Description of a struggle
I’m still playing FIFA08. Not as often as I would like, but I am still playing it. I will go on playing it until FIFA09 is released. But it’s probably too late now for FIFA08 to become my main, or only, football game for the rest of this football game year (what’s left of it).
If the PSP & PS2 version of PES2008 hadn’t come along and rescued my PES year, I’d have played nothing but FIFA08 since the turn of the year. For definite. But ‘last-gen’ PES2008 did come along, and it did save my PES year, and thus FIFA08 has held a rather marginal position ever since.
It’s a shame, as I know there are depths to FIFA08 that I will never get to explore now. There’s just not enough time left. I’d love to have attempted to win the Quadruple in Manager Mode, on Legendary difficulty, starting with a lower-league team, and using House Rules in the transfer market to make it more realistic. What a fascinating experience that would have been—one to hold in reserve for FIFA09 and beyond. I think I might have found it impossible.
It’s always possible that both FIFA09 and PES2009 will turn out to be terrible or unsatisfactory in some way. Not much chance, in my opinion—I believe both of them will be great, I really do— but there’s still a chance. If so, I’ll always have FIFA08 to fall back upon.
At the moment I’m playing a Manager Mode career with the lowest-ranked club in the English leagues—Dagenham & Redbridge. I started out playing on Professional difficulty, which is the middle of five difficulty levels in FIFA08. The difficulty levels in FIFA08 are not the equivalents of those on Pro Evo—a fact that has probably caught out many a curious PES player. Professional level on FIFA08 is roughly the same as 4.5 stars on PES, or just below Top Player. The higher difficulty levels—World Class and Legendary—are both considerably harder than the hardest difficulty level on PES. Legendary is completely off the scale. I don’t know how anyone could play that level regularly.
I’d pretty much mastered Professional, if I may say so myself. Winning a Quadruple in my first Manager Mode career was a sign that it was maybe time to step things up a notch. I took Dag & Red from the lowest point in League Two to the cusp of the Championship. During the last few games of my promotion season from League One, I upped the difficulty to World Class—possibly reckless of me, but it was long overdue. I won promotion and have now started my campaign to get Dag & Red into the Premier League, still on World Class.
It’s hard. I’m finding it very, very hard. It’s so hard that some of it isn’t even enjoyable. Now, I adore hard games. Ninja Gaiden? Loved it. Etrian Odyssey (a really old-school RPG on the DS)? Playing it now and loving it. There aren’t enough truly hard games, in my opinion. (PES itself could do with being a lot harder.)
FIFA08 is a hard game even on its lowest difficulty setting. As you move up, things get progressively tougher. On World Class, the difficulty level hits Ninja Gaiden-proportions. Long, long periods can go by without having the ball. When I get the ball, I can’t do anything with it. In my most recent FIFA08 session I played one game where I had precisely one shot on goal in 90 minutes (played as 5-minute halves), and that shot was off-target by a country mile. (When you miss the target in FIFA08, you miss the target by a long way. The assisted shooting of PES looks and feels clumsily arcadey, almost childlike, in comparison.)
Things picked up because I persevered. That’s the key to hard games in general, and to FIFA08 in particular: perseverance. The reason games developers make so few genuinely hard games—i.e. games whose harder difficulty levels are hard and remain hard, forever, even after long experience with the game—is that hard games are not deemed ‘accessible’, and accessibility is everything from a money-making point of view. Instant gratification and bite-sized chunks of gaming are where it’s all at. (May the gods of gaming save us from the dreaded ‘casual gamer’.)
FIFA08 on its harder difficulty setting demands concentration, patience, persistence, dedication, discipline…. You can’t have half your attention on the radio. One of my worries about FIFA09 is that EA might choose to lower the difficulty settings after a lot of reviewer negativity, and bring them into line with PES settings. That had better not happen.
After a few goalless draws and 0-1 defeats—and one chastening 0-3 defeat, where I actually felt lucky to get nil—something clicked. I got it. I got what World Class on FIFA08 is all about. I started playing football, continental-style. Knocking it around at the back, waiting for an opening to emerge. In PES, especially over recent years, that style of play just isn’t encouraged. You can ping the ball forward within seconds and create a goal-scoring chance without much effort at all. Occasionally, yes, passing the ball sideways and backwards is advisable—but how often, really? About 5% of the time, in my experience. In FIFA08, that equation is almost completely turned on its head. The times when you can pass the ball forward in seconds and burst through on goal account for roughly 5% of attacks. The rest of the time, you’ve got to work hard for everything.
FIFA08 is not without its faults. Some are major, many are minor, others are just comical. Take this goal, for example—
I have a tame shot that the dodgy keeper ‘edges’ with his palm. The ball rolls towards an unguarded net, but is stopped by a CPU defender, who knocks it back toward the now-upright keeper. The ball stops at the keeper’s feet. Evidently the AI’s script doesn’t know what to do here, because neither the defender nor keeper try to do anything else with the loose ball. My striker gets in between them and bundles the ball into the net. I couldn’t believe my luck. That was a big goal in an important game.
As things stand right now, I’m sitting in 9th place in the Championship. I’m still struggling to find lasting form at the World Class difficulty level. I doubt I’ll be able to find my feet in time to make a push for promotion this season. But that’s fine by me. Consecutive promotions whilst playing on Professional difficulty made me get more than a little complacent about FIFA08. Moving things up a level has whetted my appetite for the struggle again.
Greg
I cannot ever see FIFA not producing a bad game again. It has took them a lifetime to get the game-play correct. They have achieved this with FIFA 08 and EURO 2008. FIFA 09 will take it to another level.
The people that complain about it, are the same people who will never see the faults in PES, which are many.
It has a steep learning curve, which again people want instant success with games, FIFA does not allow this. It takes hard work, patience to succeed and that’s what I like about it.
NO game is perfect (or probably ever will be) I try to enjoy it for what it is, which is a brilliant attempt at a football simulation. FIFA suits what I am now looking for in a football game and gives me few hours entertainment each day.
Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes it’s ugly, sometimes it’s a bit slow and sometimes you hate it – sounds like football to me.
I have never seen a goalkeeper make that sort of mistake in what must be 200+ games I have played. It is a howler.
I am sampling World Class more and more, with interesting findings. It is definitely brings more of a realism to proceedings.
I must say, I haven’t heard this before –
One of my worries about FIFA09 is that EA might choose to lower the difficulty settings after a lot of reviewer negativity, and bring them into line with PES settings. That had better not happen.
I hope to God, that they don’t EVER change the difficulty settings in line with PES. That would be a disaster.
heraldo – I fully agree. What I was trying to say in the post (in my usual long-winded fashion) was that FIFA08 is a great HARD game, and that I love hard games. I included the goal replay just for its novelty value. It’s the only goal of its kind that I’ve seen on FIFA08.
One thing I didn’t have time to explore fully (maybe next week) is the likelihood that my playing of PES2008 and swapping back and forth continuously is damaging my experience of both games.
I’m conscious that FIFA08 has been relatively neglected by me since I got hold of the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 back in March. I don’t want that to happen with FIFA09, which is my way of saying that if PES2009 isn’t seriously up to scratch I’ll be playing FIFA09 as my main football game for the entire football game year.
Re. my last point about the reviewer negativity towards the difficulty of FIFA08 affecting EA’s assessment of where they need to go with the difficulty levels for FIFA09, if you check back on FIFA08’s reviews at the time of its release you’ll find a lot of complaining and sneering from ignorant reviewers about the game’s difficulty even on the lowest possible setting. (Remember that next-gen PES2008 had yet to come out, and everybody was anticipating it would be the greatest-ever football game.)
EA has shown in various ways down the years that it is very sensitive to reviewers (and to fans of course). I just hope that the formidable difficulty levels that I’m currently playing and enjoying on FIFA08 don’t get ‘nerfed’ by EA out of some sense of misplaced fan-service, which would really just be blatant commercialism. That’s what I’m worried about because EA have for so long been synonymous with commercialism, and FIFA08 was a refreshing departure from that.
Greg
I remember you saying to me that you can effortlessly switch back and forth on both games. Having played FIFA for nearly 2 months now, I now see that it’s totally different from PES in every way. It is so much harder. My problem when first switching to FIFA was that I made the mistake of trying to play it like PES. Mainly my major fault was holding the sprint button. Which is no no with FIFA.
Going back to the difficulty levels, if people find it too hard, go down a level. I remember saying to you a month or so ago, that professional was so hard. You learn to adapt your game. FIFA is challenging but again, I really hope they don’t change the format of the difficulty levels. People can find their own level within the current structure.
I said that swapping between them was ‘effortless’ did I…?! Ouch. I was so wrong. I often find myself trying to sprint all the time on FIFA08, which as you correctly point out is just not the done thing – it ruins all efforts to actually play the game.
This is why I’m declaring now – and will stick to – that after FIFA09 and PES2009 come out I’ll be faced with a decision. If PES2009 is an arcadey mess of a kid’s game, I’ll be FIFA09ing it all the way.
Re. the present, I’ve been thinking of some new ideas for the blog. Tomorrow’s post will be a little bit different.
Greg
FIFA is definitely my first choice football title. I have played 3 games today on world class, which were excellent games. So lifelike, and I don’t think I’ve enjoyed playing computer football games as much as I did with these ones.
Don’t know if you have seen this FIFA 09 video clip, one minute into the clip there is Arena footage. Have a look, and tell me what you see behind the goals. I think it’s a wall, for free kick practice, like you see at Professional football training grounds. If it is, another piece of brilliance from EA.
Here is the clip http://games.fok.nl/news.php?newsid=25960