Football Superstars

Following on from the most recent patch, the design and development teams have been hard at work building on the work done to remodel the way your stats work in game.  The latest patch sees an overhaul of the core attributes which make up your character’s ability on the pitch.  While recent changes have affected how these attributes are trained and the way in which they contribute to your overall ability, this patch will bring fundamental changes to how these attributes work.

Such changes are not undertaken lightly, and much of what has changed came from feedback from the community and a lot of nit-picking into how each stat works and how they could be improved to make them more relevant to your performance on the pitch.

To explain the process of designing these changes, as well as giving details on how you will feel the effects, I was able to pin down the cunning and devious mind behind the project – the man known to you and I as Strafer.

How much of the work done on this was general rebalancing and how much was re-invention of the mechanics of the stat?

A substantial chunk of both! It’s been clear for some time that some attributes have been valued over all others - Movement Rate, Kicking Power and Stamina are the obvious ones. Logically it wasn’t our intention for things to be this way, gameplay has evolved a certain way and the attributes didn’t really keep up with the times. What we’ve done is tweak, prod, poke and hammer the attributes into shape so that they all hopefully provide a tangible benefit based on how we see the current state of football gameplay in FS.

This is a major undertaking, with almost every single attribute being affected in one way or another. What were the most difficult areas to adjust and balance?

There’ve been a few challenges. Accuracy changes for example are a very sensitive area and a great example of typical balancing problems we face. We want to make it so that you can really feel your accuracy improving as you improve your attribute, to give you that sensation of becoming an absolute professional on the pitch – but at the same time we don’t want the new player experience to be so inaccurate and broken that you can’t string any decent passage of play together. It’s a bit of a tightrope walk and hopefully we’re close to nailing it but we’ll certainly be interested in the player feedback on it! 

Why now?

Well we’ve wanted to exaggerate the power of some attributes for some time now, but it’s never really been practical while we had everyone at the top end of the game running around with max stats in every attribute. Players were already complaining that division 1 was a frantic game of football gods, perfect in everything, so we had to wait until we had some degree of attribute specialisation in so we could be less afraid of extending the peaks of football attribute powers and scope. Ultimately we want players who choose to really work an attribute to absolute maximum to feel overpowered in that attribute – it’s only fair given you’ve probably had to sacrifice something else just as important.

There has been a great deal of “division of labour” with some over-worked attributes now being more focussed on one area while some of their effects have been assigned to other attributes.  How do you envision this affecting character builds and specialisation?

Well, blue and purple football items will certainly be a lot more desirable. Up until this coming patch settling for a green item for certain football item slots has been workable the majority of the time but now if you want to be capable of turning it on in more than one aspect of your gameplay you’ll need to work more attributes up. I imagine players who even purchase just a few blues will make their presence felt in any FSC match they play in.

More so with these new football attribute improvements, players who deck themselves out in purple items, have the best skills and train hard are going to be highly sought after for PMC’s especially for up coming tournaments as it demonstrates that you’ll be dependable on the pitch in pressure situations versus a player who has a much more tighter specialisation through limited training and basic green items.

How focussed were you on synergy between specific attributes?  Was there an intention to encourage training of a set group of stats or are you happy for players to work out their own combinations?

There is definitely some really nice synergies now. For example if you are one of those fabled “tanking” players who enjoys the personal challenge of running the ball through mobs of panicking defenders even though you have pass targets completely open, you’ll now have to develop Movement Rate, Stamina AND Ball Control to retain that ability. If you only sport green items that means your boots, shinpads and base layer are all pre-determined and you’ll have to forgo maxing out the other stats on those item groups. That’s now a pretty big commitment! It means that your Shooting Accuracy and Kicking Power will be down so how likely will you be to score? It also means your Recovery Rate is down, so how often are you going to be able to do this?  It also means your Hardiness is down, so you’re going to be bumped out of the way more often getting to the ball.

Another synergy that is interesting is Interception and Jumping. These both now work in tandem to make your character a heading machine, but only studs improve both those attributes so the number of players being absolutely deadly at heading will drop to only the most committed to improving both those attributes. Furthermore, it takes two to tango when it comes to heading in that for a corner your heading ability is allowed to flourish only if the cross is accurate. Having a winger or corner taker who has terrible Kicking Accuracy / Pass Timing and Anticipation won’t do your heading ability any favours. In fact if their Pass Timing isn’t good enough, they are unlikely to even be able to space pass all the way into the box on the bigger pitches now!

Indeed any player that has elected to bypass all forms of accuracy at the cost of power and speed will also be perhaps a little shocked when some of their kicks/passes/headers splay wildly off target due to the fact we’ve added the ability to “shank” ball actions completely if accuracy attributes are low.

This is all pretty exciting stuff for creating more varied gameplay! Ultimately there are a few character build combinations we’ve tossed around in the office during our matches, but I think part of the fun is working those out as a player so the ball is at your feet on that one now!

Tackling and Slide Tackling have not been directly touched by these changes.  Why were these not adjusted while every other area was?

Well even though they have not been tweaked directly, the fact that Ball Control and Hardiness now offer more protection if they are heavily improved means defenders who want to negate that will need to focus on these two attributes more. 

However, we do want to do more work with Tackling and Slide Tackling in general as mechanics. We (and probably every player too!) don’t particularly like the idea of ‘bouncing away’ from a failed standing tackle attempt – it’s just not realistic in the slightest. What we want to work towards is the tackler always going in, but having more shades of grey outcomes so that the ball either stays in possession of the carrier, or it spills out favourably to the attacker, favourably to the defender or results in the current clean dispossession result. By choosing an outcome between these results based on the attributes of the players involved we won’t be punishing you for doing all the hard work to actually MAKE a tackle and then denying the attempt completely – you will instead always stick the boot in, but with a varied outcome of success or failure.

On that note, are there any more changes planned?

Well we really like the idea of “pressure” on a player when being marked by an opponent. So effectively if a team chooses to double or triple team an opponent at a corner because he/she is a known threat, then the presence of being surrounded by players should have some bearing on the marked player. It’s of course still up to the defenders to keep him/her marked though, and some attackers can be slippery at the last moment!

We’re also considering some funky stuff to do with ball handling such as having to chip and chase the ball ahead while sprinting based on your Ball Control rather than having the ball tethered to your ankle. This would be a big change though and it will need substantial testing to ensure it is playable, fun and works nicely with the attributes.

Other smaller aspects we are looking at include determining how long you are injured for on the ground based on your Recovery Rate, your ability to be accurate and throw harder for throw ins based on your Ball Control and the distance you can slide based on your Slide Tackling. 

There are more on the drawing board too!

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Many thanks Strafer, now hold still while I reattach the manacles to chain you to the drawing board once again. ;)

You can read the full patch notes on the forums.  However, I’m sure you want to do more than just read about the changes.  As such, there will be two test server windows open between 4pm and 10pm GMT (5pm and 11pm BST) and we would love to get your feedback on them.

You can download the test client from the website. There are two test worlds to choose from when loading up the Test World Client.  Pele players will be able to access their characters on the Test World, while Cruyff players will find their characters on Hagi.

So make sure you get onto the test world this weekend to check out the changes coming to Football Superstars.