《FIFA 13》经理模式的情报近日终于公开。EA加拿大分公司今年非常努力，将经理模式中转会窗口的真实度提高了一个档次，完全改写了交易中的逻辑。
新的转会系统中将提供许多信息，例如球员的类型、年龄、士气、俱乐部中的劲敌，一集他们合同上还剩下的时间等等。
在《FIFA 13》经理模式中最大的新功能应该是加入了国家队。
在过去的《FIFA》当中，玩家只能在友谊赛或者自建的联赛中与电脑对战才新能使用国家队。但是在《FIFA 13》里，玩家可以直接在生涯模式中参加或者管理国家队。
Skill GamesA new addition for FIFA 13 are Skill Games, incorporated into the game using the new physics capabilities that came with the Impact Engine. On the surface it looks like they’re aimed at newcomers to FIFA (which they are) but they should also offer seasoned players a way to see areas of the games controls that they might not know about too. The idea primarily is aimed at teaching people the fundamentals of FIFA, step-by-step cranking up the difficulty of each particular skills area to show you more and more.
There are 32 games across 8 sections, Penalties, Ground Passing, Lobbed Passing, Dribbling, Shooting, Advanced Shooting, Crossing and Free Kicks (I’ve done those from memory so fingers crossed I’ve got them right…) each with three tiers, Gold, Silver and Bronze. The games range from hitting targets, chipping balls into bins, slalom dribbling to football tennis and plenty more including the apparently infamous (within the studio) “Gauntlet” that uses the full pitch and pulls various drills together.
When waiting to go into a match, you’ll no longer be placed into the Arena to have a kick about. Now you’ll be given a Skill Game to play instead. Each game has a target score that you need to achieve to unlock the next tier, and some restrict you to a certain number of attempts or put you against the clock. You pick a player from your set favorite team and then crack on. The games chosen for you are kind of random initially, but they will start to push you towards skill areas you’ve not made much progress in eventually. If you don’t want to have them generated for you, or there’s a Skill Game you specifically want to work on, you can access them from the main menu, going into the Skill Game hub to manually select challenges. For most players the bronze challenges will be a breeze, but as you progress further, you’ll see plenty of variables chucked at you to keep you on your toes. That could be anything from adding defenders that are actively trying to block your passes at targets, giving you a smaller area to work in, reducing the number of attempts you have or, by turning the control settings to manual. For example in the football tennis game below, you control two players either side of a wall playing manual lobbed passes back and forth. As your score moves up the wall gets higher and the area you can actively play in decreases.
Once you’ve worked your way through the first three tiers you’ll then be faced with the Skill Challenge for that particular section, which in our experiences were brutal (and to be fair, still being tweaked). The ground passing Skill Challenge saw you in control of six players positioned around the edge of the centre circle, with two defenders trying to get the ball off of you. Your passing was set to manual and there was a squared-off perimeter around you, which you couldn’t step outside of or the challenge would end. It would also end if one of the two defenders were able to get a touch on the ball. Each successful pass between your players earned you points, with additional points also being awarded for passes between the two defenders, or by lobbing the ball over them and so on. Your target is to achieve the Legendary rating, which is the highest of four points brackets. At the end of the game your points are totaled and you’re shown your rank, which is then updated to the leaderboards.
The leaderboards can be used to compare your rank against your friends or the global lists, and offer some incentive to return to completed challenges if you’re keen to stay at the top. They’re currently missing any type of autolog or push functionality for telling people when you beat them however, but we pitched the idea to Aaron and he wrote it down so it might make it in. Who knows.
Overall we found the Skill Games in FIFA 13 to be a cool addition and certainly more fun and useful than twatting about in the arena pre-game. In terms of practice they’re a great idea too, for example one challenge puts you just outside the area and fires crosses in at you, allowing for plenty of volley practise, something that’s hard to replicate in a normal match in such volume. The fact that they’ll slowly show people the wider range of controls such as manual settings and crossing modifiers can only be a good thing really and the leaderboards have the potential to keep you coming back to Skill Games if EA can get a notification system working.
We’ve added some screens throughout to give you an idea of what they’re like, there’s a gallery below too.
Career Mode is always a tough one. It’s loved by many, who feel like it’s been unloved by EA in the past. Previewing it is an absolute nightmare because when you start a career, you’re in it for the long haul and playtests rarely grant you the opportunity to progress very far or see the effects of certain actions that you trigger early on. We posted a list of the new features earlier, but also wanted to do a post about our experience playing through half a season and how all of those touches tie together.
The first thing we saw was the removal of the Player Manager option. That’s been done for various reasons, which are covered in the interview we’re posting tomorrow, I won’t go over them here. So we plumped for a Managerial Career with Chelsea, It was the most neutral team we could think of with a big enough budget to play with. I’d like to point out that Dave was driving, so some of the more bizarre decisions were down to him.
During the initial setup there are two new features, firstly the ability to choose your body type, suit colour and skin tone stand out, I’ll let you figure out for yourselves why that’s in there. Secondly a setting for financial strictness which has three tiers that dictate how much of a players sale goes back into your transfer budget, with the top end being 85% currently. Again it’s covered in more detail in the interview but the idea is to avoid transfer activity becoming a “player swap” fest, by selling a player for £20M and having all of that money still available to spend, now you’ll only receive a portion of that cash back into your available funds.
Once you hit the main Career Mode hub there’s a nice new overlay with help text that explains various bit and pieces, small touch but a very welcome one for new players. So the first order of business was to hit the transfer market and see what had changed. Given recent events we decided that Terry should go and popped him up for sale. Whilst we were waiting for some interaction from that we sent a scout out, which is still the same as it was last year, and started pursuing strikers, as you do when you’re preparing to release one of your most influential defenders.
So we went after Falcao, who seemed interested in dealing with us, and we put in a 32m offer in that was accepted. During the offer stage we became aware of the inclusion of the much wanted player plus cash option, which allows you to supplement a deal with a player you don’t want on your books. From our chat with Santi, we understand that the system isn’t as simple as taking the cash offered and adding that to the value of the player offered to come up with a total sum that’s compared against the value of the player you’re trying to buy, clubs will actually make a decision on whether the offered player is of any use to them before deciding, even to the point of coming back to you and saying that they’re happy with a player plus cash deal, but that isn’t the kind of player they’re after. You can also inquire about players without directly putting an offer in, to get an idea of what it’ll take to get them to move. When buying players you now get a little bit more detail to help you make the transfer happen. Things like being able to view their current contract help you build your offer and you also get comments from your Chief Exec, which help you understand their position within the club. For example a player might have a market value of say £15M, but your chief exec might suggest that you need to offer £17-19M to actually lure them away. From what we saw the Chief Exec will give you range to work within from a fee point of view, but it’s just advice and you could potentially get players for more or less based on form and other factors.
Once you get past the club and begin negotiations with a particular player, you get to see things like their form and happiness and can also propose a role within the deal, so you can tell players whether you see them as a vital cog in your starting 11 or whether you see them as a useful option for cup ties, which will affect their decision. In our first offer to Falcao we told him we thought he’d be an important first team player, but he valued himself higher than that and we had to up his wages and promote him to a crucial player to be able to get his signature.
In the midst of all of this we received an offer for the unlisted Ivanovic for the sum of £13M, which we decided wasn’t enough and made use of the new counter feature to put a £16M price tag on him. The offer was met and in a brutal move from EA we weren’t offered the chance to keep him. If you request a higher fee for a player and the club making the purchase chooses to meet it, tough shit, he’s gone, you don’t get the option to up the offer again. You’ll find yourself being fairly tentative with increasing the asking price, as if you push it too high, the interested club will walk away. One thing we didn’t see was situations where you agree a fee for a player but they don’t agree terms, hopefully that’s in there though. So with the Terry deal done, that’s now 2 first team defenders out and none in, with the start of the season not far off at all.
As a manager you can now view offers from other clubs mid season and you can also arrange loans outside of the transfer window too. When requesting a loan for a player, you can specify the length you want and also propose a fee for the end of the loan period, we weren’t able to play long enough to see this play out sadly so we don’t really know how the end of loan negotiations would work.
So we pushed into some games with our formidable attack and swiss cheese defense and simmed the pre-season games. Another change is that penalties can happen in simmed games, a small but a nice touch. You still can’t edit your starting 11 before a simmed game without backing out and changing it fully, which we moaned about but were told that it wouldn’t be possible this year. Throughout the pre season you’ll get subs and squad players popping up and requesting run outs as the match isn’t important which is great and shows how much more depth there is to the player stories side of things this year.
Everything on that front just feels a little more tied together, with callbacks to actions from weeks and weeks prior and players being a little more vocal, whether they want a rest or want some more time on the pitch. End of game reviews are now incredibly detailed and generally speaking there’s an awful lot more to read if you’re interested in seeing how your CM experience is being filled in outside of your own actions. Obviously we didn’t get very far given the time we had and can’t say how much opportunity there is for repetition, but there’s more than last year, and what is there seems a lot more relevant to you.
You can now navigate the news pane whilst the calendar is moving (hooray!) and news stories relating to a particular player allow you to navigate straight to them with a single click, so when you get those “one for the future” style stories, you can quickly and easily go and investigate the player without leaving the main hub and searching for them manually. Scouting seems to be unchanged, although we only got as far as sending out a scout and viewing the first set of players, so there may be more further down the line. Other options like Talk To Press and Transfer Deadline Day remain the same (as does Team Management, Boooo!) but the initial transfer window we played through was an awful lot quieter than FIFA 12, which was also something people complained about, so that’s positive. In terms of club progress, we weren’t able to see things like stadium upgrades and kit upgrades, so we’ll have to assume they aren’t in there, we certainly weren’t told about them.
We pressed into the season and started to play a game which presented us with another new option, the goal news panel. It’s basically a set of tick boxes for the games being played alongside yours, which you can toggle on or off. At that point we had no idea what they did but we soon found out. In the middle of a match our commentary was interrupted for an update from another game. It’s such a brilliant touch, we were both grinning like idiots. It’s pretty varied, so they won’t always just be goal updates and we once got an update on Arsenals third goal without hearing about the other two. The interceptions come from Alan Mcinally and Geoff Shreeves to keep things fresh and the handover between the commentary and the updates is seamless. People have been calling for more authenticity when it comes to presentation and this is a massive step in the right direction. You’ll also notice details like the commentary mentioning upcoming CPU substitutions.
Elsewhere on matchday presentation there’s a bunch of new pre match camera angles that allow you to see the cameramen on the pitch, and details like the camera bobbing as it works it’s way along the player line up all begin to add up and make everything feel a little more authentic. Also the touchlines are now animated, so you’ll see things like subs warming up, the guy you chose a suit for and sideline photographers that actually track the ball. The crowd hasn’t had a lot of work done to it and according to a recent interview with David Rutter, it’s not a priority for the team at the moment. The crowd audio seemed better though, generally a little more reactive to events on the pitch. As for things like trophy celebrations, again we didn’t see any.
As for gameplay, there’s some updated impressions being posted later, but I’d be hard pushed to say we noticed the AI behaving particularly differently based on the team or reacting to events, which will be a downer for some people. We carried on, slowly demolishing Chelsea from the inside with a string of terrible transfer decisions and rubbish results. We started to receive news stories about the fans being unhappy, in particular that our mega signing Falcao wasn’t finding the net. Even more interestingly they were citing the sale of Terry as the beginning of the end, it was a pretty hefty callback to make, months after his sale. Naturally with fans on our back and performances dropping we needed a distraction, a little bit of international management should do it. We looked in the job offers screen and found that even though we were shite, Romania and Northern Ireland were both still happy to have us. Although time was against us we took the Northern Ireland job and had a little poke around. The most important thing is that squad selection seems to have been done properly and you’ll need to get your picks in a week before friendlies and a month before Tournaments. Again time got the better of us so we weren’t able to take it much further than having a nose around the menus.
Then we started a Player Career with Arsenal and chose Alex Song as our player, much to the bemusement of the devs that were with us (and in hindsight ourselves, I think we were just a bit tired). There’s a fair few changes in here that we managed to crash through, but I think overall people will possibly still criticise it for being light. That being said, the changes ARE things that people have been calling for, so who knows.
As you start you’ll have your objectives for the season laid out, they’ll change depending on your role, but can also be more generic like “Stay in the starting 11″. Then pre game you’ll see your objectives for upcoming matches, like maintaining a pass completion of X. You’ll also see a bit more feedback regarding what formation you’ll be using and expectations from the game and you can finally be called up internationally, although we weren’t in the short time we played the mode.
Hitting (or missing) your small targets affect the chance of you being loaned or sold and you can see clubs making offers for your services even if you haven’t been listed. If you fancy a move you can request to be put on the loan or transfer list, but your manager also has the ability to block that move if they want to keep you. If you really want, you can retire and move into management, again we weren’t even close to getting this far so have no idea what carries over from Player to Manager.
One major gripe that’s been fixed is that you now won’t be able to jump straight into the Barca first team with your 65 rated VP and relegate Messi to the bench. You could still sign for them but it’s unlikely you’ll get many games and there’s a good chance you’ll just be loaned out. On that note, you can’t start from the bench and come on mid match yet, but you will be subbed off if you’re playing poorly. We came close to that happening at one point, but Dave gave me the pad for the second half and I managed to turn it around.
On the pitch your supporting AI is definitely better as you’d expect with attacking AI at work. Playing as a midfielder didn’t allow us that many goalscoring opportunities really, but that didn’t stop the AI strikers from banging them in. Gooners, Podolski is in possession of a cannon of a shot. It was really cool to see the forwards creating chances as well as finishing them.
So that was all we got to see really, I appreciate there’s loads still unanswered and still many many questions, but this is what we know based on what we saw. Hopefully there will be another round of CM news at some point, you never know. Overall the experience was incredibly positive and from the comments on the new features post it seems people agree that EA are headed in the right direction.
We’ve embedded some screens throughout and there’s a gallery below.
We were asked to find out about lots of different things before we went to EAC but the one part of FIFA 13 you all wanted to know about most was Career Mode. That’s why we’re incredibly pleased to bring you this rundown of the modes new features which address many community requests of old and, introduce some truly staggering new technical innovations.
International Management - As your reputation as a manager grows in Career Mode you will now be offered the chance to manage International teams in addition to the club side you are already playing with.
- Your performance and manager reputation in Career Mode dictates the quality of the international offers you will receive.
- Your nationality and the league you manage in will also effect the type of International offers you receive.
- Rumours about interested nations will circulate in the press for some months before you actually receive a firm offer.
- Squad selection will be a key part of your International management duties and deadlines for selections (one week prior to friendlies, one month prior to tournaments) have to be met.
- International competitions will run in parallel with the club game meaning you could land a job in the middle of a qualifying campaign.
- International management has it’s own Career Mode “Hub” keeping your club and country separate.
In Match Live Score Updates- Whilst playing your Career Mode matches you’ll now receive audio updates from other games being played in your league voiced by Alan Mcinally and Geoff Shreeves.
- The live updates cover goal, red card and penalty incidents.
- Example – Shreeves: “Goal at Anfield, Fulham’s Clint Dempsey scores a brilliant freekick to make it 2-1, 73 minutes played” Tyler “Thanks Geoff”
- You can select/de-select the matches you want to hear audio updates from prior to playing starting your match.
Player Stories - Interaction with players is now more regular with instant feedback received based on managerial decisions.
- Player Stories can now run for months in to Career Mode re-emerging if you go through a bad run of results or when you sell/buy a key player.
- Specific Player Stories also occur when managing an International team, meaning you’ll need to keep both club and country happy.
- Fan stories will now make top news in the press based on team performance.
Be A Player - Once you’ve chosen your player (VP or real) you receive a set of Season Objectives to complete from the manager. The type of player you choose (forward, midfielder, defender, etc) will shape these objectives.
- As well as Season Objectives you’ll also be asked to achieve objectives every four matches. This could include, goals, clean sheets, pass/tackle completion percentages, etc. The quality of opposition over these four games will decide the values you are asked to achieve.
- If you are unhappy you now have the option to request a transfer, or request a loan to gain more match experience.
- If you choose to play for a top club with a low rated VP you will not be a first team starter to begin with, you’ll be loaned to gain experience first.
- If fatigued or playing poorly the manager can now substitute your player.
- Once your playing days are over can can opt to retire and take up management.
Classified Results - After each Career Mode match you now receive a rundown of the classified results through in-game audio (think BBC Final Score)
- League table updates are also fed back to you as well as any upcoming fixtures. These audio sequences happen less regularly than the classified results.
- When this audio is running you can still browse all Career Mode menus and continue to the next game week.
Managers Office - You can now view any available managerial positions via the Jobs Board, this allows you to change clubs mid season should you wish to.
- Your manager now appears on the touchline in matches based on customisation options chosen at the start of Career Mode.
Transfer Negotiations - The transfer system has been completely re-written for Career Mode in FIFA 13.
- You can now offer player plus cash and player trade deals to the CPU.
- When offering to loan players you can now set a future purchase price to sign the player permanently at the end of the loan period.
- When the CPU makes an offer for one of your players you can now choose to “Counter Offer” to ask for more money. The CPU will then choose to accept, reject or make a counter offer of their own.
- Contract negotiations now contain advice from your Chief Executive which act as a guide to what they think the club and player may want.
- When offering contracts you can now choose a role for the player you’re trying to sign eg Crucial Player, Important Player, Future Star. This expectation will effect whether a player chooses to join your club.
- Prior to making a firm offer you can now make an Enquiry to find out whether a player is available and how much the club want for them.
- You can now make offers for players directly from media stories by pressing the left stick.
- A new Financial Strictness setting will limit the percentage of players sales that go back in to your transfer budget (chosen at the start of CM).
Breaking News- A new “Sky Sports” style overlay will now deliver breaking and top news to the Career Mode hub.
Edit Players- You now have the ability to edit player appearance during your Career Mode seasons. This option can be unlocked via the new EASFC Catalogue.
User Interface - You can now read news articles from the media pane whilst the game is advancing.
- The first time you enter Career Mode menus a tutorial overlay appears to guide you through each panes function.
Right at the death last night we were asked to withhold one more big piece of Career Mode news which we’ll try to bring you as soon as we can (sorry) but it does mean you have more to look forward to. Tom’s full Career Mode Impressions article will follow shortly (with screens) but for now hit the comments to let us know your thoughts on the new features. Pleased?
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发表于 2012-7-23 23:57:29
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