While PES is busy playing catch up, this would be a good time for FIFA to extend its dominance in the virtual football world. It really is amazing how much the game has improved, starting from FIFA 08. Steady slews of improvements year after year, and boom, all of a sudden the title has become the juggernaut that it is today. The team at FIFA could do very well learning the lessons from its competitor, as not so long ago, it was PES, and not FIFA, that was the top dog. What happened? Perhaps PES, pardon the awful pun, took their eyes off the ball. It’s not inconceivable that the same can happen to FIFA; and  if it does, they may potentially hand the momentum right back to Seabass and Co. Here are some things they can do to prevent that from happening:

 

Don’t Rest on Your Laurels

 

In the sports gaming world, 2011 was in many ways the Year of the Backlash. Gamers are starting to get a whiff of staleness from stalwarts such as NHL, NBA 2K and MLB: The Show (yes, it gave us analog controls, but has the on-field play changed much?). And these aren't run of the mill games, either, as they are always the perennial favorites for Game of The Year. But gamers can only be lured by the word “refinement” for so long before they start to get restless. The trick for FIFA, then, is to keep on pushing. 

 

After this year’s “holy trinity” of new features we shouldn’t expect much next year in terms of earth shattering innovations, but on the other hand they shouldn’t let complacency creep in either. Taking a year or two to polish up the ground breaking, but still rough around the edges, features like the Impact Engine and Tactical Defending is reasonable enough, but here’s hoping the developers keep pushing themselves and think of more tricks to pull from  their sleeves. 

 

If there’s one thing we can spot from the aforementioned “great games gone a little stale,” it’s that companies tend to get more conservative once they begin to dominate the field. This would be the wrong approach for FIFA to take. Again, taking a quick look across the aisle at PES' history, and one can see how quickly complacency (that's really what comes down to, no matter how the reps try to spin it) can set in, and how much quicker gamers are to shift allegiances.

 

Put the I back in AI

 

With this year’s slew of refinements on the pitch, it’s been a blast playing against other human players. But the AI is a different story. They’re not horrible, mind you, it’s just that after a while, certain weaknesses in the engine become quite noticeable.

 

First and foremost, play gets predictable, whether it’s your own or the AI’s attacking patterns. I’m far from being an expert in game programming to know why that is, the symptom is obvious enough: often times the play lacks the unpredictability that’s present in the real sport. And while tactical defending was a great first step at moving away from the one button defending scheme, the pendulum seemed to have swung too far the other way, as the AI defenders become excessively passive, and almost forces you to tiki taka your way through no matter what. Combine these two things together, and too many of the matches against the CPU become overly methodical and measured affairs.

 

Overall, repetitive seems to be the keyword — substitution patterns, formation changes, the way the AI players behave. To fully capitalize on their on pitch innovations, FIFA has to put the intelligence back in AI.

 

 

Stick to Your Guns

 

Predictably, with this year’s overhauling of the match engine, there has been some pushback over how much more effort is needed to both attack and defend properly. It’s the eternal conundrum for “sim” games — where is that fine balance between gamers having the ability to emulate the pro game without needing the smarts of a real pro to do it?

 

For better or worse, this is the path that FIFA has chosen to go down — to be the most realistic football title. Whether that is or isn’t a good choice is irrelevant now, as they are perhaps too far down the road to change course. So the most important thing to do for the franchise is to avoid developing a sudden case of cold feet and backtrack. You can’t be everything to everyone. Remember when, after great success in the late nineties, the [I]NHL [/I]series embarked to crank everything — namely scoring — up to 11, making the game resembling hockey only in the sense that there are people skating on ice, wielding sticks? The FIFA team should keep this in mind, and stick to their guns.

 

Sure, there will always be those who pine for an easier, more straightforward game of football at the expense of realism, but that’s not the direction FIFA has chosen. Now is not the time for an identity crisis. FIFA’s road to being the football sim is a long journey, and it is inevitable that a fair share of fans will jump off the wagon along the way. But perhaps that's the price you pay to try to be a realistic simulation: a slightly narrower fan base, yet a much more devoted one.