Back in black
Posted by: Greg Downs in goal replay, scripting, tags: goal replay, Jackson, scriptingI’ve mentioned once or twice how much I look forward to seeing my team turn out in its black away kit. There’s nothing wrong with the sky blue kit, as such. It’s just that I’ve now seen it so often that I crave change. And black away kits look so… what’s the word… cool?
If next-gen PES2008 allowed pre-game kit selection in Master League (curse you Seabass) I’d choose to play in the black away kit in about a third of my games, as would happen in real life. But no, I only get to play in it when the game decides that I should. Huh.
Singers FC 1-0 Genoa
I was firmly in sky blue for this one. But it was back to winning ways in the league - at last - with a tidy victory over one of the division’s danger teams. Most of the teams are danger teams (that was the thinking behind setting up this Superleague).
My goal came from Gatti, my second-choice DMF who played instead of a tired Matuzalem. Gatti received the ball and ran with it down the middle in the classic DMF-in-a-4-3-3-formation kind of way (fellow 4-3-3ers will know what I mean) and unleashed a shot that flew in past the keeper. After watching the replay I was unhappy with the Genoa keeper. The ball passed a few inches above his right shoulder. He could have headed it away.
Villarreal 0-2 Singers FC
This is the game where I finally got to play in black after a long time of going without. I picked James in goal. Akinfeev was tired. James did very well, considering he’s only 17 and very much scraping the bottom in terms of his stats. He looks huge and impressive between the sticks.
My two goals were interesting…
That first one - a screamer from 25 yards - was scored with my young CB, Jackson. I knew it was a goal the moment it left his boot. Jackson is shaping up to be one of my players of the season. It’s not just because of this goal, and also the flicked goal he got a few games ago. He’s been brilliant in defence. I tend to concede most of my goals when he’s not playing.
At first, the second goal looks as if it’s an action replay of the first. But Camacho’s long-range shot hits the crossbar and rebounds to Morfeo. In many ways the forgotten man of my squad, Morfeo calmly places the bouncing ball past the Villarreal keeper. I usually launch those bouncing rebounds into the stands.
———–
On the subject of scripting in PES2008, here’s a clip from a few games ago that shows what I think of when I talk about scripting:
I successfully tackle the Celtic player, but my player runs a couple of yards away from the ball, and pauses for just long enough to allow the AI player to get up off the floor, dust himself down, and retrieve the ball.
It’s the kind of thing that happens so often in any match against the CPU that it’s become the accepted norm.
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The tackling issue is one that of the things that does bother me about PES. I’ve made absolutly brilliant tackles in and aronud my own box getting the ball but instead then just clearing it away it my player dithers. Quite frustrating.
Paul - exactly! And it’s why, when I talk about scripting, I always mean the *accumulation* of this kind of thing, that leads to a CPU goal — or to a corner/free kick from which it gets a goal.
I’ve never personally experimented with individual games to see if certain match results are scripted, but I’ve always suspected that some are, and I’ve come across enough anecdotal evidence from other PES players to be convinced that *something* along those lines is going on under the hood of PES - but, as I say, I’ve never personally tested it out, so I can’t swear to its existence myself.
The kind of scripting that manifests itself in the accumulation of tackles like the one in the clip above, and sundry other ‘moments’ which taken together build up to things happening for the CPU when those things have no right to happen —- this is the PES scripting I know and detest at first hand, and it’s something I sincerely hope Team Seabass gets rid of in PES2009 and beyond.
I think scripting is an appropriate name for the non-tackles because it’s *pre-determined* that, although you WIN the tackle, you LOSE the tackle, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The game obeys an internal aspect of its coding to give the AI an advantage.
Of course, now that PES has been around for nigh on a decade, it could be argued that its makers have no choice but to artificially enhance its Artificial Intelligence with these kinds of shenanigans. We’re all so familiar with the game that there’s no choice.
I think your last paragraph in that last comment greg is vitally important. The scripting can be and often is quite frustrating but i think it is necessary to a degree. As you say we have all been playing the game so long and know it so well that the AI needs to be given some kind of advantage or else we would simply destroy it every game and complain about it being far to easy.
The fact is that now matter how much we want and even expect it AI cannot match the decision making and ability of the human brain. Obviously in some circumstances it can but that level of ability is yet to be implemented into video games (and quite frankly i hope it never does). In the grand scheme of things when we are playing video games we expect success in the long run, therefore the ability of the AI has to be at least slightly below that of us or else we would never get anywhere and be complaining about the game being impossible.
stinger - us gamers want to have our cakes and eat them, it’s true. When it comes to PES, I often wonder: just how did the game used to play before PES5 (which was when I first noticed the overt scripting/auto-balancing/AI advantage)?
At some point this year I will follow through on my promise/threat to play all of the old PES games in turn for at least a few days each. Yes, my back-to-PES5 experiment of a few weeks ago fell flat on its face, but there were other factors affecting me then.
It’ll be interesting to find out just how the old PESes used to handle, as games. Maybe it’s always been the case that the human player has been severely handicapped against the CPU on higher difficulty levels, and Team Seabass has just got more brazen about it in recent years.
I never played the previous PES seriously enough to notice but this time around it seems getting the first goal is everything, if you can hold on to that lead for 10 mins (game time) the pressure stops and its easy from then onwards. In my exp at least.
Was it always like this?
Granted comebacks do happen but its alot harder. (Normally need some sort of player advantage somewhere)
@Paul — it wasn’t. Some teams, particularly the top ones, would pile on pressure for the whole match.
Scripting
I don’t think the console exists that would let a full 11 on 11 football sim run with only real-time physics calculations. Even if the processor power was there, the amount of man-hours required to make that sim behave properly would be pretty daunting.
I think, therefore, scripting *has* to exist. If you want a football sim, you have to script it. But where PES fails (and has for the past few generations), is when the scripting is aimed at macro-outcomes (match results) rather than micro-outcomes (tackling, clearances).
Just like a bad movie director, PES often eschews subtlety in favor of overbearing bias. Even on my PES6-with-a-lick-of-paint PS2 version of PES2008 (oh the acronyms! Oh the humanity!), my clearances fall to the computer. If my defender gets a boot in, the loose ball falls to the computer. Occasionally, my defenders will run away from the man through on goal to mark his potential targets, allowing him the space to shoot. Occasionally, my defenders will actually run away from a cross coming in to the box.
This is the inevitable end-result of how a footie game has to be built, combined with clumsy probability maths and a poor playtesting cycle. It’s the mark of a poorly built game, but not necessarily a “fix.”
In other words, these sorts of micro-outcome problems are persistent — they are part of every game you play from friendlies to Champions League, and are just the warts on any given year’s PES release.
Where PES players like myself start to see that old red mist is when the game skews it’s probabilities toward the CPU getting a result in order to create a sense of drama in the game.
THIS is the fix. This is what I mean by scripting: A pre-determined match result that the AI will break the established expectations for the game in order to achieve.
For whatever reason, the people who program the fix (curse you Seabass) have decided that this particular fixture will be a draw. No matter what you do, you’re getting a draw. Go up three goals? They get three in the second half. Fail to score? No worries, they won’t score either.
In another fixture the opposing side will win by any means necessary, causing your strikers to baloon shots they’d normally bury, and giving their version of, oh, say Sean Wright-Phillips, Super Retard Strength (TM) that he will Use For Evil in order to repeatedly fling your 188cm 87 Body Balance center-back to the ground like a Judo master.
En route to 3 goals.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.
Some players are good enough at PES to overcome these heavy-handed pre-determined outcomes. Bully for them. They should all eff-off and go join a hippy PES commune and make PES-themed textiles for sale at the local Organic PES Farmer’s Market.
The rest of us can’t get a win against the Lords of the Draw, and can’t figure out how to stop Super Sean Wright-Phillips (short of kryptonite, which refused our offer in the transfer window). We have to sit and take it and watch somebody else’s idea of how a football season should go play out.
For myself, I get that the Master League is all about drama. I like when races are tight, and unexpected downturns bedevil your chances. If the heavy-handing match-outcome scripting always served this noble goal, I might even concede some sort of “ends justify the means” defense and stick up for old Seabass (c.y.), but they don’t. Occasionally they will, but other times it just makes no sense whatsoever.
Two mid-table teams, both safe from relegation and both too far from Europe to even consider it, and the scripting says “YEA VERILY IT MUST BE A DRAW.”
Huh? No, I don’t think so, I’ll restart the match.
Draw. And again. Draw. And again. Draw.
^ Been there, done that and don’t understand it.
So far (halfway through my second season in an ML), and the match-outcome scripting on PES 2008 for the PS2 seems much more mild than in previous years.
ck - I think you’ve summed it up. For me the micro-scripting is the one that I see time and again (I’ve still not carried out that repeat-game experiment, but I will, I will) and thus the one that exercises 99% of my anti-scripting wrath. Wrath that is tempered, as you and stinger and Paul have rightly pointed out, by recognition that there is no real choice but to have this kind of thing going on in a computer game based upon football.
As for the state of technology, I don’t know enough about it - hardware or software - to judge whether it is possible to create a truly level playing field between man and machine right now or in the future.
For the near future, I just wish that Team Seabass, curse every last one of them, would come up with a new, less blatant method of tossing the AI a bone or bones. The micro-scripting of tackles and clearances always falling to the AI is something they could and should eliminate from the game right here, right now (in PES2009). I would honestly rather see a CPU player go on an unstoppable dribble and score a wonder goal than have to suffer the succession of missed tackles and ball-bobbles that fall the CPU’s way until it gets its goal.
I hear good things about the PS2 version of PES2008 and am looking forward to playing the PSP version in the next week or so. (Release keeps getting delayed.) I know for sure now that there is player development in the Master League on the handheld console for the first time.