PES Chronicles

It’s stardate 2018 in my ongoing Master League career in PES2008 (the good, traditional, solid PSP/PS2 version). I’m going for a Treble, as ever, and for once my early season form is great. I’m top of the league and forging ahead in all competitions.

Before this season started I was worried. I thought that playing in the pre-European qualifying tournament (because I only finished 4th in the league last season) might negatively impact my league form, or my enthusiasm for the game overall. But it hasn’t worked out like that. I’ve been more focused, more enthused than ever. I really am going to play this one ML career all the way to October 30th, you know. (Which assumes a PES2009 release date of 31st October, the last Friday of that month. That seems a little late to me. Might Konami aim for October 24th instead? If they’re smart they will.)

The league seems to be looking after itself. Played 12, won 10, drawn 2, lost 0. Could I be on course for an unbeaten season? It’d be my first since PES4, I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit. We’ll see. I suspect the game will want to trip me up at some point. I’ll have to be ready to accept draws when it looks as if the AI is spoiling for an unfair fight. But I’ll cross that bridge if/when I come to it.

This European pre-qualifying group has been very interesting. I’ve played really well, showing some of the best form I’ve ever showed in PES2008. Clearing out my squad, and bringing in a new, super-duper, left-sided AMF—Burdner—may have helped. At times I’ve taken the momentum from soundly beating teams in Europe into my league games. The bulked-out fixture list has actually done me lots of good.

5 wins out of 5 ensured my qualification to the group stage proper later on this season. The final group game against Barcelona was therefore a meaningless formality from my point of view—I couldn’t be toppled from the #1 place in the group.

But Barcelona did have something to play for. They were in third place and needed to win to have any chance of progressing. I suspected that this scenario would make the game very interesting indeed. I was right.

What followed was possibly the most ridiculous game of PES that I have ever played. Team Seabass might as well start programming a giant tongue that sticks out from the middle of the pitch at the human alleged ‘player’: “So you think you’re actually playing this thing here? Haha, sucker…”

This fixture against Barcelona was an interactive script that let me press some buttons occasionally. I’ve spoken at great length on this blog about the problem (as I see it) of scripted elements in PES. I can appreciate that occasionally the AI must ‘turn up the heat’, that its players must become faster, stronger, more aggressive, and more skilful than usual. Any robust AI has to have the capacity to change and become fiercer when required.

For me the unacceptable face of scripting is the way that your own players are proportionally handicapped. They become slower and weaker. They become unable to carry out the simplest actions. Everything is dedicated to the AI getting the ball back—so we can’t have any human team players actually being able to pass the ball, now can we?

Here’s a sophisticated scientific diagram (right) to illustrate what I mean. This is a pretty common occurrence when the AI Turbocharge mode is fully on.

The upper blue circle (1) represents my player, in good possession with the ball. Let’s say this is a counter-attack scenario for me during a rare moment of possession when the CPU wants to get the ball back and will damn well do anything it takes to get it.

I’m going to play a one-two pass to my other player (2), in order to bypass the CPU defender (X). I’ll receive the ball back roughly at the end of the dotted blue line, from where I should have a clear run through on goal. It’s the kind of one-two, give-and-go move that I must have done thousands of times now on PES, maybe tens of thousands of times. It works. Except for when the CPU doesn’t want it to work, of course. The long red arrow shows what happens at times like this—the pass ridiculously misses its target and travels at an absurd pace directly to the other CPU defender’s feet (Y). It’s exactly the same as if I had deliberately picked out the CPU defender and deliberately passed the ball straight to him, deliberately…

All of my players are supposedly among the top 5 players in the whole game in their positions. There’s nothing wrong with their stats—not even Mentality has an effect on this, from what I can tell. And no, I’m not overpressing the pass button. It’s a gentle tap. I know how to pass in PES. I know how to play one-twos. I know when things are fishy.

Scripting’s apologists (they exist) contend that your players’ sudden loss of basic ability mimics real life occasions when a team put under lots of pressure can mentally fall apart. There are a number of objections here. First and foremost, how often does that actually happen in real life? I’ve been watching professional football for over 30 years now. I don’t ever recall seeing an entire team suddenly lose the ability to trap the ball or pass the ball or even kick the ball in any direction just because the other team was hyped up and energised.

Perhaps individual players will lose their bottle. It does happen occasionally. In some real-world games, sometimes, you can look at professional players and think “He doesn’t fancy it today”. But those players, and those occasions, are rare in top-class football. I suspect no player—and no team—that was prone to ‘losing it’ when the other team raised its game would ever make it to the top, or last very long if they got there.

But in PES it happens all the time, and you can’t do anything about it, and it’s stupid. It’s just stupid. I always feel mocked and defiled in some way whenever it happens to me. Scripting’s apologists also frequently say something like “Get hold of the ball and pass it around for a bit. Ride out the AI surge!” To be absolutely fair, this often works. Really it does—just passing it around calmly and quietly for ten game minutes or so often does calm things down.

But it’s always just a matter of time before the CPU gets the ball again. One of your players will take an unnatural length of time to turn with the ball. A pass will mysteriously go astray just as in the diagram above.

For the record, the meaningless game against Barcelona meaninglessly ended 0-2 to them. It made no difference to me, but Barca secured the second place in the group table that they so badly wanted.

I think that scripting has got steadily worse over the years because the PES fanbase has grown and remained faithful. Every year we come back that little bit better than we were the year before—even me, an average player. Today, in 2008, I’m a better average player than I was in 2003; in 2003 I was better than I was in 1998. What else can they do to keep the game challenging, to make sure that after a while even the average players don’t automatically win every game 10-0?

I don’t know what else they can do. But there must be something. There must be a way to program a PES AI that is content just to boost itself occasionally and doesn’t need the human player to be equivalently handicapped. At times when playing PES over the past few years, it’s as if you’re playing chess against a computer that randomly awards itself an extra Queen or two and removes yours. Chess AIs (I’ve played a few) don’t need to resort to such transparently insulting measures to give you a good game. I know that football is a wholly different game, but surely, surely there is another way than this monstrous disregard for basic believability?! I feel at my wits’ end with PES at times, I really do.

POSTSCRIPT (added @ 15.00 on Monday 16 June)

Last night, shortly after putting the finishing touches to today’s post, I caught the second half of the Euro2008 match between Turkey and the Czech Republic. What a game! It was the final game of the group stage. Both teams were level on 3 points each behind Portugal, who’d already qualified.

It was a winner-takes-all scenario for the Turks and Czechs. This produced a wild, wild game that saw the Czechs take a 2-0 lead midway through the second half. Turkey raised their game and got one back to give themselves hope. Then Cech made a calamitous blunder that gifted them the equaliser. Then Turkey scored a fine winner in the 90th minute. And then their goalkeeper was sent off, and there was all sorts of other fun and games, including the referee booking Milan Baros on the subs’ bench—it was just one of those crazy, incident-packed games that comes along every now and then.

Yes, every now and then. That’s the key, really.

I mention last night’s game here because it was an example of a team actually wilting in the face of an opponent raising its game. The Czechs just dropped further and further back as the Turks looked for their equaliser. Every cleared ball went to a Turkish player—because the Czechs were sitting so deep. They reminded me a lot of how England played in Euro2004—feebly trying to defend leads by keeping all players behind the ball. In top-class football it’s just asking for trouble, which is what England four years ago, and the Czechs last night, well and truly got.

But I hold to the point I was trying to make (and hopefully made) in the post. That it is actually rare for a team of good or great players to buckle in the face of a determined opposition. Even if they do seem to wilt under intense pressure, those players will not mysteriously have lost all ability to run with the ball, or to pass it. They’ll still be able to launch counter-attacks without having some Godly power, or lines of programming code, direct the ball straight back to the opposition.

I will admit that it makes for exciting football, memorable stories, thrilling moments, all of that. No doubt that’s the intention behind PES’s infamous God Mode. But I don’t think I’m alone among the fanbase in earnestly wishing for Seabass & co. to dream up something else for this new generation of home consoles. I don’t think anybody really objects to the CPU players having their abilities boosted temporarily, to simulate extra effort. What I think is unacceptable is having your own players’ abilities—including the most basic football abilities of all, passing and dribbling—blatantly hobbled. That is all.

Similar posts:

• The morning after the night before
• The anatomy of a PES goal
• The passage of time leaves empty lives
• In praise of Montserrat Caballe
• Mewling and puking

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Barcelona, European Cup (ECC), Uncategorized, scripting.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.