FIFA 16 – Tweaking a “modern” game

Greetings, football fans!

My name is Ciais, and I’m an Italian football fanatic since the glory days of FIFA 98. And I loved FIFA 98. But then a classmate of mine lent me his copy of ISS Pro 98. From that moment on, I knew what I wanted in a football game: as much realism as possible.

So the years passed, and PES6 came and never left, until another friend of mine from NHL04 Rebuilt (known there as trent, but as El Pajaro on Evo-Web) told me to try WE9. Another couple years passed, and I found out this very same friend of mine was now praising another game entirely: FIFA 16…

Introduction

And so begins this story. From what I could gather online, this game was very well received, with many indeed considering it the best since WE9LE/WE9/PES5. So I bought it, and was glad I did. It really felt like the next generation of the PS2-era PES games to me.

But something felt odd. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed like the referee had forgotten his whistle in the locker room. Teams had a very fast build-up play with ping-pong passing, and players were making impossible quick moves like the laws of physics didn’t apply. Sliders helped somewhat, but it was obvious the issues were deep down in the game engine itself.

Then why were reviews praising this game when it got out? Why to me it plays undeniably good, but I see glaring arcade bits here and there? The answer is simple: updates. The latest game update is v1.07, and after reading pages and pages in various forums, it appears that from v1.02 onward, the game was patched with online in mind, little by little reducing the simulation aspects. But is it possible to revert to an earlier, more realistic version?

Yes. It is. On PC, at least. And this turned out to be the foundation of the massive tweaking I decide to undertake to fix the arcade aspects of this game.

I decided to use the v1.01 EXE (after managing to get myself a copy of it), because the Demo, arguably the better version, is currently very complicated to use since EA removed it from Origin, while v1.0 has some issues that the version I’m using fixes (first touch control bug, etc.)

As I said before, sliders help. But unfortunately, while they’re perfect for cross-platform gameplay tweaking, they can only do so much. This is what actually controls the gameplay:

• DB edits: 70%
• Sliders: 15%
• cl.ini: 15% (this is a file to be put in the FIFA 16 folder that can contain mainly gameplay strings extracted from the EXE, effectively overriding them)

Since editing the DB can be a little tricky since there are tons of mods online, and I couldn’t simply edit just one and force people to play only that to enjoy the tweaked gameplay, I didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, a user named fifaCCitiu.com at Soccergaming had created a tool just for this purpose: a utility that extracts the data from any DB, reads it, makes the necessary adjustments and reimports it back in.

He never actually released it in the end, but he has made the source code available, and after asking him, he told me I could use it and gave me his blessing. This Gameplayzer (this is what he called it) is written in Python, a programming language I didn’t know, but I did my fair share of Javascript coding back in the day for NHL04 Rebuilt, and the syntax for all programming languages is basically the same, so it was intuitive from the get-go. And fifaCCitiu’s original Gameplayzer (meaning, without my subsequent edits) already does a nice job tweaking the gameplay.

Gameplay tweaks

So, the very first thing I wanted to do, was to increase fouls. I’ve seen many people looking down on users like us who want more fouls, arguing that since we’re condensing 90 minutes into 30-40 at most, we should have a number of fouls as if games were actually shorter. But then I thought, shots and goals should be lower too. Yet, according to them, they should be around 30-20 even if playing 10 minute halves . Okay…

The attributes that have an influence on fouls are Aggression, Balance, Strength, Standing Tackle, Sliding Tackle, Sprint Speed, Acceleration and Stamina. Sounds complicated, right?

• Aggression is a double edged-sword: while it does indeed increase the players’ aggressiveness, what it really controls is the chance to win the ball in a 50/50 tackle — the higher the value, the less fouls then, and players are also “on drugs”. So I left the average value as fifaCCitiu intended it, around 50, a nice middle ground
• Balance is the key attribute here: what it does control is the chance of stumbling in a tackle, so if we lower it players will not behave like drunkards around the pitch. According to Soccergaming users bangus, regularcat and AndreaPirlo21, the ideal value is 10 and lower, and that’s what I applied with a percentage decrease
• Strength is also a factor: this also mainly controls the chance of winning physical battles. I tried decreasing it the same way as Balance, but players were now ridiculously flopping over-the-top for the slightest of touches, so I left it as in the default Gameplayzer, where it’s geared to height and weight
• Standing and Sliding Tackle: contrary to what it seems, from my testings it seems these attributes control the frequency more than the ability, so all I did was setting Standing Tackle at half of Sliding Tackle at most — I wasn’t seeing many slides otherwise, and these help in creating more foul situations
• Sprint Speed and Acceleration: you may wonder, what these values have to do with fouls? Well, a lot, as I’ll explain to you right now. You see, if a player can’t catch you, then he will more likely stick a leg out and trip you. Players are too fast by default, but 99 Sprint Speed is actually realistic for a fast player, so I did something suggested to me by Madmac79 at Evo-Web: I exponentially decreased these two attributes, both to reduce the game speed and making sure faster players can fly past slower ones — the FIFA engine requires a difference of at least 50 for us to see a difference in speed between players
• Stamina: since we reduced the players’ speed, now players weren’t fatiguing as before (and even by default, they were still as fresh as flowers after 90 minutes), so I significantly reduced this attribute so it’s now 5 and lower for all — players are rightfully exhausted at the end of the match, and of course the more tired they are, the more fouls they commit

Other stuff affects fouls and CPU aggressivity in general (like Attacking and Defensive Work Rate, the Diver and Dives into Tackles traits, Defensive Aggression and Mentality in team tactics, and Referee Foul Strictness is also important), but the attributes I listed above are the key ones. And this is the result:

Better than the standard 1-2 fouls you have in a vanilla FIFA 16, right? But we’re not done yet. There are still many arcade quirks to fix.

• Players still moved unrealistically jerky and without inertia — I hugely decreased Agility, except for the very top players (we still want a degree of individuality, also achieved with strict Trait assignment criteria)
• Dribbling, Short and Long Passing were reduced too so respectively the ball isn’t as glued to the feet and passes are “dirtier”
• I was seeing too many perfect shots, so I decreased Finishing according to the player position (defenders should make more blunders, etc)
• Headers were also too much, so Heading and Jumping were also reduced
• There’s a bug in FIFA 16, as pointed out by slider tweaker Matt10 over at Operation Sports, called ADD, or Attention Deficit Defending: basically a CPU player will simply ignore a loose ball even if it’s in front of him. I significantly increased Reactions to try and counter that
• Passing percentage for CPU teams is way too high by default. There’s no way to have a different realistic number depending on the team, but we can at least reduce the CPU’s passing accuracy. The main way to do it is reducing Vision (leaving it high only for the very few top playmakers), and the Pass Error slider helps a lot too
• Goalkeepers were making over-the-top reflex saves, even with the GK Ability slider in the 10s. By decreasing GK Handling and Diving, I brought them back to normal human level — after all, the defense is what keeps you from conceding goals!
• I reassigned tactics to teams based on their quality, sometimes to the extreme, because as Krebstar said, tactics don’t really work that well in FIFA 16 (you’d need the Demo for that, dang), and if you want to see some change (teams playing the long ball instead of the short pass, etc), you need to put the values either to 1 or to 100.
• I removed, as much as I can, any CPU boosts (which are up to 160% on Legendary), with tweaks to the Match Intensity and Team Mentality in the DB, and specific strings to be put in cl.ini

I prepared a short video (only 2:30 minutes) to showcase the changes made so far:

Conclusions

This gameplay mod comprises a compilation of sorts of tips and tricks by many FIFA gameplay modders, be it the DB, the sliders or the cl.ini strings. Plus insightful suggestions and impressions from my team at Evo-Web.

You can find the latest (testing) version here: https://www.evo-web.co.uk/threads/fifa-16-news-discussion-thread.75194/page-193#post-3379135

It’s still a work in progress, because there are still some things that I don’t like — and I actually caused with my tweaks. As an example, after reducing Build Up Speed and Passing to slow the CPU down (and possibly some other tactic values too), the CPU will, most of the time, take short corners, free kicks, goal kicks, everything. I think this shows quite clearly that, at least in EA’s mind, the game was never meant to be played the way I want to play it.

It also may not be for everyone. Changing the players’ attributes so much reduces the Overall: for example Messi, CR7 and other superstars are rated around 73-74 in the DB I’m using for testing, and other players are obviously rated lower — and I may decide to decrease other attributes as well in the future. By default, players are rated in the 50-99 range, but to have a more realistic gameplay, they should actually be rated 1-50. But many of us are used to seeing top players being in the 90s, so anything less may even be considered a heresy, but I don’t blame them. For this and other reasons, default Career is broken, and that’s why I plan to fix that too to accomodate all the edits I made.

So, I believe I told you everything I needed to tell you. I hope you enjoyed reading it (also, sorry if it’s too long!), and if you ever decide to try this gameplay mod, I really hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Cheers!