Noticed this too - very weird and kind of annoying.
All in all though, as an offline-only player (PS3), who hasn't messed with slow-speed and sliders yet, this plays better out-of-the-box then 12 did for me. First-Touch and the revamps of the Impact Engine have made it a game that actually resembles real football, and I'm excited to get home and make those slider-changes to see how it looks on slow (although with 3 minute halves I'm sure I won't be able to get much accomplished re: scoring).
Plenty of errant first-touches and balls ping-ponging around more realistically. 0-0 games on World Class difficulty (which, with 3min halves I expect). Not so much wonky stuff from the "Impact Engine" and I've seen a bunch of cool deflections. You can really see the impact of player strength in a positive way - small attackers get shoved off the ball legally, and powerful defenders can use their strength as an asset. Dropped it down to Legendary difficulty and manged to score a few goals - even a 2-1 victory a couple times.
I definitely notice an improvement in AI behavior - both from my attackers and from CPU attackers. More intelligent runs by teammates into channels, and I even scored a great goal on a counter attack where I slid a through-ball past two attackers onto a ST who was making a diagonal run. Also nice - managed to get a good ratio of on-frame to off-frame and score a couple times from the top of the 18, whereas in FIFA12 I found that to be tough for me.
Even on Legendary because of the first-touches and errant passes I lost possession a fair bit of the time - whereas on FIFA12 on Legendary I basically didn't lose possession unless I "wanted" to.
I think once i can get a good slider-set and slowing things down a bit I'll settle into playing on Legendary/World Class and having really competitive, realistic games.