FIFA 11 reinvents player authenticity – on and off the ball – for every player and at every position on the pitch with Personality+, an all-new feature that sees individual abilities reflected in game, enabling clear differentiation for every player.

With Personality+ a footballer’s abilities on the pitch is mirrored authentically in game, creating individual personalities. Players will be distinguished from one another through a sophisticated database that evaluates and grades each player’s skill-set over 36 attributes and 57 traits, compiled by 1700 scouts around the world. Real Madrid’s Kaka will deliver crisp, creative passes, Barcelona’s Andres Iniesta will utilize tighter turns and close control to dribble through defenses, Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney will hold off defenders and strike shots from distance with pace, and top-flight defenders like Giorgio Chiellini of Juventus will anticipate, predict and react to offensive players to win back possession.

Goalkeepers have also been injected with Personality+. The real-life personality of the keeper, whether acrobatic or traditional, will dictate his style in game. Dive attributes will determine keepers with ability to reach for further shots while reflex attributes determine reaction times, enabling a keeper like Petr Cech of Chelsea FC to showcase world-class skills.

Building on the FIFA 10 gameplay that won 50 sports game of the year awards, FIFA 11 introduces new Pro Passing where pass accuracy is determined by a gamer’s ability on the control pad, and player skill, situation and urgency on the pitch. Plus, experience true freedom in man-to-man interactions with 360° Fight for Possession that transforms physical play from just lateral jostling to full 360° collisions.

A series of new customization tools will enable fans to transform FIFA 11 in new and personally meaningful ways. Go online in Creation Center to create a player or team, share with friends and download into your console. Plus, assign customized chants for any team and play music tracks from your existing library within the game.

New features and innovations will be revealed in the coming months.

Key Features
•    Personality+ — A footballer’s performance on the pitch is mirrored authentically in game, creating clearly differentiated players with individual personalities. Personality+ at every position and for every player reinvents how players perform—on and off the ball.
•    Personality+ Goalkeepers—The real-life personality of the Keeper, whether acrobatic or traditional, will dictate his style in the game. Dive attributes will determine the keepers with the ability to reach for further shots while Reflex attribute determine reaction times.
•    Personality+ CPU AI— CPU controlled football stars have a suite of skill moves to exploit, with star player attributes and specific behaviours attributed to particular players.
•    Personality+ Celebrations—User Controlled Celebrations 2.0 enables you to perform your players’ trademark celebration & interact with teammates in real-time.
•    Personality+ Player Models— Greater variety of bodies and models further distinguishes each player. Plus, new dribble run styles perfectly match players’ real-world abilities and style.
•    Pro Passing System— A new passing system where pass accuracy is determined by a gamer’s ability on the control pad, and player skill, situation and urgency on the pitch. Poor decisions or over/under striking the ball will mean error-prone outcomes. New types of passes such as swerve passes will enable players to make a safer and more effective play.
•    360° Fight For Possession —True freedom in man-to-man interactions, transforming physical play from individual lateral jostling to full 360° collisions involving multiple players.
•    Advanced Intelligence: REAL AI now controls CPU players enabling them to recognize and react to patterns of play more sophisticated than simple on-the-ball decisions. Plus, hundreds of skill moves have been recorded and assigned to thousands of players.
•    Advanced Goalkeeper Awareness— Goalkeepers are now more aware of their surroundings and react more intelligently to each threat. Improvements include sprinting to cut off a loose ball, demonstrating urgency when scrambling back to the net, and the aptitude to skillfully identify and react to lob shots.
•    Creation Centre: Go online to craft your own player and create the team of your dreams. Plus, manage your team’s formations and tactics right from the web. Create your player’s appearance, accessories and attributes and then create a team with a distinctive crest and kits. Share with friends and download into your console to play online, in Tournaments and in Kick-Off matches. Created players can also be used in the Arena, Career Mode and Lounge Mode.
•    Career Mode: A new engine delivers an authentic experience that mimics the real-world game. Begin as a real player, created player or Virtual Pro and evolve into a player-manager and manager–or just begin at the top–and enjoy a 15-year career. Players now receive instant feedback and enjoy a vastly improved status system. Plus, authentic tournament structures, results and new calendar system, featuring simultaneous simulations, improve the speed and flow of games. Featuring new Team Management for simpler player comparison and Friends Leaderboard to compare stats and earnings.
•    My Music & Audio— Assign customized chants for every team and league. Set your home club’s anthems and chants to play during player introductions, halftime, and after goals. Even hear your name echo in the stands of Old Trafford or San Siro with customized chants for your Virtual Pro. Plus, play music from your hard drive in game.
•    Advanced Goalkeeper Awareness— Goalkeepers are now more aware of their surroundings and react more intelligently to each threat. Improvements include sprinting to cut off a loose ball, demonstrating urgency when scrambling back to the net, and the aptitude to skillfully identify and react to lob shots.
•    FIFA Theatre — Save highlights from any match – including online – right to your hard drive to view, replay or upload to easportsfootball.com at any time.
•    Complete Authenticity —Over 30 officially licensed leagues, 500 licensed teams and more than 15,000 players.

Keep reading for more details!

FIFA Manager 11 is the 10th edition of the franchise, featuring a vast array of all-new features. Hundreds of improvements to the game have been made across the board with a special focus on its core areas. Introduced last year it also includes a separate online mode where up to 8 players can play against each other over the internet.

The manager still has full control over the management of a football club. In the game you are responsible for the line-up, the tactics and the training of your team – as well as for signing the right players, improving the club facilities and the stadium. Special highlights are the FIFA 3D engine, more than 13,000 original player pictures, the player manager mode, the national team manager mode, the Create-a-Club mode and the Match Prognosis Tool.

Line-up and Tactics

The tactics area is completely re-designed and now offers a unique complexity. Target positions for every single player in offensive and defensive play can be set directly on the pitch (even in Full HD). The manager can now also choose between several variations for goal and corner kicks. Various tactic presets and formations can be defined and easily selected before a game with just one mouse click. A new formation assistant guarantees optimal adjustment of the manager’s line-up in case of bans or injuries without permanent efforts of the manager. For beginners the new Tactics Wizard makes life really easy. Before its use every tactical option is explained in detail and the manager can make informed step-by-step decisions.

New Rating, Skill and Morale System

FIFA Manager 11 will use a new system to rate its about 40,000 players and to make the differences between the players more obvious.

Every player gets a playing level for every position, and the skill differences between the positions will become a lot more realistic. Players will be more flexible to learn new positions, and experience becomes more important. The game also introduces a new morale system, which makes it more challenging for the user to keep a high morale for all players, especially in strong teams with a lot of competition between the players.

Transfer Market

For many fans the transfer window in summer has now become more exciting than the actual season.

The realistic implementation of this period, surely the most stressful for any manager, is another focal point in this year’s FIFA Manager. This core feature of every football management simulation now confronts the manager with all the challenges real managers have to face. Players and agents will now tell you what they expect from you ahead of the talks and the AI clubs will become a lot smarter and use all the tactics we know from real-life, e.g. they make offers to players just to weaken the direct competition. Life at a small club also becomes much harder and if there is only a 1-year contract left it’s often only the decision between the money or an unhappy player for one last year. The clubs will now have long-term strategies and will immediately react if a season went not as good as expected.

The media pressure is a central challenge for managers with its regular gossip, talks about offers and contract extensions or news on unsatisfied players. There is even a newspaper archive with all the headlines and articles from the first rumours to the signed contract.

But the manager can also use the very nature of the press to his advantage. He can involve the media at an early stage of negotiations with his favourite players, by praising them or advising them to not extent their contract at their club, all to direct them to his own club later. Much like in reality, it pays off if the manager cares about new signings from a very early stage.

Just Football

FIFA Manager is well-known to simulate all aspects of club management. This year a new mode allows the user to just focus on teams and transfers.

Other features that make the game more accessible are a new Search feature to find clubs, players and league data a lot faster and a new “Links Widget” to quickly jump to the game areas used most often.

Separate World Cup Mode

It is possible to replay the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ directly from the main menu. This is a quick game mode that takes 20 minutes to 2 hours to complete, depending on the manager’s success and love for details.

Community Wishes

FIFA Manager 11 comes along with a series of community driven improvements, e.g. a special presentation of local matches, new cup draws, the possibility to set the clubs for all “Found a Club” leagues, more transfers in last 24 hours before the transfer market closes, thousands of new lines of text in the Live Ticker, new FIFA player faces, youth player contract negotiations, and many other advances in practically all areas of the game.

New pre-matchday screens give the manager additional information on the next opponent, important other matches, historic results and on the cities and stadiums.

Extended Online Mode

FIFA Manager 11 also includes an extended Online Mode which has been successfully introduced last year. Amongst other features, a new action-card system has been implemented, allowing even more direct influence on the match action.

Other new features are a draft for youth players, new auction types and regular sponsor missions, which let the managers compete for bonus payments.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Microsoft XP SP3 (Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98/ME, Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows NT are not supported), Microsoft Windows Vista™, Microsoft Windows 7
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1 GB
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB or greater, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB or greater, Pixel shader 2.0 and above.

8 GB available hard disk space
8x DVD-ROM drive
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

The guys at VGZ have done some, comparing last year to this year. They’re particularly useful when the differences are subtle, and at first a large improvement isn’t realised instantly.

Click here to see them.

Looking good, with clearly improved faces and player models.

As posted on the Spanish FIFA 10 Facebook page (thanks to jjoseca for the heads up), click here for the full size image. Bigger sizes, and more pics tomorrow!

Above is a personal favourite. I’m a huge fan of Özil, and seeing him represented in the game perfectly certainly is a buzz. Massive kudos to EA for taking fan feedback on board and really going to work on player representation.

See all the players by clicking here.

First of all, some screenshots from “The Story Of Qualifying” mode have been uploaded onto the official FIFA Facebook page (check out the gallery below).

But that’s not all the screenshots that have been released. 14 in-game screenshots have been published in this article by Gamersyde.com.

While we’re on the subject of pictures, some moving pictures – I believe the kids call them “movies” – have also been released. The in-game videos are all courtesy of French PES website WeArePES.com, and the Simon Humber interview comes from xg247.co.uk.

But enough with the bright shiny pictures and videos, how about some good old fashioned black and white reading material? I hear you, don’t worry. There’s plenty of stuff to talk about.

VideoGamer.com reports that EA are “not interested” in making money from World Cup DLC. You can read the story in full if you click here.

VG247.com have put together an article about whether FIFA World Cup’s improvements are enough to merit a purchase from FIFA 10 owners, which you can see if you click here.

SuccesFull.fr has provided a possible list of trophies/achievements for PS3/360 players of the game, which is nice for any achievement whores out there such as myself; you can check that out if you click here.

And finally, if you’re still hungry for more, check out this list of previews – seven in total from six different websites. Enjoy FIFA fans!

• CrunchGear preview
• CVG preview
• EuroGamer preview
• Spong preview
• VideoGamer.com preview
• IncGamers.com preview 1
• IncGamers.com preview 2

Click here to see them. Thanks to Nanny for the heads up as always.

EA have released some new pics for 2010 FIFA World Cup. To see them all, click here.

Damn EA are quick, Ferdinand captain already…

That’s a pretty sharp graphics upgrade…