Huge FIFA 12 PS3 and Xbox 360 patch out today

A huge patch for FIFA 12 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 goes live today, EA has announced.

EA said it should make a "really positive difference in a variety of ways" to the all-conquering football game.

The headline new features include a lowering of the CPU AI in Pro Clubs, Career Mode fixes and improvements and upgrades for Ultimate Team.

EA said it is continuing to investigate disconnections at the end of Ultimate Team games that seem to be affecting roughly two per cent of FUT gamers.

This patch is already out for the PC version of the game.

The patch notes in full:

Gameplay

• Sometimes the game would get confused when a user called a second player to take a quick throw-in, where the game would consider the ball to have re-entered play. We've made sure this won't happen anymore.
• We have fixed an occasional problem where a user's crossing setting would default to Manual and need to be reset.
• Very rarely indeed, a physics error could cause a player's leg positioning to become misaligned. You may have seen some videos of that around the time we brought out the demo for FIFA 12. As rare as it was (the vast majority of people will have never experienced it), it's now fully extinct.

Career Mode

• You can now select the weather conditions before entering a game.
• Your chief executive's salary suggestions when offering a youth player a senior contract will now remain consistent when exiting and re-entering the negotiation screens.
• We have made sure that, after releasing a player from the Youth Squad, his salary returns to the Wage Budget.
• When loaning in a player with an option to buy him at the end of the season, if that player caused you to reach the maximum squad size, you wouldn't be able to buy him. Now you can.
• It's now no longer possible to sign a Youth Player with a wage greater than your available wage budget.
• We have addressed a couple of rare situations where specific actions would cause controller buttons to become unresponsive.
• When playing as a player in Career Mode, your manager will now be more inclined to sub off your player if he's getting too tired.
• We've made sure that commentary won't fail to show up when playing League Cup games involving Manchester United.
• We have fixed a situation where, given a certain set of circumstances when editing and saving player positions, you could see player names converted to numbers before experiencing a console hang.
• We fixed an issue where it was possible for the user's player's team to enter a new season without a goalkeeper, or without the minimum number of players needed to play a match.
• We have solved a problem that involved the player's team recording a win despite forfeiting a league game because of an insufficient match-day squad.
• Recently signed Youth Squad players who you're attempting to sell on will now enter negotiations with an accurate, consistent 'Current Wage' displayed, meaning you'll see them picked up much more easily by CPU teams.
• If you and a friend entered a Career Mode game with two controllers, advanced beyond the Player Selection screen and then backed all the way out again, the game would hang. We got that fixed.
• We have taken care of a bug that caused apparently random crashes in Career Mode, with players sometimes appearing with a zeroed cash value.
• Physical attributes of players were growing a little unrealistically since they were tied to their overall growth potential. We have made a change that separates the growth of these attributes from others, resulting in much more steady progression.
• You can now offer a new contract to players you have loaned out for the last year of their contract, before they run off and become free agents.
• Loaned players weren't always growing fast enough. We have tuned this to be more noticeable, making loaning players out much more rewarding.
• More mid-week Career Mode games will now be played with night-time lighting conditions.

FIFA 12 Ultimate Team

• Using an outdated "Take Me There" link on a Trade Feed notification in the FUT hub will no longer result in your coins not being returned if you lost the auction.
• The Trade Feed notification in the FUT Hub for a newly acquired Goalkeeper Coach will no longer cause the game to hang.
• Creating a new squad, then immediately deleting an old one before then applying an item to your new squad could result in a disconnection. Not now it won't.
• We have made sure that real-time information is displayed on active auctions. You'll no longer find yourself unknowingly outbid while waiting for those auctions to count down.
• We have isolated and eradicated a data-flow interruption that sometimes caused the game to crash while players were on the Match Setup screen before a FUT game.
• You will now see your EAS FC XP increase - and your news feed update - after playing a single-player or play-a-friend game in FUT.
• We have optimised the game to make sure the console won't struggle, or even crash, when paging through a lot of FUT auction pages.
• We have taken care of a crash that would occur if users entered FUT and downloaded the latest update after creating a Virtual Pro.
• We have made a couple of separate enhancements to the FUT pack purchasing system to make sure sudden losses of internet connectivity (such as pulling the network cable) won't result in console crashes.
• We discovered that if you downloaded a roster update in FUT and, while still on the update confirmation screen, signed out from your Gamer Profile, the game would crash. Not many people would do that but, just in case they do, they're now safe.

FIFA 12 Clubs

• Changes that Clubs players make to camera settings during a Clubs game will now find those settings saved for subsequent games.
• You will now be able to change your penalty kick taker via Team Management between the penalty kick being awarded and taken.
• Clubs players' accomplishments are now fully tracked in online matches.
• We asked you, and you told us. Community feedback overwhelmingly suggests that the default AI in Clubs is too powerful, leading to clubs choosing not to field defenders in order to allow the AI to do their work for them. We have therefore dropped the AI difficulty level in Clubs from World Class to Professional, and have made some complimentary minor adjustments to AI goalkeepers.

My Live Season

• Injured or suspended players will now be automatically moved to the reserves, not the subs bench. And there'll be no more missing subs as a result in subsequent games.

EA SPORTS Football Club

• We have made an optimisation that stops the game making too many calls for Support Your Club information on entering the EAS FC hub.
• Every now and then, when coming back to the main menu from another area of the game, the Back/Select button to go to the EAS FC hub was not always displayed and functional. That won't happen anymore.
• We have taken care of a rare crash bug that cropped up when entering the EAS FC hub from the main menu.
• We have enhanced the way the game loads the pre-match arena before an EAS FC Challenge.
• All your Career Mode activity will now display correctly in the EAS FC news feed.

FIFA 12 Online

• An occasional problem saw users repeatedly failing to match-up online due to mismatching squad files, despite re-downloading the online squad file. We've made sure that won't bother anyone again.
• A small number of people found their stats not tracking properly for Online Friendlies games. They are now.

Creation Centre

• We have solved a problem that saw FIFA 12 crash when trying to download PNG images (e.g. a team crest) that were over the maximum file size.
• Particularly keen Creation Centre users who bookmarked a lot of items to download into their game could find that they were not able to enter the Creation Centre gallery. Now they can.
• We have fixed a rare problem where it was possible in specific circumstances to find your Creation Centre team hit the pitch with a man missing.
• We have made sure that swapping and changing kit sponsor images on the web will no longer cause any problems on the console.
• We have improved the way FIFA 12 handles large numbers of Creation Centre downloads to make sure there's no slow-down in the performance of team-selection screens.
• The game no longer struggles to retrieve Tournament Crest images in the Creation Centre gallery.

EA SPORTS Arena

• We have enabled private sessions within the EA SPORTS Arena.

And some others...

• We have turned on our in-game podcasts. If you want to listen in, you can access our regular five-minute chunks of audio news and information by turning the option on in the Game Settings > Audio menu. [English language only]
• We have made some optimisations to make sure that people with lots of save files on their hard drives don't suffer long load times or server disconnections.
• [PC only] We have corrected a problem where, after scoring a goal, custom music would stop playing for around two minutes.
• [PC only] We have added an option to the FIFA 12 launcher to disable some Windows settings, improving the framerate for people with lower-spec PCs.