Last year EA Sports was finally able to surpass the critically acclaimed PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) franchise with FIFA 09. For FIFA 10, EA has gone into the mind frame of refining what made FIFA 09 so good and creating a more realistic game. In a recent interview with the FIFA community, producer Marcel Kuhn gave us some insight on just how they are going to bring the world of football into your homes with FIFA 10.

For FIFA 10, EA Vancouver isn’t changing much in terms of graphics or the overall gameplay found in ‘09, what they are doing is simply refining some aspects of the game to bring a more realistic experience to gamers. The biggest change, which you will notice right away, to the gameplay is going to be the 360-degree dribbling. In the past, gamers were only able to move their player in 8 different directions. Now with the new mechanic your player will move in any direction your stick is pointing in, giving you more control over your player than you’ve ever had before. The new dribbling will also allow you to play more realistically. Adding to the dribbling is a more realistic attacking AI where they will position themselves better, move at the appropriate speed of action and move outside to create better scoring opportunities. The new positioning and route-running of the AI also leads to more accurate passing, something that FIFA 09 had some issues with. On the defensive front, AI players will now move to close up to dangerous spots on the field left by other defenders and will now play more physically than before. Players will now double attackers when they need to and will fight for the ball with more urgency creating a more realistic battle between the defender and attacker.

Goalkeeping and shooting has always been one of the weaker points in a FIFA game, it’s either too easy or too hard. With FIFA 10 EA is hoping they can create a good balance with some improvements in both departments. Goalkeepers will now be more aware of loose balls and will come off the line to intercept them. Hopefully that means no more passing the ball in the box when you’re two feet away from the keeper. Keepers will have a more responsive and powerful rushing system and new animations that gives them more realistic movements, positioning and momentum. They will also now swat at balls from the goal line making them a bit more effective on the line. The ball physics has also been changed to allow shooting to be more realistic and it will also increase shot options around the field. With the changes to both the attacking and defending AI, along with the changes to shooting and goalkeeping, they hope to limit goals scored from half field, goals scored right from kickoff, and goals scored from through balls. If all of these changes seem a bit overwhelming, EA has finally listened to their fans and put a practice mode in the game. So if you’re having trouble controlling your player or can’t quite get a good shot in the goal, you can work out all the kinks in practice mode.

All of these improvements are very small compared to the refining of Manager Mode. Manager Mode is the most played game mode outside of online play. Because of that EA wants FIFA 10 to deliver a “Total Football Experience”. They collected a ton of community feedback and used that to create 50 big improvements to the mode. For starters they brought in a new financial system for your club. Instead of relying on sponsors to provide your club with the cash, you will have a Board that will give you two different budgets to work with. Ticket sales and getting sponsors are still important but the Board is your financial backbone. The Club budget will go towards paying transfer (trade) fees, hiring staff and club upgrades. The Wage budget is strictly to play player fees. When you first start manager mode you will be given a certain budget based on the team you choose. The better or more popular the team, the bigger budget you will have and vice versa. However, your budget can change based on goals that are set by the Board. If you can meet these goals your budget can increase for next season, not meeting them won’t make the Board very happy thus your funds can decrease.

Along with this the player transfer system has also been re-worked. Player’s wages are now more realistic, unlike last year, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres will be worth a lot more and will be harder to obtain. Signing new players will also be harder because not only do you have to convince the club to release that player, you will also have to convince the player to leave the club. Money wont be the only thing to persuade a player to leave, he will look at how many players you currently have at his position, where your club will be playing and how much your manager can offer him in terms of development. This allows for more realism when it comes to transfers and you will know exactly why a player doesn’t want to play for your team.

On the development stage player growth will now be more accurate. Last year’s title you could easily get all your players to a very high rating in only a couple of seasons. With FIFA 10 player growth is based on three different categories, physical, mental and skill experience. How fast these experience points adds up will depend on how much time they get to play, their opponents and how well they perform. Every player will have a different potential to reach. A younger player will have a higher potential and will increase experience points much faster than an older player who will have a lower potential and who’s skill might even decrease over time. So throughout the season you will have to decide if you want to play the younger player and try to make him into a star or play the higher rated player who’s skill could start declining in a couple of years.

The improved scouts system will help you decide which young player has the most potential. The higher the scout is rated the better he is at predicting the player’s potential. The new pre-season friendlies will also help you figure out who to start and sit. Since there isn’t a practice mode in manager mode you can use the friendlies to fine-tune your line-up. Another change to manager mode is with the mangers themselves. They will now have less impact on the recovery rate of players so you don’t always have to change the line-up after only a couple of games.

With all of these improvements it really has my hopes up that FIFA 10 will be even better than the already great FIFA 09. A bigger emphasis on realism means that no longer will it be easy for no-name teams to beat a team like Manchester United or Liverpool. The gameplay looks to be more fluid and with improved AI you might actually get to experience some really intense games. EA Vancouver spent a lot of time listening to the complaints the FIFA community had and it seems as if they locked on and targeted almost every issue. For now they are keeping a tight lip on their Be-A-Pro mode and online modes but hopefully we will hear something about that soon. While we wait, here is a video preview of the new improvements courtesy of EA Sports. As always don’t forget to keep checking back to Spawn Kill for more updates on FIFA 10.

Tags: EA, FIFA 10, Previews, PS3, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under PlayStation 3, Previews, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.