Re: Fifa 11 Xbox 360/PS3
Yeh - should have come to find you guys really. I loved sitting there when Nick spoke up - instantly realised who it was from his question. Couldn't think of any especially relevant questions (having been forced to sit through a seemingly endless presentation of stuff-I-already knew when frankly I'd have preferred to be playing.
To reiterate - those videos do not show the game in a fair light. In those videos I'd struggle to pick out the differences from 10/WC, and in reality, the differences are clear. Oddly enough, if anything is really improved - if anything has been fixed it's the one thing which all those videos would contradict.
The pressure is... a -hell- of a lot less effective than in previous games. It no longer seemed particularly worthwhile as a tactic, and that was for a lot of reasons.
The worst thing, undoubtedly, was the defensive lines. Again, they are better, undoubtedly, but there is far too much of the same old same old defender standing off his man. It's one thing if the whole line drops back to compensate, but all too often you'd have a straight line with one defender 3-5 yards further back because a striker was standing there. There were multiple occasions where I did find my defensive line doing some really bizarre things - usually all on the same theme, dropping back to cover, whilst the other defenders stayed up.
If anything was surprisingly poor - it was the analog sprint. Found very little use for it really. Not sure if anyone had a different experience of that - and I was struggling with the PS3 controllers as it was, don't like the sticks, don't like the triggers, and desperately wanted to play on a 360 controller to make a fairer comparison on certain things. In terms of analog sprint - I really like the concept but because the difference between jogging and sprinting is relatively low in terms of pace, there doesn't seem a huge amount of difference between half press and full press. I also found that it crucified your stamina and turning circle as if it would if you were fully sprinting. Analog speed is a great idea - but I'm not sure about this particular implementation.
A continual feature of the game I felt was a bit off was the contextual error on passes - which is all too often expressed as slow, bounciness, rather than misdirection. It just looks kinda wrong - and I would have hoped for more variety. To see a pass for which error has been applied which was too fast, too slow, too left, too right, curving away from the player, and yes, bobbly - as opposed to the consistent slow, bouncy thing which does occasionally seem very odd.
It does however, to a decent enough extent, neuter the worst of pingpong passing. It's surprising how ruinous a slow, bouncy pass can be to an attack. For me, with the contextual error, it's much more a feeling of it looking wrong and not quite being true to real life than anything.
What I was underwhelmed with in the passing sense was the Pro Passing. I was gobsmacked at how good a completely underweighted pass could be (ie, where the white marker would be 2/3 of the way along and I tapped it). It does have an affect, but as a manual enthusiast I find it far too forgiving.
On the manual side of things - unsurprisingly it is nothing like the changes which would satisfy me, and frustratingly it still has a tendency for direct passes on manual to be too short to do really short passes - and too weak to do the longer passes. It means that you have this bizarre need to use throughball for the really long and really short passes, and direct pass for everything else.
In terms of assisted/semi/manual overall... well I'd say that in general terms the balance is still ordered the same. Assisted tends to be the most effective, followed by semi, followed by manual - but it's definitely contracted a lot. Unfortunately, my hope that semi would become more effective than assisted doesn't seem to be a reality - and I think that's because generally, by design, semi is a harder assisted. The pros of manual, really don't exist in semi (ie, the freedom). I still feel to a large extent that EA's mentality when it comes to adding these features is backwards. The new assistance settings I'd need more time with to really say much about.
The R1+Lob modifer was interesting, didn't get as much use of it as I should because to be honest I forgot about it for quite a few matches. Definitely a nice addition to the repetoire.
And, though not many of the people in here care, the goalkeeper controls feel solid - I only played it in arena, but they work well and i actaully think it could be a pretty fun setting for something completely different.
I tried out as many exploits as I could think of - didn't find any working - but obviously without a serious amount of time, there is a limit to how stringently you can test everything.
There were a few really BS moments - the jumping-over-players and losing ball crap still exists clearly. Skilled dribbling still has all the same quirks, and I often found my player just totally losing the ball at his feet when using it, especially when transitioning in/out of it. This would be maybe understandable (not really) except that the most prominent ecase occured with Messi.
Another occasion, I played a lovely manual throughball to Villa, and he was running alongside the other player (physical interacaction is definitely better btw), and I just managed to tap the ball ahead into the area, and the defender took me out from behind. Their player got a yellow - not even debatable that he was last man and that I would have got a shot off.
Overall I'm focusing on the negatives here and this is brief - I'll get round to answering the questions in the thread soon enough. Just wanted to put some quick (!) thoughts here. Don't get too depressed from the negatives in here - I'm just trying to gt everything bad down unless I forget. I realise i haven't mentioned Personality+ - not because it's bad or not noticeable, but because I'm tired, and it's not really a negative.
Yeh - should have come to find you guys really. I loved sitting there when Nick spoke up - instantly realised who it was from his question. Couldn't think of any especially relevant questions (having been forced to sit through a seemingly endless presentation of stuff-I-already knew when frankly I'd have preferred to be playing.
To reiterate - those videos do not show the game in a fair light. In those videos I'd struggle to pick out the differences from 10/WC, and in reality, the differences are clear. Oddly enough, if anything is really improved - if anything has been fixed it's the one thing which all those videos would contradict.
The pressure is... a -hell- of a lot less effective than in previous games. It no longer seemed particularly worthwhile as a tactic, and that was for a lot of reasons.
The worst thing, undoubtedly, was the defensive lines. Again, they are better, undoubtedly, but there is far too much of the same old same old defender standing off his man. It's one thing if the whole line drops back to compensate, but all too often you'd have a straight line with one defender 3-5 yards further back because a striker was standing there. There were multiple occasions where I did find my defensive line doing some really bizarre things - usually all on the same theme, dropping back to cover, whilst the other defenders stayed up.
If anything was surprisingly poor - it was the analog sprint. Found very little use for it really. Not sure if anyone had a different experience of that - and I was struggling with the PS3 controllers as it was, don't like the sticks, don't like the triggers, and desperately wanted to play on a 360 controller to make a fairer comparison on certain things. In terms of analog sprint - I really like the concept but because the difference between jogging and sprinting is relatively low in terms of pace, there doesn't seem a huge amount of difference between half press and full press. I also found that it crucified your stamina and turning circle as if it would if you were fully sprinting. Analog speed is a great idea - but I'm not sure about this particular implementation.
A continual feature of the game I felt was a bit off was the contextual error on passes - which is all too often expressed as slow, bounciness, rather than misdirection. It just looks kinda wrong - and I would have hoped for more variety. To see a pass for which error has been applied which was too fast, too slow, too left, too right, curving away from the player, and yes, bobbly - as opposed to the consistent slow, bouncy thing which does occasionally seem very odd.
It does however, to a decent enough extent, neuter the worst of pingpong passing. It's surprising how ruinous a slow, bouncy pass can be to an attack. For me, with the contextual error, it's much more a feeling of it looking wrong and not quite being true to real life than anything.
What I was underwhelmed with in the passing sense was the Pro Passing. I was gobsmacked at how good a completely underweighted pass could be (ie, where the white marker would be 2/3 of the way along and I tapped it). It does have an affect, but as a manual enthusiast I find it far too forgiving.
On the manual side of things - unsurprisingly it is nothing like the changes which would satisfy me, and frustratingly it still has a tendency for direct passes on manual to be too short to do really short passes - and too weak to do the longer passes. It means that you have this bizarre need to use throughball for the really long and really short passes, and direct pass for everything else.
In terms of assisted/semi/manual overall... well I'd say that in general terms the balance is still ordered the same. Assisted tends to be the most effective, followed by semi, followed by manual - but it's definitely contracted a lot. Unfortunately, my hope that semi would become more effective than assisted doesn't seem to be a reality - and I think that's because generally, by design, semi is a harder assisted. The pros of manual, really don't exist in semi (ie, the freedom). I still feel to a large extent that EA's mentality when it comes to adding these features is backwards. The new assistance settings I'd need more time with to really say much about.
The R1+Lob modifer was interesting, didn't get as much use of it as I should because to be honest I forgot about it for quite a few matches. Definitely a nice addition to the repetoire.
And, though not many of the people in here care, the goalkeeper controls feel solid - I only played it in arena, but they work well and i actaully think it could be a pretty fun setting for something completely different.
I tried out as many exploits as I could think of - didn't find any working - but obviously without a serious amount of time, there is a limit to how stringently you can test everything.
There were a few really BS moments - the jumping-over-players and losing ball crap still exists clearly. Skilled dribbling still has all the same quirks, and I often found my player just totally losing the ball at his feet when using it, especially when transitioning in/out of it. This would be maybe understandable (not really) except that the most prominent ecase occured with Messi.
Another occasion, I played a lovely manual throughball to Villa, and he was running alongside the other player (physical interacaction is definitely better btw), and I just managed to tap the ball ahead into the area, and the defender took me out from behind. Their player got a yellow - not even debatable that he was last man and that I would have got a shot off.
Overall I'm focusing on the negatives here and this is brief - I'll get round to answering the questions in the thread soon enough. Just wanted to put some quick (!) thoughts here. Don't get too depressed from the negatives in here - I'm just trying to gt everything bad down unless I forget. I realise i haven't mentioned Personality+ - not because it's bad or not noticeable, but because I'm tired, and it's not really a negative.
