Hopefully you’ve all read the first couple of blogs being released by my colleagues David and Christophe. They provided a really good overview about FIFA 10 in general and specifically the game play and online parts of the game. In this blog I will talk about the Manager Mode feature, where we have put a lot of Development focus this year.

Based on playing FIFA 09 and the feedback the community provided, we started by creating a shortlist of features that either had to be improved on or had to be completely redone. Needless to say, the list got pretty long, pretty quick and we had to make some tough decisions to ensure we focus on the most important pieces of the puzzle first.

At the end of pre-pro we came up with the following list:
- Match Realism
- Transfer Authenticity
- Player Development
- Football Atmosphere

For this first blog I will focus on Match Realism and Transfer Authenticity. Later on there will be another blog that will cover the other two topics. For the ones that can’t wait, thanks to Weepeeler, I already “spilled a couple of beans” in the FIFA forums in the Manager Mode questions and answers thread.

Hey, don’t leave yet…Match Realism and Transfer Authenticity…here we go!!!

Match Realism

Match Realism is a very broad term for Manager Mode this includes everything related to simulating matches, from generating CPU results to league standings and generating match events such as shots, fouls and goals. The FIFA 09 sim engine was not producing the most realistic results and on top of that was very rigid “under the hood”. When trying to address some of the issues that were bugging us, we soon noticed the limitations of the current system and decided to create a new one with more depth and easier tune-ability. To make sure we can iterate on this engine fast, we also developed a tool that allows us to play around with multiple factors outside of the game.

Here’s what this tool looks like..

The tool enables us to look at and address many issues, here are a few examples of what it can do:

- Simulate specific match-ups, e.g. have Manchester Utd play Barca back to back 10 times
- Simulate whole seasons, e.g. look at the end of season standings and stats for the EPL
- Look at the events from specific matches , e.g. who passed to who, when did tackles occur, who scored goals or provided the assist
- Change formations of teams and see the immediate impact, e.g. sometimes the sim engine favors a specific formation, with the help of this tool we can find and address these issues
- Edit probabilities of events, e.g. the chance of a defender scoring a goal, a striker receiving a red card, a GK having a clean sheet or the impact a Left Wing Back has on the midfield of his team

The most interesting for you (as well as us :)) is the final result. The biggest test for the authenticity of a football sim engine is the end of season standings. Therefore let’s just have a quick look at the impact this will have on FIFA 10 when you play through a full Manager Mode season. Please keep in mind that we’re not 100% done with this yet and some of the stats are still being tuned, but overall we believe this is a major improvement over last year.

The database (all players and stats) that was used for this full EPL season sim was last year’s. Therefore we can compare this with last year’s real EPL standings. As you can see we have a very realistic top 5 already - although they might be a bit high scoring, i.e. Manchester UTD scored “only” 68 goals in the real world. We have a good amount of surprise teams (i.e. Aston Villa, Tottenham) and we predicted one of the three relegated teams correctly - if you take Boro and Newcastle out, Hull would have been relegated as well and we’d be correct for 2 out of 3 :).

To sum it up, with the help of the tool we were able to address our top 5 issues related to match simming:
1. Better top 5 - best teams qualify for European cups
2. Promotions and Relegations - top teams will very rarely go down a division
3. Overall season stats, i.e. total goals scored per season, yellow cards per game
4. Player stats, i.e. who scores the goals, who receives cards
5. 11 of the year - Select players for the 11 of the year based on player stats

Transfer Authenticity

One of the most exciting times for football in real life is the Transfer Period. Clubs trying to get rid of players, managers trying to add the right player to make their team a contender and rumors about potential player transfers dominate the press during these weeks. We’ve just witnessed a couple of monster transfers by Real Madrid who snatched up Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Benzema. The reaction to these transfers from the press and football fans around the world is immense. Excitement, jealousy, love and hate are just a few of the emotions football transfers produce.

More than enough reason to see how our transfer system in FIFA 09 compares to the real world. Ronaldinho to Aalborg? Carlos Tevez to Grasshoppers? Cristiano to Charlton, only to sit on the bench for 76 minutes? Ok, enough…this is painful.

It was very clear that some major rework had to be done in order to make the transfer system exciting again.

Let’s start with some fundamental changes related to the financial system. FIFA 09 was not very challenging as the sponsors provided you with a lot of money. We’ve adjusted the sponsor payouts for FIFA 10 and they will only play a minor role. This year the board will be the major source of “income” for your club.

The board will grant you two different budgets you will have to manage, Club Budget and Wage Budget. Club budget will be used to pay for players transfer fees, purchase staff upgrades and so on, while the Wage Budget will pay for your player’s wages. You will start with a specific amount of money, which ensures that Chelsea and Manchester City are rich, while Bolton and promoted side Burnley don’t have a lot of cash to spend.

When selecting a club, you will be made aware of its financial situation as well as to who their best players are.

The next fun-damental change is related to the transfer and wage values for players. For FIFA 10 we take into account a large amount of factors to determine the play-ers transfer value, i.e. current over- all, future overall, contract length, player position, player form and so on. To make a long story short, here’re the currently most expensive players in FIFA 10.

The 3rd big piece we’ve tackled this year is the CPU Manager and the player AI. What this means is that CPU Managers will be smarter and that they are aware who their star players are, as a result they will try to lock them up in long term contracts. On the other hand, they will also be able to determine which positions they have too many players for and they will try to get rid of some of their surplus players.

The result of this can be seen on the “Transfer Listed Players” screen, which shows a list of the most interesting players that are “On Sale”. This screen will be shown to you when you first start of your Manager Mode and you begin to plan your acquisitions.

Both of these improvements come into play when we’re talking about the CPU managers doing player transfers with each other or when the user is trying to sign a player. One of the most visible changes here is that the CPU managers are now bound to the constraints of their budget, so they can’t go off and buy any player. As a result the movement of big players has been reduced, however when they transfer, they will go to teams that can afford them. Here’re the transfers that happened after I played my first friendly…

There’s also new logic for players accepting/rejecting offers and we’ve added several new reasons why players wouldn’t sign with you.

When I played with Chelsea I’ve tried to sign the Argentine player Ledesma, but he actually declined my offer, due to my team being too strong down the middle. Attempting to sign the same player with my club Stuttgart wasn’t possible either as he thought my side is not strong enough to compete in Europe.

In the end you will have to find the right players and entice them with the right offer to have them join your squad. Another pretty neat feature we’ve added this year is that we’ve removed the bid system. Due to this you can bid on as many players as you like. Once the player and your club have come to an agreement, you have the last say in signing or rejecting this player. The reason for this is, that you might need to find a CM but you have 3 or 4 players you’re interested in. Now you can negotiate with all of them and in case they all accept your offer, you can choose which ones to say “Yay” or ” Nay” to.

After doing all of this, we still thought we’re missing something. In order to spice the transfer system up, we’ve added transfer rumors (looks like Gago really wants out of Madrid after they’ve bought all these superstars :). The rumors will mainly affect top players and you will see the rumors from the Manager Mode HUB, which acts as a “desktop” and allows you to review the most important pieces of information at a glance.

That’s it for now - looking forward to discuss the new Manager Mode features with you…Cheers, Marcel