I think this is the first time I’ve posted a news article that simply consists of a post, on a forum, by someone who isn’t from EA. But when I read this I had to feature it, because the guy who has written it has said everything I tried to say since my FIFA 10 playtest beautifully (despite English not being his first language). So thank you klys from the EA forums!
You can read the article by clicking the read more button below, or you can visit the thread and comment on it yourself over here.
[In answer to some of the concerns raised by those watching the gameplay videos…]
1) “There’s too much chipping in the game, plus it looks far too easy.”
When standing in line waiting to play the game with a friend I could watch a lot of games with players ranging from absolutely unskilled to very good, even some “abusers” of [exploits], so basically the kind of mixture you would expect in online games.
I was very surprised how even bad players would fire some great lobs when making it into the box. How was that possible, are they not so bad after all? Is the game so hard to control now, that skilled players would look like starters? Well. Some thirty seconds into my first game, my friend (a rather bad player) dribbles alongside my box and fires one hell of a lob at my goal. I stare at him in shock and he smashes the gamepad. “The hell, I wanted to SHOOT, not cross!” What was going on? About 50% of the players actually hit the cross button instead of the shoot button, because some people adjust the controls the way they like it, others just start to play and everything gets mixed up.
Plus, you can’t spam the keeper button and expect the goalie to hover back magically into his goal if you release it anymore… A lot of players, including me, just press it way too often and the keeper stands too far away from the goal – lobs are as easy or hard as in FIFA 09.
2) “It’s too easy to ping-pong-pass and get into the box.”
That’s crap. First of all, which teams [feature] in the current gameplay videos? Barcelona, Munich, Chelsea … you would expect teams like that to play some good one touch football. The new 360° movement in defence is worth gold. My friend likes to ping-pong and I never could put a stop to that in 09, but now I can actually move where I want, so goodbye getting the ball to your fast forwards from the defence with three quick passes in the midfield. When playing a game with Toronto against Marseille this became even more obvious, because the players in Marseille’s midfield can’t pass as fast as Ribery or Messi, so the ball jumps away or a player misses entirely… And even if he gets to pass it, I could stop it if it wasn’t a move that he thought through and didn’t just hit L1/LB+pass for a one-two spam.
3) “No-one can play Fifa, the videos suck.”
Well, a lot of the available footage actually is ruined by bad plays. This is easily explained by the following facts. The controls are changed almost every game, and this is Germany, and you don’t want ten angry Germans behind you when you are setting controls and stuff like manual shooting, passing… “Oh so now he ees changink ze controlls, plees, zees ees just to test ze game!” … So you basically play with mixed up buttons and actions. Plus, the triggers and [shoulder buttons] tend to get stuck fairly often because they are worn out (on the second day of four)!
Also, the game speed is often set to fast by a few guys and this is unnoticed by the next ten or more couples playing, so if they film it, another false impression is on tape and ready to hit the forums.
So far, this is what I read in this forum a lot and just wanted to clarify some of it. I am not paid by EA or something for writing this. My personal game history is FIFA 96-2002 on PC, then changed to PES 3 until PES 6, bought an Xbox 360 and continued playing PES 6 until FIFA 09 was finally a great EA product again while Konami messed up big time … and now I am waiting for FIFA 10.
Finally, a few words of my own (Chris Davies, FIFA Soccer Blog)…
This is only touching on just how good the game is and how disappointing the gameplay videos coming out of Gamescom have been so far.
We scored a few cracking long range goals, and even without scoring we hit some really good powerful shots. Nobody seems to want to try anything new in these videos, they’re playing the game like it’s FIFA 09.
A few of us did that at first while playing FIFA 10 and we were underwhelmed, then after three games and starting to play differently, using the slow dribble button and trying shots we wouldn’t have tried in FIFA 09, the game came to life and we started to see things that blew us away.
The demo really can’t come soon enough.
