving the ball away. Again, just like you would expect in real life.

 

So what the game wants you to do here is realise which of your players has the ball, then use your knowledge or experience of playing with those players to quickly work out if they’re going to be capable of what you would like them to do. This means you have to make a very quick decision, just like a real footballer does when picking his passes in a real game.

 

Let’s say, for example, that I’m playing as Man. United and Gary Neville – a player with a far lower passing stat than someone like Fabregas – has the ball. Now, knowing that Gary Neville’s passing stat isn’t his best attribute, I quickly forget about the 70-yard through ball I’d like to play and instead go short to Paul Scholes, a player with a much higher chance of putting the ball where I want it to go. There, I just made the kind of decision a real-life Gary Neville would probably make. You get the idea.

 

Of course, what this means is that you will need to recognise who you have on the ball and what they’re capable of as quickly as you can, so you can make the right instant decision, which is where one of FIFA 11’s major new features comes in. 

 

Personality + is designed to help you distinguish individual footballers from one another, giving you the ability to make the kinds of decisions we’ve been talking about. In FIFA 10 there were three body types used for the player models, basically small, medium and large. There are ten different body types in 11, ranging from small and lean to big a stocky, right up to ‘special’ – a category built with players like 6ft 7in Peter Crouch in mind. Personality + also makes all players look and move much more athletically and some even move uniquely – think Cristiano Ronaldo and the way we dribbles at high speed while thrusting his straight arms back and forth.

 

But it isn’t just about making everything look better – there’s so much more to P+ than that. Over 1700 real scouts from all over the world gather information on players and send it back to the FIFA team, so that they may put together 36 different attributes and 57 traits for each one. Personality + uses these attributes and traits to make players move, feel and play just like the real-life stars they’re based on. Even goalkeepers display their own unique personalities, with those that tend to be more acrobatic able to reach further shots, while keepers whose style is more traditional and reactive rely on fast reflexes to stop shots.

 

Combine all of that with what we’ve just been talking about in terms of players looking much more like the real thing, and you’ve got the highest level of authenticity ever seen in a football game so far.

 

Impressive stuff then, but that’s not all for FIFA 11.
You’ll also have the ability to completely customise the audio by choosing everything from what song you want to hear when your team come on to the pitch or score a goal, through to importing your own custom chants then listening to the crowd sing them as you pass the ball around. Plus there will of course be many more new announcements as we get closer to the game’s autumn release.

 

It was just 50 per sent complete when we got our hands on it for a few hours last month – even at that stage it was quickly obvious that the game had moved forward from 10 – so there’s half of the development to go, and in true FIFA fashion the team still want to hear from the community and refine the gameplay in the ways that matter most to you. To give your feedback to the team, or to find out what the fans have already requested, visit http://www.facebook.com/easportsfifa and join the FIFA group.

 

If you can help them make the next 50 per cent anything like as good as the first, we’re all in for a treat.

 

See you next week.

Darren