This is a big change for the series and it seems like a major upgrade for on-the-ball movement. I plan to take the piss on all of yous with it.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/fifa-10-sony-playstation-3-microsoft-xbox-360/781847-fifa10-360-degree-dribbling.html

Hey all,

First let me introduce myself. I'm Gary Paterson (obviously), I'm from Scotland (Aberdeen supporter so REALLY bad week for me ) and I'm the Creative Director on FIFA10. I work with David, Mike, Christophe, Aaron, Santiago and Marcel to design the features of the game. I have been on FIFA since 07 on PS2 where I was gameplay producer and programmer, before joining the PS3/360 team for FIFA08 and 09 as lead gameplay designer/producer. Apologies for not being on here sooner, its been quite a hectic year as I'm sure you'll all understand.

I see that there has been quite a lot of traffic on here recently regarding 360 degree dribbling and I just want to send a quick post to let you all know how it works and why we chose to make it work the way that it does.

Let me begin by saying that 360 degree dribbling will have an affect on all dribble speeds: Jog, Skilled and Sprint, and will affect trapping. However, the effect on sprint is different than the others for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

Jogging
When jogging with the ball FIFA10 will give you full 360 degree control, when requesting a turn you will get exactly the angle you input on the left stick. One note on this however is that for turns less than 22.5 degrees (22.5 degrees may sound like an odd limit but this is basically 360 / 16 ) you will not get a turn immediately. Instead he will make the small adjustment the next time he catches up to the ball. This is because we don't want your player to constantly be playing a turn animation as this will affect the fluidity of the dribble and also affect pass responsiveness as we do not allow you to pass while you are about to touch the ball in a dribble turn.

The effect of this is that FIFA10 feels more fluid and you can now beat defenders, protect the ball and ultimately make plays that you could not before.

Skilled Dribbling
Like jogging, skilled dribble is fully 360 degree though the real power of the feature is really in the sideways movement.

Sprinting
The affect on sprinting is slightly different from jogging. The reason for this is that when sprinting your momentum dictates that you cannot adjust your body to perform the same turns that you can when jogging. In FIFA10 the range of turn that we allow when sprinting is ANY angle from 0 degrees to 22.5 degrees (plus 180), this is different from 09 as in that game we could only turn 0 or 22.5 left or 22.5 right.

Again, the reason we do not allow full 360 in sprinting is that it is just not physically possible to turn say 94 degrees and stay at sprint speed. Obviously if you did want to perform a 94 degree turn you could release the sprint button and the player would perform a 'Sprint to Jog' turn that would satisfy your pad angle request and turn 94 degrees or whatever angle you were requesting.

The result of this is that you can finely adjust your sprint direction in order to not lose so much momentum when turning and potentially get away from a defender without slowing down and getting tackled like you would in 09.

Hopefully I have explained that clearly, its difficult without diagrams

Summary
So in summary and as a comparison to FIFA09, these are the ranges of movement that you will see in the game:

Jogging 09: 8 directions (0, ±45, ±90, ±135, 180)
Jogging 10: 360 degrees

Skilled Dribble 09: N/A
Skilled Dribble 10: 360 degrees

Sprint 09: 4 directions (0, ±22.5, 180)
Sprint 10: 45 degrees (any angle from -22.5 to +22.5) and 180

We have shown the game now to quite a large group of people, mostly community and journalists and I have to say that 360 degree dribbling is one of the features that has stood out for the majority of people. The number of comments that I have heard about people 'not being able to go back to 09' due to the freedom and fluidity that this feature gives them is encouraging. This feature along with the numerous other changes that we have made have made FIFA10 what I believe to be a more fluid, more authentic and more fun game, I hope you will agree when you get the chance to play (fingers crossed).

Hopefully this post has addressed some of the concerns that you have. I'll try to post on here more often going forward.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for your continued support.

Gary