bangus;3883987 said:
Right, that's what I do. But I also globally edit some player values to help improve the game play, I use DBM for that. Otherwise the game doesn't need much tweaking this year.
On gameplay: I'm surprised actually.. from the reading I've done here and elsewhere, it sounded like the game was a total failure this year. But after a few slider tweaks, I've found it's actually quite enjoyable. Sure it's a different game from PES. Something about the player's mechanics feels more organic there, like I'm ACTUALLY causing the things I do with the controller. I don't know how much this has to do with it but I find there's an interesting correlation between people who have problems with the game and the level they play on.
I've always avoided (for years and years) the hardest levels in sports games because while they feel difficult, often to frustrating levels, I also think in my opinion that they invariably provide the most unrealistic gameplay of all the levels. So, I play lower down (mid-level, pro-ish) and play with sliders to make the game more challenging for MY particular skill level. I just find it interesting than 90% of the time when someone has problems with the game, the physics, etc, it's people playing on the highest possible difficulty levels of sports games where I feel you get CPU players that behave like relentless robots.
For example, if you'll pardon the complete deviation from football to make a point, in the NHL series, there are people that insist on playing on fast game speed levels to "replicate the pace of hockey". Well, I've been watching hockey since I was able to keep my attention on a TV screen for longer than 5 seconds and, geeky as it may seem (possibly obsessive as it may seem), years ago for the 2008 hockey games, I did a test putting video game footage and live footage side by side isolating animation of one CG player and one real hockey player and then side by sides of full screen gameplay. In both EA and 2K series', the lowest and at the most second lowest speeds replicated real life pace. But from the outside, you THINK hockey is a faster game than it is. It's not. It's just the camera moves, and the fast cuts in the corners, and the rebounds in front of the net, etc etc etc. Very few players can actually go top speed down the ice for more than half the rink length before starting to slow down. And acceleration is slow too. And moments of total outbursts of speed in hockey are actually quite rare. More often than not, you're watching quick passing and static skaters. Players tend to glide, not rush, down the ice.
In the end, I think that a lot of things FIFA is blamed for this year come down to two things... 1) It's a video game. If it wasn't "fun" a bit more than "real", it wouldn't sell. You have to allow for a little silliness in the mechanics. If just any random player could pull of a scissor kick the way you can with anyone in FIFA as long as you get the commands and location right, real football would be a cartoon. I've been bitching about full team control in seasons that's well designed (you have to simulate all other games individually before moving to your next fixture?? Come on...), full transfer control, full injury control for years but I know EA is simply never going to implement these things because 9 out of 10 people buy FIFA for FUT, a mode I never even look at, much less play and also because it works, it doesn't crash, so who cares? 2) Go back to basics and compare with real football stats. Then if you find the game is broken, then fine, it's broken. But it's like getting a bunch of different unknown weights to balance. Find a ROUGH balanced middle level of play and then add weights to both sides until you get an ACCEPTABLE (not perfect) middle that's acceptable to you. I find that the majority of the time, playing at a lower skill level and adjusting sliders for more difficulty yields more realistic play in every sports game than cranking it up to Super Mega Pro All-Star Hall of Fame Level. To go off on a completely unrelated example to make the point that's already been made, only because it just occurred to me... Calibrating televisions is about micro changes of red blue and green in individual parts of the chroma scale. So you add a touch of red, the blue and green go up, remove some blue and red goes up but green goes down. You never balance them all perfectly but you get close. I don't know how else to describe it, that's how I set levels in my sports games.
As a sidenote, I find it mildly amusing that a defenseman not holding his post can drive people nuts, but having to shoot people 10 times to kill them in Uncharted doesn't bother anyone. Something I loved about Medal Of Honour more than any other war game was the realism of a clean shot in any vital place killing any soldier instantly. But what did people play? Call Of Duty. Medal Of Honour was never as popular.
Anyway... I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore...
