FIFA 12 Demo impressions

Yeah its about £16/2000MS points to play early but with no real benefits after that.

Here's how you can justify it.

Get the game at midnight from Asda or Tesco as strong rumours the are doing the £25 midnight release thing again.

So £25 plus £16 is about the price of a normal game.

or... wait 3 days.

I'm waiting.
 
Here's the video displaying how broken Tactical defending is:
YouTube - FIFA 12 HUGE bug regarding tactical defending, please fix this ea

It's not just the contain function, it's all the quick turning, perfect touches which also allow for this to happen.

The grand solution is to sort out the inertia, individuality and momentum :)

The most depressing thing is the goal scored by the keeper. Another clear example of how much the stats mean in this game.

Career mode will be such fun. You spend weeks scouting for that special left sided winger to make your team complete. You finally find your man, spend days negotiating a buying price and wages, a snip at £15million and £50k per week.

You give him his debut in left midfield and he plays great, perfect first touch, great dribbler, strong left foot. He also appears to be equally strong on his right foot, which is handy.

But he gets injured! Oh no! So you decide to bring on your sub, a 16 year old auto-generated goalkeeper from the youth team. And he's every bit as good as your £15 million man. Oh my, that was lucky.
 
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The most depressing thing is the goal scored by the keeper. Another clear example of how much the stats mean in this game.

Career mode will be such fun. You spend weeks scouting for that special left sided winger to make your team complete. You finally find your man, spend days negotiating a buying price and wages, a snip at £15million and £50k per week.

You give him his debut in left midfield and he plays great, perfect first touch, great dribbler, strong left foot. He also appears to be equally strong on his right foot, which is handy.

But he gets injured! Oh no! So you decide to bring on your sub, a 16 year old auto-generated goalkeeper from the youth team. And he's every bit as good as your £15 million man. Oh my, that was lucky.

:LOL: FIFA 10 I think had more individuallity. At least you could tell which players were fast and which were slow. i a game eariler on Lenegedary i sprinted with Mandanda the Marseille goalkeeper all the way down the touchline and even got a cross in :LOL:
 
The change that happened for the last ten minutes was interesting. Exactly on 80:00, the Barcelona midfield pushed up and closed off all your passing options. Didn't impact on your experiment, but it at least shows that the AI does alter its tactics during a game.
 
The change that happened for the last ten minutes was interesting. Exactly on 80:00, the Barcelona midfield pushed up and closed off all your passing options. Didn't impact on your experiment, but it at least shows that the AI does alter its tactics during a game.

Yes i noticed that. So there is hope that they can fix this, it should happen much earlier though.

EA need to build a game on football wisdom rather than trying complicated clever ideas which break the game.
 
Sorry but no, I'm not Keegan.
I'll watch that video when it's up.

Ooh ok, well nice to see another jamaican here :))

theres a legendary modder called keegan, a jamaican who mods boots, i though you where him.

EA cannot release the game in this state though! they need to make some changes and sort this issue out. There will be far too many issues and exploits and people should finally see the conclusion the game is broken.

'I mean what playing style won't be seen as cheap?' Everything will be an exploit!
 
Here's the video displaying how broken Tactical defending is:
YouTube - FIFA 12 HUGE bug regarding tactical defending, please fix this ea

It's not just the contain function, it's all the quick turning, perfect touches which also allow for this to happen.

The grand solution is to sort out the inertia, individuality and momentum :)

Dunno if you can call it a huge bug. However, you can also play in midfield and knock the ball about without any pressure providing you hold precision dribble and move in circles. Works all the way up to the edge of the area providing you don't pick silly passes. You can pretty much camp outside the oppposition area doing this. The game is completely lifeless in midfield and lacks urgency.

Jesus, the irony of actually wanting the com to intitiate some pressure spamming
 
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To be honest lads neither of you will probably even play Fifa, it's a bit unfair to pick the type of faults that the fans of the series won't indulge in anyway. It's just pissing on people's parade, no need for it. Lead by example, if your not interested in Fifa, just leave it at that.
 
To be honest lads neither of you will probably even play Fifa, it's a bit unfair to pick the type of faults that the fans of the series won't indulge in anyway. It's just pissing on people's parade, no need for it. Lead by example, if your not interested in Fifa, just leave it at that.

Jimmy i do like FIFA you know. I've been playing it since i was about 5 years olds man. It's my highly cynical frustration which has given the impression i hate it! It was very frustrating when playing FIFA 08 seeing that only a few key improvements where needed from the game being completle and they have just pissed about for the last 3-4 editions. I mean i was always a dual FIFA PES player over the years but for the last 5-6 years i went to only playing FIFA because of PES downfall then almost vice versa recently.

My mates love FIFA, i played it a lot last year with them, so i needed to play and see how fun it is this year, sadly it's very flawed (like we expected) but so flawed it might not even be playable, far less playable than the terrible FIFA 11 even :CONFUSE:, so we need to show how bad it is so that EA can improve the game for everyone. PES being hug out to dry and embarrased by similar videos like i put up is the reason why it's improved so much :)

One day, FIFA will improve, we can only try to help :) It will be good for everyone.

the feeling of me wanting to like and love fifa has returned despite the horrible flaws :)
 
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To be honest lads neither of you will probably even play Fifa, it's a bit unfair to pick the type of faults that the fans of the series won't indulge in anyway. It's just pissing on people's parade, no need for it. Lead by example, if your not interested in Fifa, just leave it at that.

Fair point in all honesty, though I do plan to give it a run out like always.
 
The thing that worries me is i think i do get it. What i was doing was pretty similar to Nerfs example, even then at least 3 times a game midfielders dont track runs.

When so much is placed in the hands of the AI as Nerfs example shows, thats when they can control crappy last minute goals or legendary BS.

What amazes me is when i get slated for calling the defensive setup unintuitive and bad design, yet no-one is using the default control scheme and are mapping buttons all over the place. Moving controls to RB so you never use it.

Even with that, the teammate AI is sooooo bad on defending and attacking thats its no fun at all to cover them. I want to be able to concentrate on either marking the guy after i make contact or cover passing options. NOT switching between the back four covering bad AI.

Gamerbase wasn't this bad so i hold hope but i cant see me playing this for a year.

Clubs mode will have to be good, but I'll have a bet that purple afro 'flair' passing for 90 minutes will be the norm within days.

I've actually gone back to using the new default setup and I'm better for it. Even on Legendary I rarely concede more than two goals and at least 50 percent of the time I'm keeping clean sheets.

From what I gather, most people have moved teammate contain off of RB because they don't like having to use two fingers to press teammate pressure and RT Sprint at the same time. But if you're using Tactical Defending correctly, you never really should need to press both simultaneously.

I actually think now that going back to a control scheme similar to previous FIFA's makes defending harder than it needs to be because it tends to make you play against TD's strengths. The more comfortable I've become with TD, the more I understand why they mapped the buttons the way they did.

Defending in the demo is actually not much more difficult than defending in 11 once you come to grips with the new system. If anything, I'm worried that over the course of the year defending will again prove to be too easy against the CPU.

I won't argue that TD is intuitive or that it's the best defensive system out there, but I'm having a lot of fun defending in FIFA for the first time, maybe ever.
 
i was pes up until fifa 09, played fifa 09, fifa 10 and a little fifa 11 (manual against friends), now im back to PES. the philosophy taken by the fifa devs is going to be their own downfall, next year will be the last chance imo. if pes builds on this very solid base of pes 2012 it will be the game of choice for football fans once again. fifa is circling the drain right about now

Harsh assessment but i can't disagree. PES this year is really good apart from glitches here and there (and the odd keeping clanger). EA spent two years making falling down look better. I have no idea why. They complain about having limited funds to stretch across areas of develop,ent yet Pro Passing, Personality + and Impact engine are still not accomplished.

I say they stop dicking around an REALLY spend time on the CPU and team mate AI.
Another big one is inertia. It doesn't even have to some fangled new engine. Just impliment a recovery time with the stats. Making a mis-timed tackle should result in slight recovery time penalty. This makes each tackle more important. It will pull the shape of your team apart and open new space to dribble into which then creates better goals and shooting oppertunity. THIS SHOULD ALSO BE APPLIED TO WHEN YOU LOSE THE BALL ATTCKING or misplace a pass.

IMO There's skullduggery going on with the stats in EA's game cause a lot of the time it doesn't feel like any of them are actually working other than "this player is good and this player is shit". Passing with a top player really needs more zip. Atleast this has been applied to the shooting though.

Don't get me wrong, the demo is fun but there's so much more to do with FIFA and PES is definitely hot on it's heels. Next year will be VERY interesting.
 
So far, I'd say I've been using it to a) put my foot on the ball while I have a look around, or b) to extract myself from an impending tackle, (sort of pivot/drag the ball out of trouble), or c) just to quickly face up in the direction I want (instead of going through a longer turning-while-dribbling animation).

At the moment I'm looking at it as a way of manipulating the ball between your feet, so you can rotate, drag, turn, face up in tighter situations without needing to travel or commit to a direction.

I like the new contextual dribble animations and find dribbling improved overall but I'm not a fan of the LB Precision Dribble. Don't want to say I hate it but I sort of do.

For me I have much better luck when just relying on the new contextual animations, sharp turns with the stick, and a mixture of LT and RT. More often than not LB Precision Dribble = loss of possession for me.
 
I like the new contextual dribble animations and find dribbling improved overall but I'm not a fan of the LB Precision Dribble. Don't want to say I hate it but I sort of do.

For me I have much better luck when just relying on the new contextual animations, sharp turns with the stick, and a mixture of LT and RT. More often than not LB Precision Dribble = loss of possession for me.
Same here. I'd just use a small tilt on the stick instead of pressing another button.
 
I quite liked his analogy that "fifa is circling the drain right about now". I must start using that one myself.
 
I like the new contextual dribble animations and find dribbling improved overall but I'm not a fan of the LB Precision Dribble. Don't want to say I hate it but I sort of do.

For me I have much better luck when just relying on the new contextual animations, sharp turns with the stick, and a mixture of LT and RT. More often than not LB Precision Dribble = loss of possession for me.

Good call. Precision dribble is an awful animation. Much prefer using close dribble and pressing LB to stop on the ball then move the left stick around.

2 nights ago I had a great game and then last night I played 5 games on the demo and was ready to throw the controller against the wall lol. Having just played FIFA 10 World Cup, where the player movement and gameplay was great, and going to the FIFA 12 demo is day and night.

I've been FIFA from day 1 and only swapped over last year. I do want to buy both games as I'm a football fan and 2 of my close
mates and I play FIFA together often. But having a good career mode counts for zilch if I can't stand the gameplay.

Why on earth do so many players STAND STILL? You move around create a passing option and everyone else stops again. It's part of the reason you always seem to get passes cut off as well. Your players are on the back foot. I've used the 1-2 button and it gets 1 player running but then that's it.

I want gameplay footage of how the player run sliders affect the game. It doesn't have to be as active as PES, just any kind of movement lol. And some kind of differentiation in gameplay between teams would be nice too. Not everyone plays a short passing game like Arsenal or Barcelona.

As Klashman said - we're not hating on the game. We like it and want it to be enjoyable. No one ever improved a situation by denying it's flaws.

The CPU AI still loves it's cheating too haha. Playing the World cup game, it's astounding how many fouls you get called for when you win the ball yet they can break your legs and it's play on. Not the same here on FIFA 12 demo and I know it's partly because I'm not as good a defender as the AI, but why can they find space where I can't and why can they win every 50-50 ball when a cross comes in yet I can't get near it?

sliders and 5 min halves should have been in the demo.
 
I think only certain stats take effect. Speed and agility are clearly two of them. Maybe shot power/accuracy and pass power/accuracy. But how much is a big question. No one really knows what the difference between 99 and 90 is, or 99 and 70 for that matter.
Really I'm starting to feel like stats are good/bad. 0-50 bad, 51-99 good, and that's it.
 
This is my approach for tactical defending.

Go run to the dribbler without any contain button. When close to him press X (contain) then quickly O (tackle). By close i mean closer than shortest tactical defending distance.

Using the same method in PES X + R2 and release R2 quickly. lol.

Man, i am not that patient to use that contain stuff. i'll use just jockeying instead to slow down opponent's.
 
I think only certain stats take effect. Speed and agility are clearly two of them. Maybe shot power/accuracy and pass power/accuracy. But how much is a big question. No one really knows what the difference between 99 and 90 is, or 99 and 70 for that matter.
Really I'm starting to feel like stats are good/bad. 0-50 bad, 51-99 good, and that's it.

Too many stats in a simulation approach of a sport game could leave some just pure aesthetic number and info. IIRC, i read somewhere that some people from admits that some just don't really have effect on the game. take it with a pinch of salt tho.
 
I want gameplay footage of how the player run sliders affect the game. It doesn't have to be as active as PES, just any kind of movement lol. And some kind of differentiation in gameplay between teams would be nice too. Not everyone plays a short passing game like Arsenal or Barcelona.

Yeah, I wouldn't get your hopes up that sliders will turn gameplay that you don't like into gameplay that you do. The sliders this year will have limited value considering what's being included and what's not.

I've had experiences like you though - yesterday I was enjoying the demo and today, not so much. I did have some better matches once I subbed out all the players for the lower-rated players. Pace of play I find is always better in FIFA with lesser quality teams/players.

And I have no issue pointing out FIFA's flaws as long as the arguments make sense.
 
I like the new contextual dribble animations and find dribbling improved overall but I'm not a fan of the LB Precision Dribble. Don't want to say I hate it but I sort of do.

For me I have much better luck when just relying on the new contextual animations, sharp turns with the stick, and a mixture of LT and RT. More often than not LB Precision Dribble = loss of possession for me.

my guess is your going to need it when the full game comes out, your not going to have nearly as much time or space as in the demo. it's not something your suppose to get a hang of right away, it takes weeks, sometimes months depending on how often you play.
 
I'm actually looking forward to gameplay online and vs mates in the same room. But if I play offline and get more frustration than enjoyment, it's going to be killing me haha. I'll be playing PES offline and online but was hoping to get some enjoyment out of FIFA's new career mode.

Speaking of which, I was thinking of starting off as a young player in the Australian League and trying to get poached a couple of seasons in by a club in another country and then working my way up to a top team. Not sure if that would work though.
 
I played a match of my FIFA11 Career Mode yesterday, and it felt like one of the better FIFA11 matches I'd had. With French Ligue 2 players, and with my Build Up Speed @ 60 and Chance Creation Passing maxed out @ 100, movement off the ball felt better than in the FIFA12 demo. Particularly from my forwards, who didn't just stand still next to their centre backs. My goal came from a CM making a penetrating run from deep.

The other most noticeable difference was that the CPU opponent was easier to get close to than in the 12 demo (not using the Pressure buttons). They would/could not turn away so suddenly.

If I could change one single thing between the FIFA12 demo and retail, I'd hope that the off-the-ball movement is made less static. Combined with the run slider and ability to edit Custom Tactics, that could make a big difference I think.
 
The change that happened for the last ten minutes was interesting. Exactly on 80:00, the Barcelona midfield pushed up and closed off all your passing options. Didn't impact on your experiment, but it at least shows that the AI does alter its tactics during a game.

Yeah, this is one of the interesting things you can see in the way the AI works.

A lot of people on the FIFA boards don't realise just how effective the default quick tactics and team mentalities are. The AI uses them to very good effect on the higher difficulties.

Interestingly I think the change in team mentality were due to the score and the timing and not because of what Klash was doing which is a shame.

What the AI lacks is a soul though. Obviously the AI has no memory and no emotions so you will never get that sense that its getting pissed off at you dribbling backwards and forwards across the 6 yard box.

What I would like to see is more adaptive programming in to the AI where it looks for patterns in your play and adjusts accordingly. If it could look at possession in zones of the pitch and react a little more free and less ridged this sort of thing could be solved.

In real life you would hold the ball up in the corner and someone would just go through the back of you. This isn't replicated in FIFA as the AI doesn't get the concept of time wasting IMO.
 
...In real life you would hold the ball up in the corner and someone would just go through the back of you. This isn't replicated in FIFA as the AI doesn't get the concept of time wasting IMO.

I know what you mean but it's not entirely the case. In trying to close out some games on FIFA 10 World Cup (offline vs CPU), I knocked the ball around my defence and keeper for 20-30 mins so I wouldn't concede a cheating AI goal haha. With every few passes I noticed their forwards creep further and further up the pitch around me to close off my passing options.
 
I think only certain stats take effect. Speed and agility are clearly two of them. Maybe shot power/accuracy and pass power/accuracy. But how much is a big question. No one really knows what the difference between 99 and 90 is, or 99 and 70 for that matter.
Really I'm starting to feel like stats are good/bad. 0-50 bad, 51-99 good, and that's it.

Yeah, I've long thought the exact same. Some players in the game are clearly noticably faster, noticably better dribblers, noticably better standing tacklers, perhaps one or two other attributes as well.

But it certainly does feel like it's a simple case of ON or OFF. A player is either a good dribbler (on) or not (off), is fast (on) or not (off). Any granularity of stat in between appears to be purely cosmetic and has no bearing on the level of his dribbling ability...he's just ON or OFF.

Rooney and Messi are clearly ON for speed, dribbling and shooting, so they stand out.

Most of the other stats are probably completely unused, purely cosmetic.
 
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