EA Sports reps have talked at length about how they basically rush to get a game out and then fix things along the way. The interesting thing I found was that for a baseball game, just to design the stadiums from scratch would take a full two years.
Handballs must be a bitch then. They've had how many years now to get that working reasonably well? I realize that they put a lot of work into the game, but spending a year fixing what's broken rather than developing "360 degree dribbling" would've done wonders for the game.
I'm not making excuses. I'm completely in agreement with your assetment of how the difficulty system works and it's a major frustration for me. Still more information gives more perspective. Without sufficient CPU programming knowledge, one like myself can only ponder just how difficult programming the AI in this game must be. When we suspend our frustrations for a moment and think back a few years in this and other sports series we realize that improvements have been made, it just faces one major problem. That is, these games attempt to simulate a real life situation that every one of us can replicate ourselves. (unlike say fighting war, let alone full fantasy games). We want it to get as close to reality as possible and we know what that reality is and feels like, at least in the sense of playing the game. Perhaps few if any of us know what it is to play in the EPL, but we all know the reality that this game will always fight to achieve and will almost assuredly never reach.
1) With handballs - i'm glad they've taken them out (i never saw an option to turn them on). I started playing with FIFA 06, which had an occasional hand ball here and there... I then later picked up FIFA 10, which handballs were so outrageous and often... was fairly annoying ( Oh, i'm slide tackling directly at the player. Success.. oh, ball rolls up player hits arm... turnover. WTF). But I find it irritating that a game like NHL can perfect high sticking, hooking, and slashing rules - yet the soccer game can't perfect a handball - that mostly means that the game area for the specifics (ala arms and hands) is too wide of a game range. Think of what i'm trying to say as personal space - they can't perfect it for whatever reason (this will go in line with some of the players often a good distance away from your player, and they get to and steal the ball before touching it). 2) As much as it takes effort to create the AI and the surrounding environment, defensive AI is complete shit compared to other games. NFL games are completely better with defensive AI - yes it's not freeflow play, but not every player only stays in a concentrated zone and then runs backwards when the ball is advanced on them. This is also similar with the goalie problems of the slow dive to make a fairly easy save... and because of that, no save.
Oh, and it took the life of another controller... actually, this time it was the controller's fault - it kept turning off mid game...
I understand (somewhat) the difficulty of implementing the AI as well. But when I graduate from Pro to World Class, EA''s expression of that difficulty, for example, is having Wolverhampton CBs running step for step with my striker with 90 sprint speed over 30 yards chasing down a ball (not dribbling) while on the other end of the field my CBs are getting outrun by Steven Fletcher while he's dribbling. This is not "AI is extremely difficult and we did the best we could with it." This is situationally manipulating player attributes to achieve a desired result. Cheating. They haven't tried to improve this element of the game for generations. Skills (I use the term lightly b/c it's a video game in the end) learned at an introductory level cease being applicable in more difficult levels not because the computer plays a better, smarter game, but because the team the gamer has built suddenly is crippled in some respect. I'd rather they just say, "We don't give a shit about improving gameplay, so we really didn't do anything about that this time around. But the graphics are so detailed in this thing that you can count Rooney's freckles". Hyperbole, I know. And, yes, my hopes about gameplay being improved with the updates I reveived have been dashed. Same ol', same ol' from EA. The "improvements" are a effing meter that tells me I play the game too much. I knew that already.
fellas the thing with the the nhl games its completely scripted. I can go play either one of you in the new nhl and beat you it takes no skill. I've played the new one around ten times and If i played either one of you 5 times id get at least two wins and a draw. Theres no rebounding system whatsoever, the aiming system sucks, and you can just dive on the ground all the time and depossess another player lol. Theres so much that you can take advantage of with the A1. I just thought the older nhls for 360 were genuinely more fun and when you lost you lost. Theres games where its pre determined no ones going to score i'd like to be proven wrong because I actually used to enjoy the NHL games.
Today I won 66-0 online in the first division. That is right. 66-0. The kid gave up and kicked the ball into his into his own net 65 times... ...but I will take it.
I don't use the headset so I have no idea. Just did not know anyone could be so committed to kicking the ball into his own net after a 1-0 scoreline. It was quite fascinating. Took like an hour for the game to end. The epitome of a sore loser.
Someone did that to me once... only got 6 goals... he was up 3-0 at the half... of which i came up 4-3 in the 2nd. He got tired and started doing the own goal technique, and couldn't figure it out for a minute. Was funny. After the 3rd goal i was now trying to defend his goal... i saved it once.
Okay wtf. I am winning 3-1 in the 90th. Guy quits and I somehow got the loss. So fed up with all this crap.
The game is weird like that. I must have lost at least 15 matches on bad connection, most of them beacuse of the game not doing good matchmaking and making me play opponants too far away.
I had 1 situation where the person quit right at the beginning of kickoff because they realized we just played eachother - obviously didn't like me (i lost the previous match too..but it was a tough one) And another where we started, and then for some reason the loaded lineups were incorrect (pre-updated rosters), and it kicked me out and gave me a loss. Then i couldn't get another game for 2 days cause it was saying my rosters were tampered with, and i had to delete the updates - and essentially my entire profile (created player too) to get it corrected. Everything that was loaded online (rank, division, play time) was the same... but i lost majority of my profile and saved games on my drive. Was infuriating.
