55% proof?
So, it’s a few days after the PSM3-fuelled, PES2010-related storm. It didn’t say what I wanted it to say, but I thought it was a good article nonetheless. Lots of food for thought. It did its job. PSM3 must be very happy with the attention it’s generated, if not with the numerous links to illicit scans.
I’d have liked to read a lot more about the writer’s experience of actually playing the game. Possibly the now-famous ‘55%’ early code didn’t help matters, but it sounds like they had some good hands-on time with the gameplay nevertheless. What did it feel like, in detail? How did it handle, from moment to moment? How did it compare in detail with past PESes? Was the players’ touch on the ball heavy or light? Ditto the shooting: heavy or light? How well did the passing game flow?
I’d have preferred 9 pages about all of that, and maybe 1 page about everything else. Why do previewers think they have to focus so much on sock tape and that kind of thing? At this stage all the stuff about tactical sliders and skill cards is just a sideshow. That new tactical system will count for nothing if the game isn’t up to scratch.
There were frequent hints in the article that PES2010 is just another decent, workmanlike, but ultimately lacklustre next-gen PES game. PES2009 part 2. That was precisely what I didn’t need to hear. Or was it? My expectations could do with being brought back into line with reality—although they still remain high, and I’m keeping them that way.
I’m desperate for a Pro Evolution Soccer to be proud of this year. PES2009 was okay, yes, but even I was knocking in hat-tricks for fun on Top Player after an indecently short time. That’s not the PES I remember. I want it back. PES should last for a year, not just until Christmas (if that).
Buried in the Article of Infamy were some nuggets of good news. Among them the fact that Middle Shooting is back in PES2010. And the overall pace of the game is slower.
I still believe that PES2010 has a pleasant surprise up its sleeve for me this year. I know that this is against all the evidence. The precedent established by the past two years is that I’m being gulled by clever marketing and my own PES-centric mental habits.
Thankfully, PES fans have a pretty sizeable insurance policy in the form of next-gen FIFA. The new FIFA certainly has its critics. I’m one of them. There are also plenty of PES fans for whom the FIFA revolution might as well never have happened. These people are the Amish of the PES world. For them, FIFA is the enemy and always will be. “FIFA is good now”, as a proposition, simply does not compute… does not compute…
But perhaps they’re the lucky ones. Having never played an actual next-gen football game, they’ve got nothing to compare PES’s relatively feeble efforts to.
I waver between two camps. On the one hand I’m a full-on FIFA convert, relishing its deep gameplay and startling difficulty (I still haven’t graduated to the hardest difficulty). On the other hand, while I enjoy what FIFA has to offer, I still yearn for a return to Paradise. That is, to the rock-solid certainty that was PES, year after year.
FIFA09 has taken up my morning gaming sessions over the past few weeks, and it’s made itself right at home. If PES must finally die, there’s a replacement waiting to step into its shoes. My feeling is that it really is now or never for PES. I think this is a widespread feeling. Three years is long enough. It’s all up to PES2010 now.
When I moved back to Kansas and started supporting the Wizards (Kansas...
Curse you, Seabass™.
I didn’t read the PSM3 article as negatively as you did. I read that the development goal was to create a game that had multiple approaches and new layers of tactical depth (being able to toggle on and off individual player preferences). That, combined with enough new animations to give the game a smoother feel and reduce some of the current ridiculousness (getting bumped and stumbling 14 yards like a goon in a Kung Fu movie) would be a really good game.
If they have more up their sleeve (which surely they must, as it is still early in the release cycle and their sleeves are so long), we might even get a great game.
That said, if FIFA can pull off an engaging Manager Mode — one that has the stickiness of Master League — then PES is done for anyway. They’re too far behind in ‘09, and all FIFA is missing is a bit more variety in approach, and a truly immersive offline mode.
By ‘variety of approach’, I don’t mean necessarily build-up. That facet of play is excellent. I mean that if I want to bomb down the wings and loft in crosses, it should be useful — in current FIFA, I can get crosses all day, but I only vary rarely score from them. As a gamer, I sigh and adjust my play to favor long balls down the middle for my strikers and start pounding in goals. It’s a flaw, and a critical one for me.
It would also be a fantastically easy flaw to address, at which point even FIFA 09 with that modification becomes scary good, and likely better than PES 10 will be. Combine that with the 360-degree dribbling (which very well could be the proverbial ‘game changer’) and I don’t see even a fantastic PES release competing.
But you and me? We’ll play them both. This year, I’ve been playing both FIFA and PES for the PS3, and PES for the Wii as well. Three excellent football games would probably mean that I’ll never get that tan I’ve been bitching about.
ck—One of the major obstacles to me really liking FIFA is falling away. I’ve started knocking in PES-style goals in FIFA09 quite regularly. I mean distance thunderbolts from 25-35 yards. Not too many—the ratio is quite realistic, I get about 1 roughly every 10 matches. (There’ll be another goals-filled FIFA09 post early next week, and all of them will be good to look at this time.) On PES I could get a piledriver from distance roughly 1 in 4 matches, or 1 in 2 matches in a great session.
The thing about this is, now I know how to do it, it scratches one of the major itches. I never thought next-gen FIFA would be able to satisfy my craving for quality distance goals, but it is now. And so another element tying me to PES falls away.
Having said that, I’d be delighted with some high-quality PES gameplay in a next-gen package (‘emulated’ or not). I can’t help being pessimistic sometimes. The past two years have been so damaging. But I’m optimistic at the same time.
Hmm not-greg care to share your long range techniques? And why was my previous post deleted?
I think that not even SEABASS believe in PES anymore…but perhaps we should not write off the underdog – or the underdog heads
Well, I agree with what you’re saying, except for the “now or never” part.
I think that PES2010 will be a big step, and that PES2011 will be a complete package… with possible 360 movement.
So even if PES2010 doesn’t best FIFA10 (it already has the better visuals, possibly deeper gameplay), I’m sure PES2011 will be “it”.
Maybe I’m a fanboy (or a PC gamer with no other options), but I feel that a lot of FIFA’s late success seems to stem out of PES’s recent downfall. In reality, I think that if PES delivers a next-gen experience, it will definitely be the superior game…
I agree somewhat TareX. I don’t know about PES2010 or PES2011, but an improved PES will definitely be the superior game. Having spent quite a lot of time with FIFA09, I can categorically say it does not play the better game of football. I can’t quite put my finger on the reason, but it just doesn’t feel right. Its something to do with the floaty/light weight of the ball, the sterile atmosphere and shooting system. It just leaves me cold. Even PES2009 feels better than FIFA09.
I agree I think a lot of FIFA success stems from PES’s lack of improvements in the next-gen. I don’t think FIFA09 is anywhere near as good as PES4/5.
I don’t regret getting swapping it for PES, it has been fun at times and its good try out the competition, but I think I’ll still be buying PES this year.
As for the PSM article, its not too encouraging. I like the sound of slower gameplay and the tactical sliders. I think we’ll all have to withold judgement until its released and we can guage its gameplay depth, difficulty and online mode. I think we can all safely assume that the game modes will be slightly tweaked, nothing more. I know we are all addicted to the hype but the last few years (should) have taught us to wait until we have played the game ourselves before making any assessments.
Ghost of PES past—sorry, but WENB is a soundly flogged topic over recent days and I’m not publishing any WENB-related comments at the moment, or maybe ever again. (Except this one, obviously.)
As for the FIFA09 shooting, my best tip is to just keep believing that it’s possible and keep trying. The received wisdom is that it’s a waste of time trying distance shots in FIFA09, that you’re always better off trying to work the chance inside the box. But a football game isn’t a true football game for me without the possibility of belting in a 30-yard screamer every so often, so I just kept trying. Switching to semi-assisted shooting may help. I’ve certainly had way more success with it than I ever did with assisted.
And re. Seabass—he’s definitely being kept out of sight this year. He’s not been the most gifted of PR reps, mainly because he always strangely told the truth.
TareX—FIFA certainly wouldn;t be where it is now—standing poised with teh keys to the castle—if PES hadn’t had such a peculiar fall over the past two years. As I have found and others have found there are too many strange ‘dead spots’ in next-gen FIFA’s gameplay, the equivalent of leaden exposition in film, for it to be anywhere near the old PS2 PESes.
As for PES2011… I’m one of those who can’t put up with it any more. I’m tired of this endelessly deferred deferred gratification, of PES always being something that’s over the next hill. Literally ‘now or never’ is probably too far, but what I mean by it is ‘now[i.e. PES2010], or I give myself wholly to FIFA, and just wait for PES2011 with detached interest’.
But I also think that PES2010 will be a big step. It’ll just be a question, for me, of will it be a big enough step?
Grilled Seabass—I’m with you on all three negative counts re. FIFA09 (floaty ball, sterile atmosphere, eccentric shooting system). But I’m currently in the midst of my most sustained run on FIFA09 (in Manager Mode, no less) since I got the game last year, and I’m really enjoying it. The thing I’ve found over the past few weeks is that its problems are all ‘absorbable’. They can all be worked around. PES5 was the pinnacle of console football gaming IMO, but do you remember the double-stepover that would often see the ball run out of play? The strangely empty stadia? For all its faults, there was and is real love for that game. I think the same allowances will come to be made, over time, for FIFA’s myriad faults. At the moment, I agree neither of the next-gen FIFAs is as good as the middle PS2 PESes. I’d say they’re both on a par with the original PES1 and maybe PES2 as well. (I speak of the offline game, of course.)
FIFA can’t fully occupy me, though, while PES is still alive. PES has to more or less die (to make room in my heart), and it hasn’t done that yet (and see tomorrow’s post for more on that). After three years I’m still here, waiting expectantly for an astonishing next-gen PES experience. You mention addiction to hype. It’s very true—I’m totally addicted. I check all the websites and forums every few minutes sometimes. It’s the hype that’s getting to me. If and when I finally get my hands on PES2010 I’ll be completely serene about things, whichever way the verdict goes.
PES is the heart zombie. It might never die, honestly.
I played a lot of both PES and FIFA this last year, and while I can add to the chorus that says that FIFA was the better game, it was missing enough (or rather, the things that it were missing were critical enough) to send me back to the mouldering, rotten arms of a two-years dead PES.
Which I’ve definately played long enough to realize that it’s fatal flaw is the horrible attacking AI. PES has always hamstrung your players in order to increase its difficulty (a fundamental mistake, in my game-designery opinion), but this version takes it over the top with inept forward runs basically forcing you into a “play it sideways or backwards” circulation approach.
I think the circulation approach is fine if that’s what you want to play, or better yet, if the defenders actually force you into it, but this was just transparent. My players won’t make runs into space!
I need to see players at least attempting positive runs — I just get the feeling while playing that the horrible runs and passing woes are just patching over AI problems. Hopefully the additional developers this year will allow them to not have to take such frustrating shortcuts.
In fact, I even went out and bought a wii in my desperation, and am currently playing PES for wii, which is the successor to the PS2 version in every way. It’s the PES you love and remember, no doubt, but the graphics . . . well, they’re also the PES from the past. You adjust, but it’s not the same.
We need a great next-gen football game. One game to rule them all. Two years ago, I wanted that game to be PES. Today, I don’t care which team seizes the brass ring.
On current form, my betting money is on the FIFA team, even if my sentiment still pulls for old Seabass (curse him™).
@Not Greg: Good point about Seabass — he never b.s.ed the fans. He is an artisan and craftsman in the best sense of the word. He had the brilliant vision, and knew both when he’d gotten it right, and when he’d gotten it wrong.
Good point regarding the attacking AI cklarock. I have always played a pass-pass-pass game, so I wasn’t too effected by PES09’s AI. But the option always used to be there for the direct game, if thats how you want to play it. The devs really need to work on the AI this year. The attacking AI definitely needs tweaking, but I think the much touted ‘teamvision AI’ needs to be overhauled. I didn’t see any evidence of it in PES09. I always play the same style but the AI never adjusted to my style. It just played the same disjointed crap it always does, whoever the opposition.
I think one of the most important advances that needs to be made in football gaming is a variety of AI ‘personalities’. Barca should play a quick short passing game, Chelsea should play a direct powerful game, Stoke should play a long-ball game. Right now there is no differentiation in approach from CPU teams (in PES or FIFA) and it will be a huge stride forward in football gaming when we finally get to play against teams playing a similar style to their real life counterparts. That is why, for me, playing against the CPU is hugely inferior to playing against a human opponent.
“Teamvision AI” = Little green men, dragons, faeries, Santa Claus and clean coal. It sounded great at the time, but failed to materialize.
The sliders will give them a better chance at creating adaptive AI, because you’ll essentially be telling the computer what you hope to accomplish. The PES defenders will have a mole in your training camp!
Of course, that isn’t in and of itself a good thing. If it’s overdone, it will render the sliders useless.
I was thinking that if I was a developer, I’d consider reorganizing the stats around athleticic, technical and mental abilities. The latter would control how close to “perfect” the individual player’s AI was, and in what specific ways it diverged.
The player with all 99s in mental stats would always be in the right place, always make the right runs, and follow your tactical instructions to a T. The player with a 65 in “attacking discipline” might be well-positioned defensively, but go off on runs counter to your instructions during buildup.
There are a world of possibilities, all of which would give individual players vivid personalities, but you have to start with the assumption that you have a “perfect” AI to degrade downward from.
Imagine looking at Chapi against Khumalo — Chapi is the far better player, but he won’t play within the team system (due to his low “Teamwork” and “Discipline” qualities). Do you start Khumalo in his place, especially when you need to hold a 1-0 aggregate lead in a cup tie?
I’m with you 100%. The sliders also could go a long way toward developing team personalities — of course the game “out of the box” will be bland and useless, and the editing community will have to come ’round and fix them all. But if they are really impacting, you know everyone will. Some ambitious soul(s) will spend two days making all the La Liga teams play correctly.
If I were Konami, I’d look for a way to let folks trade Option Files and save games online. I know legal issues would make them balk at the suggestion, but that’s why God created “End User Agreements.”
At the very least, they need to make the next-gen OF trading that happens off the official servers a bit more convenient .
Again, if I ran the PES team, we’d insist that the fan editing community is a big, fat brand value-add and the thing that makes up for our lack of licenses. I’d put as much development time serving that community as I might have creating licensed teams.
Ah, armchair game development.
I find my life mirrored in real football and gaming football… I made a vow not to chase scraps of info on FIFA and PES until September just as I made a vow not to check up religously on Liverpool’s endless transfer gossip in real life.
Neither has happened, t’internet has a lot to answer for…
ck—About a year ago I did something that I’ve never, ever mentioned on the blog: I too bought a Wii, and a copy of PES2008 with it. I disliked the Wii from the start after I discovered that its much-vaunted motion control system doesn’t really work. Or better to say, it doesn’t work enough of the time for it to be a problem. (Yes, I spent an age calibrating my top-of-the-TV sensor thing, which was another unpleasant surprise about the whole Wii experience.) I was particularly disgusted with this after paying the full price for Tiger Woods 09. A full-on swing, or even some putts, would more often produce a comedy twitch from my on-screen player, resulting in endless triple bogeys or worse. PES2008 was a better Wii experience as the controls were all point and click. It amused me for a day or two, but never more than that. I never got over my dislike of being unable to control shots. It was something different, though. After the Wii literally lay gathering dust for a few months, I traded it (and the two games) for a DualShock3 and a copy of FIFA09 on the 360. The Wii was the first current console I had ever traded in. From that day to this I have been an unashamed Wii-hater. I know that Nintendo have lately brought out an add-on to make motion control more truly 1:1, but I feel that’s the way it should have been from the start and the alleged Wii revolution in gaming has been based on a false premise. The die is cast for me and I will never again dabble with the damn thing. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
Deep breath… I agree with all your points about AI in PES. Will we ever see that truly flexible AI, though – Stoke playing like Stoke, Milan like Milan? From my limited knowledge of AI programming (all theory), it’s not beyond the current generation of developers. Heck, it wasn’t even beyond them in the 1980s, or even the 1950s, if they’d had consoles. It’s just a matter of designing different ’style sheets’ and programming parameters, and whatnot. It’s not even a real AI challenge.
p.s. I’m about 70 pages into Castel di Sangro and loving it. Are Castel di Sangro in Football Manager? (Don’t answer this. It’ll spoil the rest of the book, although I had a peek at the photos in the middle and kind of know how it’ll turn out. I’ll check out FM2009 for the team when I’ve finished.)
Grilled Seabass—the much-derided ‘TeamVision’ was just a rebranding of something that was already there in the PES code, IMO. As a feature of PES’s year of hell, it’ll always suffer by association. As soon as I hear TeamVision I think of PES2008, of slowdown, of super-sprinting, of 10-0 scorelines, of the beginning of the end of PES (possibly).
Chris—the sooner it’s August the better, really. We’ll have loads of PES previews and videos to look at (if it looks even vaguely like PES2009 in motion, the fur will really fly). And the football season will have started again.