Ok, here we go Part II of our Career Mode: The Road To Success article series and as always lets us know if you agree, disagree or if you have any bright ideas of your own for Career Mode in FIFA 13. If you missed it be sure to check out Part One which was released a few weeks ago.

Squad report

One of the major problems with FIFA 11’s Career Mode was the lack of a high level overview of your squad and how your players were developing and performing over multiple seasons. It’s surprising then that the largely excellent Squad Report in FIFA 12 hasn’t received a great deal of praise or approval from the FIFA community.

The design itself is simplistic but when conveying information on this scale that’s exactly what’s required. The split screen view showing morale, form, OVR progression, attribute growth and statistics with just a single trigger for navigation is a shining example of usability which should be replicated in other areas of Career Mode.

My criticism is that the Squad Report isn’t prominent enough throughout Career Modes design and being tucked away under Team Management on the main menu doesn’t help. I’d imagine quite a few people are missing out on the Squad Report entirely because they just don’t know it exists. Squad Report’s influence should be weaved more deeply in to the fabric of Career Mode and a direct link to team tactics seems like the most logical option going forward.

I’d really like Squad Report to give us the ability to compare players too and I’d also like to see the attribute hexagon famously used in PES, but also in FIFA’s own Creation Centre to be part of the report. It’s again, brutally simple in design but that’s the beauty of it, because once hexagons are overlaid the differences in player abilities are immediately obvious.

Its rare that you see such success from a new Career Mode feature on its maiden outing and my only disappointment is that the Squad Report isn’t utilised prominently enough. For that reason it feels tacked-on right now rather than being integral to the day-to-day management your squad.

Scouting

After an unexplained period of absence scouting has made a very welcome return to Career Mode in FIFA 12 albeit this time under a slightly different guise. The scouting system plugs solely in to the Youth Academy system this time and it’s here that the water becomes slightly muddied.

I understand EA’s reasoning and I agree that it is a waste of time scouting Lionel Messi, but with a database of players and teams so vast I think it’s asking an awful lot of the FIFA community to have football knowledge on that scale. You could of course use the Transfer Search to scour the unknown players within FIFA’s player database but that doesn’t provide the same feeling of achievement you get from signing a player you’ve scouted over weeks and months.

There’s some work to do on the reporting end too because whilst the information about a players potential rating is great, the detail on the type of player you’ve scouted isn’t always readily available. Just a one-liner about whether they’re an attacking fullback, a play-maker, or a target man would suffice and information about how they compare to existing players within your squad would also be very welcome.

Scouting is back and that in itself is a great thing for Career Mode in FIFA 13, but there’s certainly a discussion to be had about how far scouting’s reach should extend and whether the licensed player database ought to be considered in scope. Personally I think it should.

Youth Academy

The last thing we were probably expecting to get in FIFA 12’s Career Mode considering the failings seen in FIFA 11 was a working Youth Academy. Most people would have prioritised a fully functioning reserve squad over any youth offering, but in FIFA 12 the new youth development system is one of the stronger additions.

The Youth Academy itself is a little thread bare options wise in FIFA 12 and once you’ve scouted and signed a player they essentially sit in the Youth Academy until they’re old enough for first team selection. It’s only when the player actually leaves the Youth Academy that interest ramps up because then you start to play them in matches and find out whether their early promise was well judged.

The Youth Academy itself needs to become more than just a holding pen for 16 year old boys (easy…) in FIFA 13 and there needs to be much more to youth player development than sporadic match experience. Squad training isn’t something Career Mode currently caters for so maybe there’s an opportunity to use the Youth Academy as a testing ground for a new training system? Youth players need to be viewed as unfinished products and as managers we should to be able to utilise training to help guide their development, moulding them in to the type of player the team requires.

One thing I really like about the Youth Academy setup is the monthly reports which update you on how player development and new scouting is progressing. The reports act as reminder as much as anything to continually monitor your Youth Academy and the data within the reports is almost always useful. What I’d like to see though in addition to this report, is a monthly report for the first team squad as well, possibly produced by the Assistant Manager. Just to let us know which players are in form, who’s playing poorly and who I should consider giving a run in the side.

The Youth Academy system is in its infancy in Career Mode and to my knowledge it was a fairly late addition during the FIFA 12 development cycle. For that reason it can be absolved of some of its shortcomings but with a full development cycle in front of it we should certainly expect to see much greater things in FIFA 13.

Customisation

Making Career Mode feel fresh and exciting for 15 seasons is a very difficult task and CPU Team Individuality (see part 1) will be at the forefront of any major improvements for FIFA 13. What Career Mode doesn’t currently provide though are the tools to extend some of the variety ourselves in terms of the way players in our squad are visually represented.

If Career Mode had a self-contained edit mode which allowed you to tweak player customisation (even if it’s only for the squad you are managing) I think it could be a real longevity winner. Modern day footballers change boots, kit styles and haircuts like they’re going out of fashion, which makes Career Modes fifteen season, uniformed player models a contributing factor towards multiple season burnout, which a lot of Career Mode enthusiasts experience.

Career Mode needs to feel different on a game by game basis tactically, but it also needs to differ visually purely to add variety to each seasons campaign. Handing this aesthetic freedom over to the community would be a great move in my opinion and as it only affects the personal offline experience it carries zero risk for EA to include it, and it goes without saying that we should be allowed to appear on the Career Mode leader boards with aesthetic only changes.

Where this edit mode would probably have the biggest impact is for the youth players that arrive from the academy. Currently we don’t get a say in their styling, or the god awful selection of generic EA boots they get assigned by default and for that reason they feel very manufactured. With just a small touch of customisation to compliment the type of youth player you’re developing, the already compelling bond between manager and player could be even further enhanced.

Again it comes down to choice; some people won’t care for, or even use a Career Mode editing suite but I know for a fact that most of the community would embrace the freedom to visually overhaul their squad season by season. Even if it only improves Career Modes longevity by 5% it’s still worth doing because invariably the best things are always found in the finite detail.

Match Simulation

If you’re a battle hardened Career Mode purist, the thought of simulating a match will probably be enough to make your blood boil but if the option to sim is going to be in Career Mode it needs to function and perform properly.

The most glaring omission really is the ability to amend Team Management after you’ve chosen to sim a match, which to me makes no sense whatsoever. Your default line-up may indeed by your preferred setup, but with fatigue and injuries taking their toll over a season it’s very unlikely that you’ll be routinely unchanged.

Another frustration is that once a simulation has started you’re unable to interrupt it to make your own substitutions. The CPU does an “okay” job of handling this but it only tends to swap players on a  like-for-like basis which doesn’t help your cause if your team ever find themselves a goal behind.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all though is the way results are determined when simulating. If the engine decides the match outcome before we see the highlights play out in real time (a question for EA?) then there’s no point in showing it to us at all. In fact if the result is scripted I’d argue that there’s no point having the simulate option in Career Mode, just remove it entirely and make Career Mode a genuinely pure management experience.

What EA decide to remove from Career Mode is just as important as the things they decide to improve or implement from scratch and I think match simulation is fat I’d instantly trim. If the results are indeed scripted, the frustration this rather poorly constructed feature brings to Career Mode  just isn’t worth the hassle.

The Media

An incredible amount of depth has been injected in the media aspect of Career Mode this year and the volume of new text especially has caused EA plenty of technical headaches. Complimenting this added depth are the Player Stories which have finally given FIFA’s superstar cast some personality and a feeling that they have their own personal agendas as well as routinely taking to the pitch each week.

Usability can be an issue at times though and oddly when Career Mode is advancing you can’t read the news articles in your feed, when it’s arguably the most appropriate time to read them. Any time Career Mode spends loading is our time wasted and making news articles seamlessly readable during the game week advancement would represent a major step forward for immersion.

The content of the news articles is largely excellent but for me what they lack is user interaction. For example, if a news article pops-up about a player handing in a surprise transfer request, I should be able to click on that news feed and jump straight to the transfer negotiation for that player. But because the news articles aren’t linked to the body of Career Mode it makes the media pane feel like a separate entity rather an embedded part of modern football culture.

The “talk to the press” feature is disappointingly lightweight in FIFA 12 but I’m glad Career Mode does allow us choose where and when to talk to the press, as being forced before every match would rapidly become tiresome. I think there’s certainly a place for some dynamic press conferences though, which could launch to mark a new signing, or an upcoming derby game. This would definitely complement the chosen media interaction well and it would give the perception that the Career Mode media are actively interested in your club rather than it being a one way relationship.

The options within “talk to the press” also need to be expanded because having just three conversation streams makes it feel really limited. I also don’t like the option “unsettle” because what I say should unsettle an opposing manager based on context of the dialogue, rather than me making a conscious decision to unsettle them. It’s the wording that’s a bit odd and considering EA (rightly) mask the knock-on effects produced by talk to press, it’s a bit hypocritical to describe the desired outcome of a conversation stream so blatantly.

With some added variety to player story scenarios, a wider selection of images to accompany media posts and hopefully some of the above suggestions, we could have a living, breathing media centre in Career Mode for the first time. A massive step forward this year but as with each and every feature, room for improvement.

Part III of the Career Mode: Road To Success article series will cover “the little things” which could be changed for FIFA 13 and will be released very soon so watch this space.

The next video, coming soon will be covering the new Career Mode Youth Academy system.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other obvious things to look out for are the incredibly polished menu design, the player stories which pop up throughout Career Mode, the new Squad Report screens (Anelka/Benayoun) and the new colour coded player attributes.

We’re expecting more FIFA 12 Career Mode videos to follow this one, so watch this space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll have other pretty big news coming next week too, so make sure you check back throughout…

A new interview with World Cup producer Simon Humber has appeared; check it out above.

I especially like the swearing and the reference to this very site at the end. This man is a proper producer!

About the game going gold: It went gold about three weeks ago.

Regarding any differences between the demo and the final game: You’re playing the final gameplay, although that won’t stop a bunch of people claiming the full game and the demo are different. That happened on EURO too.

Regarding the promised squad updates: We plan to do two updates; one when the final 23 players are known [to be released after the round of 16], [another] during the tournament to update according to form.

Responding to those asking to make the game slower: Slowing or speeding up the game has many game breaking problems. If you slow the players and not the ball they don’t intercept passes, and if you slow both then you get floaty ball physics.

Responding to those saying that the game is too fast: Take a second to think about it. Think of two screens, one is 20 inches wide, the other 40 inches. If the camera didn’t follow the ball, then if you ran the player from the left side of the screen to the right side then it would take the same time on both TVs but on the big TV the player has twice as much screen width to cover. So to your eyes it appears faster, it’s an optical illusion of sorts. This assumes you are sitting the same distance away from both screens. I prefer to sit close to a smaller screen, than on my sofa with my big screen. I remember when we launched the FIFA 07 demo, I told everyone something had gone wrong and the speed was mental!

About the star ratings: The star ratings are a load of **** in any case. You guys get so wound up about them, but they don’t do anything. They are based on the overall ratings of a certain number of players, and the overall ratings are numbers that just represent some measure of quality, they don’t do anything by themselves. You’re way better off looking at player stats as they are what are used in gameplay to determine the quality of actions.

About correcting Spain’s away kit: We don’t have to contact them to change it, the problem now is time has run out ages ago. So to correct it means doing something post ship, and that gets muy complicato mi amigo. – Adidas send us the design for the kit. We make the kit. We send it back to Adidas. Adidas say ‘oh yes, well done EA, that’s right, you can now put it in the game.’ We put it in the game. We finish the game. Adidas launch the new kit and it’s different to what they gave us and approved from us. You moan.

An interesting fact for Ireland fans: Ireland have two home kits and one away kit.

Regarding Be A Pro mode and Online Team Play mode: World Cup has BAP, [no] OTP.

More on the absence of Online Team Play: There’s no 10 v 10 in World Cup. 10 v 10 is a massive amount of work. Even just to do what was in FIFA 10 and make no improvements is a lot of days work. Looking at our usage figures we deduced that there would be too little variety in matches in World Cup. They’d be way too many England v England v England v USA v France v Germany games. You’d get fed up of that. With the time we then had we could innovate with new online modes, namely Online World Cup & World League Ladder. So you can still get your 10 v 10 fix in FIFA 10, and experience brand new online modes in World Cup.

Regarding World Cup tournament customisation: You can customise the teams in the 32 team finals but you can’t create a tournament with the number of rounds, groups etc.

About the special XI teams: Classic XI has some new players. adidas XI is naturally their players. Not sure if they can be selected for unranked matches.

Regarding the new heading tweaks: Attacking headers are improved. Players seek space in the area and make more effort to get on the end of crosses.

About the midfield gameplay of future titles: The whole midfield, put your foot on the ball and survey your options is something we’ve talked about, especially in 10 v 10. I’d personally like it to be fully manual and people be skilled enough to be a playmaker. But to do that you have to negate pressing and that of course causes all manner of problems with getting into position to block or make tackles. Football games are ****ing complicated, otherwise there would be more than us and Konami still making them. Unlike first person shooters where there are ****loads of them.

An interesting fact about international retirements: There are players who retired during qualifying who retire in the game at the same point.

Regarding the new noise of the ball hitting the net: Yep the noise for the ball hitting the net, where it lifts up the metal frame on the ground, was something I kept hearing on Match of the Day, so we added it.

Regarding stadium altitude levels: Bolivia play in a generic stadium, some other teams use the same stadium. But when Bolivia play in it the altitude value is changed to La Paz, so only then is it a high altitude stadium. But in South Africa a team is not tied to a stadium, so we use the altitude value of each real stadium.

Regarding a missing stadium or two: We wanted to include St Jakob Park, but our Swiss office wanted Berne.

Regarding the odd set of incorrect adverts at a stadium: Qualifying is a licensing minefield, we tried to get other adverts in, but it wasn’t possible. Generally if you see something dumb in our games, in terms of authentic sponsorship, then this is why. We are not blind to reality, just handicapped in what we can do.

Responding to a question from a Spurs fan: Sorry, can’t talk to Spurs fans ahead of our semi-final on Sunday. COME ON POMPEY!

A response to those claiming that the game is a rip-off: Rip off is a personal viewpoint. If I leave my house to buy a bottle of water and it’s $10 then it’s a rip off. But if I am lost in the desert and someone offers me that bottle of water for $10 then it’s a bargain. Each individual has the right to decide how much the World Cup means to them and choose to buy the game or not. All we’ve done is make a game we’re pretty proud of, the rest is up to you lot.

A response to FIFASoccerBlog.com publishing the rumoured (and later revealed to be accurate) demo details: I must find their source and shoot that person.

You can read the interview in full if you click here.

Have a read by clicking here.

Cheers to Nanny as always for the heads up.

IGN: 2010 FIFA World Cup Feature

The interview with line producer Simon Humber goes into details about Controls, Penalty System, Virtual Pro Integration as well as Captain Your Country Mode. Its a very informative article so be sure to check it out.

On the official FIFA forums, Simon Humber has partaken in a Q&A session with the fans, in a bid to answer the many questions going through peoples minds. After the jump, we have a large segment of the Q&A, with some very interesting information!

Here are some other things he has already posted:

Loads of threads about exactly which 199 teams are in the game so here you go.

These are the nations that FIFA permitted us to include, others are not allowed for various reasons.

You can play any of these in the online & offline World Cup tournaments.

All are fully licensed, which means we are allowed to use the real player names & crests.

Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua & Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil British Virgin Islands Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Chad Chile China PR Chinese Taipei Colombia Comoros Congo Congo DR Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote d’Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador England (- C’mon England!!!) Equatorial Guinea Estonia Ethiopia Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Korea DPR Korea Republic Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Northern Ireland Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Paraguay Peru Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Scotland Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Tahiti Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands U.S. Virgin Islands Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Wales Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

Will all have detailed kits? In 2006 only some had detailed kits. Just asking.

Not all of them, as many as we were able to build with the art team we had and with the reference we were given.

When you select World Cup mode are the groups going to be the ones that have been drawn for the world cup or will they be random? Also the same question about the qualification rounds.

Real or custom, up to you.

On throphy celebrations:

Oh yes, you get presented with the trophy very nicely

On list of managers in the game

Managers will be announced at a later date.

When can we expect the next bit of information, video, pictures, announcements?

In a few more weeks!

About the online world cup:

We haven’t posted as nobody told us about this dev team forum. We’ll start from now on but we’re working on the game which is the most important use of our time right now.

Personally I think it’s the best online mode we’ve done. It’s very exciting to play.

You choose any of the 199 nations and as TT31P says, we match you against someone at the same match of the tournament, attempting to avoid any team or gamer you’ve already met.

If you finish in the top two in your group you go into the Round of 16 and all the thrills of knockout football.

The third group game is also exciting since this is played simultaneously in real life, so in the game we give score updates from the other match in your group so you can alter your strategy according to where your score and the other score leave you in the table.