Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experience?

beachryan

beachryan

Golden Boot Winner
4 July 2003
Bermuda
As loads and loads of posters on here have noted, PES single player is dead, and has been for almost 5 years. WE7 was awesome, I played the ML to absolute death, but every game after that has gotten worse in terms of CPU cheats and jokingly poor scripting in the CPU's favour.

First experience with FIFA 08 was great, got into manager mode, there was so much to do I barely noticed that in away matches it was actually comical, until my roommate asked why it was that John Carew had just spun from the half way line and held off Rio and Vidic for 40 yards before inexpelicably running to teh byline and passing it backwards. It clicked that when it wants to, FIFA will NOT let you tackle their players. On the other hand, unless you're a top, top player (rooney, drogba, Ronaldos) you simply cannot control a ball to your feet with a CPU near you. Oh and chest control is an oxymoron, if the ball is in the air, you can't have it.

So basically both of the big footballing titles are pretty sh*t awful for single player. Is taht because it's impossible? Is football too random, too complicated for programmers to recreate intelligent AI capable of winning without cheating? Should they stop trying? What can they do? Thought it would be helpful to get ideas, because I worry that at the moment, there'll never be a good single player experience again!
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Fifa08's single player is excellent, I'm 310 matches into my manager mode (8th season) and I'm still really enjoying it. It's all subjective. Yes there's much that's broken in Fifa08, especially in how the AI manages (that should be mis-manages) its teams but it's still highly enjoyable, for me. I've been playing football games since the early 80s and certainly Fifa08 is the best simulation of football I've seen so far, whether or not it's the most enjoyable I'm not sure, I had some really great times with the career mode of Player Manager 1 and 2, but it's close, and if the Fifa series advances as it has so far on next gen the next few should be special.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

I think the problem is that there's too many people on the pitch to control with clever AI, the CPU power just isn't there for such a complex game spread across 21 CPU players, and so it actually needs to resort to cheats - which drives me insane and I would literally rather play no football game offline ever again than play another game like the latest PES or FIFA (which isn't a big loss with the invention of online leagues, the Evo-Web FIFA League is fantastic fun and Konami need to add this too - I can say now, if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't still have FIFA because single-player is crap and ranked matches are always full of cheating scumbags, so much so that there's not a huge difference between them and the CPU).

I was sucked into FIFA's single-player quite a lot, yet last night when I started playing it it all fell to pieces and I was infuriated at just how bad it was. It's not the fact that you can't win (because you can when you're used to knowing when the exploits are going to happen), it's the fact that A) these cheats are there in the first place, it's a matter of principal, and B) you literally can't touch them - I was trying to break their legs for 90 minutes just to vent some steam, and by the time my player was sliding on the ground their player had done a pirouette and was now running in a completely different direction.

I can see why such things are done, why the game has to delay your action (e.g. if you press pass and the CPU isn't ready for it), but it makes for a crap game experience and it's not something I could "settle" with and go "oh well, what can I do". If it's got any kind of cheating, like if any other kind of game had any kind of cheating (sports or otherwise), I don't want it.

Just out of interest - I'm not a big fan of American football games and things like that. Madden has been going for years now, is that loaded with cheats in single-player?
 
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Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Not as bad as FIFA but it does have it's moments like the defence doing magical jumps to intercept passes. It did make the game unplayable until they released a patch. But now it's patched, it's supposed to be fine.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Yeah, I think at the end of the day football is just too random for a computer. 22 people all making their own decisions at any one time is too much, as JB says. Maybe we'll have to wait for the Xbox 720 :)
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Jack Bauer said:
I think the problem is that there's too many people on the pitch to control with clever AI, the CPU power just isn't there for such a complex game spread across 21 CPU players, and so it actually needs to resort to cheats - which drives me insane and I would literally rather play no football game offline ever again than play another game like the latest PES or FIFA (which isn't a big loss with the invention of online leagues, the Evo-Web FIFA League is fantastic fun and Konami need to add this too - I can say now, if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't still have FIFA because single-player is crap and ranked matches are always full of cheating scumbags, so much so that there's not a huge difference between them and the CPU).

I was sucked into FIFA's single-player quite a lot, yet last night when I started playing it it all fell to pieces and I was infuriated at just how bad it was. It's not the fact that you can't win (because you can when you're used to knowing when the exploits are going to happen), it's the fact that A) these cheats are there in the first place, it's a matter of principal, and B) you literally can't touch them - I was trying to break their legs for 90 minutes just to vent some steam, and by the time my player was sliding on the ground their player had done a pirouette and was now running in a completely different direction.

I can see why such things are done, why the game has to delay your action (e.g. if you press pass and the CPU isn't ready for it), but it makes for a crap game experience and it's not something I could "settle" with and go "oh well, what can I do". If it's got any kind of cheating, like if any other kind of game had any kind of cheating (sports or otherwise), I don't want it.

Just out of interest - I'm not a big fan of American football games and things like that. Madden has been going for years now, is that loaded with cheats in single-player?
Click to expand...

madden with cheats... hmmm hard to say... its not the cpu power jack, programmers quite simply, are not as good as they used to be...
they can use CPU power to cover up there crappy programming...

i rareley find cheating scumbags on live, or maybe i dont know that there cheating..
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

FIFA 08 manager mode is the best single-player football game experience I have ever had.

Case closed. :)
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

gomito#10 said:
its not the cpu power jack, programmers quite simply, are not as good as they used to be...
they can use CPU power to cover up there crappy programming...
Click to expand...

I wouldn't agree with that at all, part of the problem is that any game made today gets judged firstly and fatally on how it looks, the media and consumers are such graphic whores that the majority of CPU power has to be spent on graphics, there's no way around that, AI is considered less important to developers because the media and consumers tell them that AI is less important.

Take COD4 as an example, the AI is pretty crap and does nothing that AI of previous current gen games does, in fact the developers used the same scripted AI and spawning AI cheating that has been used for years and years on previous current gen gems and previous PC games when 1ghz was a fast PC, what review scores did COD4 get again?
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Placebo said:
I wouldn't agree with that at all, part of the problem is that any game made today gets judged firstly and fatally on how it looks, the media and consumers are such graphic whores that the majority of CPU power has to be spent on graphics, there's no way around that, AI is considered less important to developers because the media and consumers tell them that AI is less important.

Take COD4 as an example, the AI is pretty crap and does nothing that AI of previous current gen games does, in fact the developers used the same scripted AI and spawning AI cheating that has been used for years and years on previous current gen gems and previous PC games when 1ghz was a fast PC, what review scores did COD4 get again?
Click to expand...

casue those developers are lazy.... and i thought graphic artist deal with graphics and programmers deal with AI... also im pretty sure the xbox has a dedicated graphic card with its own chipset... unless there integrated on the main board, not sure.... but i suspect less is spent on AI for the reason you stated, and that programmers have begun lazy and not as good as they used to be....
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

How many development teams do you have personal knowledge of? Your comments really show how little you know, it doesn't matter whether a system has a dedicated graphics card or not, there are many different elements that go into "graphics" and most of them still take up CPU cycles.

Development teams have to basically figure out where they will balance the "budget": sound, graphics, AI, everything uses up CPU cycles, the dev team decides how much processing power can be spared for each area, and as graphics these days seem to be pretty much 75%+ of what the media rate a game on and also what people who buy the games rate the games on it's no surprise that graphics is the primary concern for the majority of companies (I work for one of the few who don't think that way).

To just make a blanket statement of "lazy" shows you really have no knowledge of what goes into developing games.

From my own experience Dev teams are primarily broken up into:

Programmers
Artists
Designers
Sound Engineers

Artists is mostly self explanatory, they're told what art to make to what quality and they make it.
Sound is again mostly self explanatory, they're told what sounds to record and they do it.


The category of designers and programmers is where most people get confused. A programmer programs all of the code obviously and pieces the game together from the various elements, but they only do what the designers tell them to do essentially, a game is the sum of all of its parts and it's the designers who decide how many parts there will be, if the AI of a game is weak it's because the designers haven't done a sufficient job in deciding and planning what the AI will constitute. Designers say what they want something to do and the programmers find a way to do it.


From my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the Fifa08 next gen development team the problems (specifically in AI, manager mode integration and such) are down to the way the development team is balanced, for the next gen version there was a vast amount of art that needed making to get all the teams/players in the game as compared to the next gen Fifa07 and UCL, all dev teams have an overall budget for the amount of staff they can have, for Fifa08 a large part of that budget had to be spent on artists due to the aforementioned requirements, this meant that less could be spent on the design aspect and because of this the next gen version is less well designed and less fully designed than its current gen counterpart. That is the explanation I was given by EA and it makes sense to me from my personal experience of working for a game company, maybe it was a bit of a PR (read bullshit) answer but hopefully with 09 time will tell. I was told that for future next gen versions of Fifa there will be less of a need to have so many artists hired so there will be more room in the budget for designers and thus the game design side of Fifa (of which stronger designed AI is a part of).
 
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Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Thank you for that Placebo :)
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Placebo said:
How many development teams do you have personal knowledge of? Your comments really show how little you know, it doesn't matter whether a system has a dedicated graphics card or not, there are many different elements that go into "graphics" and most of them still take up CPU cycles.

Development teams have to basically figure out where they will balance the "budget": sound, graphics, AI, everything uses up CPU cycles, the dev team decides how much processing power can be spared for each area, and as graphics these days seem to be pretty much 75%+ of what the media rate a game on and also what people who buy the games rate the games on it's no surprise that graphics is the primary concern for the majority of companies (I work for one of the few who don't think that way).

To just make a blanket statement of "lazy" shows you really have no knowledge of what goes into developing games.

From my own experience Dev teams are primarily broken up into:

Programmers
Artists
Designers
Sound Engineers

Artists is mostly self explanatory, they're told what art to make to what quality and they make it.
Sound is again mostly self explanatory, they're told what sounds to record and they do it.


The category of designers and programmers is where most people get confused. A programmer programs all of the code obviously and pieces the game together from the various elements, but they only do what the designers tell them to do essentially, a game is the sum of all of its parts and it's the designers who decide how many parts there will be, if the AI of a game is weak it's because the designers haven't done a sufficient job in deciding and planning what the AI will constitute. Designers say what they want something to do and the programmers find a way to do it.


From my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the Fifa08 next gen development team the problems (specifically in AI, manager mode integration and such) are down to the way the development team is balanced, for the next gen version there was a vast amount of art that needed making to get all the teams/players in the game as compared to the next gen Fifa07 and UCL, all dev teams have an overall budget for the amount of staff they can have, for Fifa08 a large part of that budget had to be spent on artists due to the aforementioned requirements, this meant that less could be spent on the design aspect and because of this the next gen version is less well designed and less fully designed than its current gen counterpart. That is the explanation I was given by EA and it makes sense to me from my personal experience of working for a game company, maybe it was a bit of a PR (read bullshit) answer but hopefully with 09 time will tell. I was told that for future next gen versions of Fifa there will be less of a need to have so many artists hired so there will be more room in the budget for designers and thus the game design side of Fifa (of which stronger designed AI is a part of).
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says the big shot PR guy.. i conceded your point as being valid and your design point is valid, but there is an element of programmers/designers or architects not getting the most out of the cpu% they do have(being lazy, and or not very good). I wont even go into my experience, cause your showing yours, a bullshiter
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

What the fuck are you on gomito? Why is Placebo a bullshitter? We know he has worked for this company, and that's how he's said it's done, so I guess it's at least pretty similar in other companies...?
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Just played a tournament with my brother against the cpu, it's so bad. It seems to be even worse when you're two players because it didn't select player automatic at all, even if the option is set in the middle. When their goalkeeper kicked out the ball and none of us got to be the guy near the ball he just backed away and let the opponent take it. Why would they program a game to be like this? Why does our cpu AI back off all the time. I'm not talking about backing off to defend, I mean backing off to the side and let them pass through.

I can't see how anyone can enjoy singleplayer in this game. I'm not talking about if you're good or not, your own team AI is still really bad and unrealistic. I want a realistic game and this is absolutely not even close to that. Even PES was better on this and I fucking hated PES AI. But oh nooo, we need retarded AI to make the game challenging and FUN!!!!!!!!!! Fuck you EA and fuck you too Konami.

Like I said before, offline be a pro AI is good though but how fun is that mode to play...
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Jack Bauer said:
I think the problem is that there's too many people on the pitch to control with clever AI, the CPU power just isn't there for such a complex game spread across 21 CPU players, and so it actually needs to resort to cheats - which drives me insane and I would literally rather play no football game offline ever again than play another game like the latest PES or FIFA (which isn't a big loss with the invention of online leagues, the Evo-Web FIFA League is fantastic fun and Konami need to add this too - I can say now, if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't still have FIFA because single-player is crap and ranked matches are always full of cheating scumbags, so much so that there's not a huge difference between them and the CPU).

I was sucked into FIFA's single-player quite a lot, yet last night when I started playing it it all fell to pieces and I was infuriated at just how bad it was. It's not the fact that you can't win (because you can when you're used to knowing when the exploits are going to happen), it's the fact that A) these cheats are there in the first place, it's a matter of principal, and B) you literally can't touch them - I was trying to break their legs for 90 minutes just to vent some steam, and by the time my player was sliding on the ground their player had done a pirouette and was now running in a completely different direction.

I can see why such things are done, why the game has to delay your action (e.g. if you press pass and the CPU isn't ready for it), but it makes for a crap game experience and it's not something I could "settle" with and go "oh well, what can I do". If it's got any kind of cheating, like if any other kind of game had any kind of cheating (sports or otherwise), I don't want it.

Just out of interest - I'm not a big fan of American football games and things like that. Madden has been going for years now, is that loaded with cheats in single-player?
Click to expand...

is fifa and pes making good use of all the cpu core's on the console?
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

My God you guys are fickle.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

gomito#10 said:
I wont even go into my experience, cause your showing yours, a bullshiter
Click to expand...

What exactly am I supposed to have "bullshitted" about? Or is that just your feeble attempt at deflecting your ignorance? If you can't handle being wrong you shouldn't go around spouting baseless facts.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

gomito#10 said:
madden with cheats... hmmm hard to say... its not the cpu power jack, programmers quite simply, are not as good as they used to be...
they can use CPU power to cover up there crappy programming...

i rarely find cheating scumbags on live, or maybe i dont know that there cheating..
Click to expand...

It DOES cheat!
Whenever the CPU wants, they start to call stupid penalties that you can't control(grabbing facemask, holding, etc..), making you fumble or intercepting making exorcist-like jumps!
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

it takes a supercomputer to actually beat a human being without cheating.

and that's just chess!
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

SPMC said:
it takes a supercomputer to actually beat a human being without cheating.

and that's just chess!
Click to expand...
Good point, and very depressing as well. :(
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

SPMC said:
it takes a supercomputer to actually beat a human being without cheating.

and that's just chess!
Click to expand...
I understand the need to, shall we say alter things in favour of the AI but does it have to be so blatant and obvious... Is that down to poor programing..
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

DJ Doc4 said:
FIFA and PES are NO WHERE NEAR making good use of the PS3 and 360...
Click to expand...

exactly what im thinking. they say todays hardware cant make both games better in terms of the AI but i think they are just bullshitting. you have 22 players to mess about in ai and that can easily be split up to the 3 or 4 cores that are inside the ps3 and 360. its about time we see sports games in general making good use of all cores inside our consoles.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

I think BOTH consoles and also a decent spec PC are MORE than capable of running a game with close to Photo Realism as you can get with a SOLID AI model and a decent Game Engine to go with it... the thing is though (this is something my mate has always said to me) If they make the perfect game how are they going to make money every year? They drip feed us extra things for a reason and its called Making Money! Also we usually buy it because we know the game is good.... this year PES2008 has taken a HUGE dive backwards!
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Yea, it's a good point about making the "perfect" game. It's like with lightbulbs, they have created a lightbulb that will last forever, but they don't want to release it as they would make no more money from people keep buying new lightbulbs!
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

I didn't know that... That's terrible. And yet it's probably nothing compared to what else is being kept under wraps.
 
Re: Is it possible for programmers to make a good footballing single player experienc

Yeah, I'm sure the perfect lightbulb is true!
 
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