PES Chronicles

Back on 24th October, the first thing I did when I opened the PES2008 case was remove the manual. Underneath was a leaflet marked: WASTED POTENTIAL? At the time, I thought it was just asking for trouble…

I have now spent 24 hours with the game since Konami released the PlayStation3 patch yesterday.

The pesky framerate jitterbugs that scarred the initial release – the initial release that should never have happened, as the game was unfinished (curse you Seabass!) – have all but gone. The offline game now plays very smoothly most of the time. It’s not perfect, but it is acceptable. This was #1 on my wish-list for the PS3 patch, so I’ll take it and say thank you very much.

Some niggles remain. Most matches still feature the traditional ‘PES prickle’ of slowdown at isolated moments. But this has been present in every version I can remember, especially PES4. What slowdown remains in PES2008 is nowhere near as bad as that.

The Bernebeu and one or two other stadia are still occasionally problematic. I don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable playing on pitches with concentric circles. The time has come to edit all of those pitches out of my Master League.

So the 99% resolution of the offline slowdown is very welcome. But this has come at a price.

Those clever programmers at Konami seem to have given themselves a leg-up by reducing the game’s graphical quality. Textures are rougher, and the grass on the pitches is less detailed – it looks duller and glassier than ever. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think so.

Nothing has been announced by Konami. There is no official word on what the patch has and has not changed. The download was a whopping 130MB – almost a fifth of an average full game – so there’s been some pretty substantial changes. We just don’t know what, exactly. So many people have reported a drop in graphical quality that I think it’s safe to say it’s not just my paranoid and bruised PES-related imagination at work.

Konami has taken with one hand whilst giving with the other. They really did rob Peter to pay Paul.

PES2008’s graphics were already relatively poor when compared to other games on the PS3 – games like Call of Duty 4, Oblivion, FIFA08, and even launch titles like Motorstorm.

Call of Duty 4 features chaotic screens full of true whizz-bang, next-gen action that never lets up, and nary a frame is dropped. It’s a hell of an achievement. Likewise Oblivion and Motorstorm. FIFA08 suffers from odd glitches, but these are so rare that they’re a non-issue for me. Graphically, EA’s football game is a true next-gen experience.

I am not a graphics junky. I have never loved PES for its showstopping graphics – it’s never really had them. Gameplay supersedes graphics when the game’s as good as PES always has been. But I do expect that the graphics should be at least decent. Otherwise, why bother with a next-gen console? Let me rephrase that: why bother with the PlayStation3?

Pre-patch, PES2008’s graphics on the PS3 were decidedly PS2.5. This patch has further degraded them. We’re now looking at PS2.25-style graphics.

It’s not good enough at all.

After I had played several games offline I visited the online section of the Main Menu for the first time. I am not much of an online gamer – PES has always been a solo experience for me – but from time to time I do mingle with those exotic creatures known as ‘people’ on the internet. I was curious.

I’ll get straight to it: the quality of online gameplay on the PS3 is absolutely shocking and unforgivable. Players who instantly teleport from one side of the pitch to the other aren’t even the worst of it. Quite often the ball itself will magically disappear and reappear in ways most strange and unnatural. The action can jump from one moment to several moments later without any warning. During one match I was attacking down the right wing, when there was a momentary flicker on the screen and suddenly my goalkeeper was diving to save the ball down at the other end.

I played around 8 full games. All but one was horrendously unplayable. The one good game was ‘only’ marred by occasional player teleports, which I strangely learned to cope with. I happened to win that game 5-0.

I played as England against Spain. Andrew Johnson was rampant. I was gratified to discover that my offline style of play translated very well into an online match. My opponent didn’t get a single shot on goal. (Possibly he was suffering worse lag than me, but who knows.) I’m only slightly embarrassed to report that I fully exploited my strategy buttons‘ alt formations. My players were always in his way. I ran riot in front of goal.

I could get to like this, I thought. But if the online code is irrevocably broken, and no one knows how to fix it, I won’t be playing online again.

The online session ended as it had mostly gone on – farcically. Playing as Spurs against Arsenal, the game seemed to be doomed from the start, with player teleports galore. Every few seconds the camera would zoom to another area of the pitch, leaving the ball behind. Then I kept seeing the ‘Waiting for another player’ message for several seconds every time the ball was ‘out of play’ (even when the ball was in play, it was effectively out of play, but never mind). After the game had stuck on this message for more than five minutes, I quit in something like disgust and went for my dinner.

Later, I double-checked that my internet connection was still working fine with other PS3 titles in my collection. Warhawk, Motorstorm, FIFA08, and Call of Duty 4 were all working online as they always have done – perfectly. I loaded up PES2008 and went online to see how things were now (this was after midnight) – and it was still a dog’s dinner. If anything, things seemed a little worse than earlier. Sheesh.

But I’m an offline, average, Master League player, so I’m all right, yes? Well, no.

I care about the franchise. I don’t want to see it trashed and trailed through the mud like a common whore. I’m also very keen not to be swindled out of my money by a product that promised next-gen graphics, online play, and a lasting PES experience, and delivered relatively little. I also care how my fellow PES gamers are feeling about the game. We’re a tight community, and my brothers in PES ain’t happy…

What must a very common type of PES player – the type who loves Editing, and loves nothing more than to play online – think of PES2008?

For the first time, I can really understand the anger that is out there amongst the wider PES community. I’m angry too, but I’m less angry now that the offline framerate has been sorted. If I had bought PES2008 primarily to play it online, I’d have been spitting nails during the month since release. After seeing the online game in action, post-patch, I’d be speechless with outright disbelief right now.

At this point, I’m going to execute a rhetorical handbrake turn and re-emphasise what I have stated many time before, here and elsewhere: that I like PES2008. Yes, I like PES2008. I like PES2008 because I’m a Master League player through and through, and I can overlook the game’s graphical shortcomings because I find the gameplay to be satisfying – for now.

Along with everybody else I hate the goalkeepers. I hate the fast pace of the game sometimes (let’s have a FIFA08-style pace for PES2009, eh lads?). I am concerned that I’m suddenly the world’s greatest dribbler after seven years of not being able to dribble at all, but – I like it. It’s still PES, warts and all.

However, for the first time in my entire PES life, I doubt that I’ll still be playing this game regularly in six months’ time. I might not even be playing it regularly in a month’s time. FIFA08 is burning a hole in my shelf right now. So much about this PES year is unprecedented. Perhaps FIFA08’s serious challenge is the most unprecedented thing of all.

PES2008 on the PlayStation3 is nowhere near being the next-gen game that it should have been. It’s not even halfway there. An offline mode that only just passes muster (after a 130MB patch) simply isn’t enough nowadays. It fails on too many fronts for even a dedicated fanboy like myself to continue making excuses. Wasted potential? I’ll say.

My league form continues to be appalling (just look at that table down below), but I have somehow navigated my way to the semi-finals of the D1 Cup.

My quarter-final opponents were River Plate. They started out in Division 2 with me almost four seasons ago now, but they got promoted in that first season. They’re a tough side – when I met them in the league earlier this season I was pummelled and harried and teased all over the place. I lost that game badly. I was worried about meeting them in the cup.

The first leg was away at River Plate’s ground. Due to fitness levels I was missing the likes of Donadel, Shaw, Schwarz, and Bramble. Ouch on every front, but I’d have probably rested some or all of them anyway. The league is the #1 priority. This Cup run is just a bit of fun – a sideshow.

I went out with my makeshift team – giving rare starts to Muntari, Mattsson, Reyes, and Traore - and just made the best of things. Perhaps I should play with this attitude (and/or these players) more often, because I defended well, took my one clear-cut chance, and won the game 1-0.

This was despite seeing what was at times an absolutely horrific amount of slowdown during the game. Whenever the ball was at either end of the pitch the game went into Bullet Time for up to several seconds. I coped as best I could, but it spoiled my enjoyment of what was a solid win.

The slowdown problem seems to be making a comeback for me in Division 1. I don’t know what is causing it now. I am quite concerned about it. I haven’t changed any of the settings that all but eliminated it a couple of weeks ago. I’m not doing any background downloading. It’s just got about 50% worse for no apparent reason.

A PS3 patch from Konami is rumoured to be in the offing, but all the talk about it is centred upon the online lag problem. Whereas it’s the offline game that is still the beating heart and soul of PES – or it should be. I’ll be watching how this situation develops very carefully indeed. I have played PES2008 on the Xbox 360 and not only does it look 10 times better than on the PS3, it also plays as smoothly as the proverbial baby’s bottom.

Getting back to the Cup, with that away goal under my belt I approached the second leg feeling that I would have to suffer a complete disaster to lose. And it nearly happened – River Plate got an early goal with more than a whiff of scripting about it. But then I went up the other end and scored three goals without reply. I’ll face Manchester United in the semi-final.

This Cup malarkey is all well and good, but there is disturbing news elsewhere… Around these two games, I suffered on the league front.

I lost four games in a row, scoring no goals at all and losing my discipline completely in one particular game as the frustration took its toll. I had 5 players sent off and the game was abandoned with a 0-3 scoreline awarded against me.

The latest table makes for some truly alarming viewing. I am 18th – third from bottom. In the relegation zone. I can’t seem to buy a result in the league right now.

There are eighteen league games left to play. I’ll probably be all right. I will be all right. Won’t I?

Finally, finally. Pardon the exclamation mark up there. I was just so excited. Here is Donadel’s first goal for Coventry City:

I had to wait almost a full season for it, but it was worth it.

Apart from this high point and the ongoing Cup run, my league form is still poor. I’ve hit the doldrums again in the run-up to the mid-season negotiations. A string of draws and one defeat. If this keeps up I might find myself dragged down into the relegation dogfight. Now that would be a first.

I’m actually feeling pretty fed-up with PES2008 right now.

For one thing, I’m suddenly seeing way more slowdown.

In the match at Galatasaray earlier this season, the action slowed to a crawl every time the ball was at either end of the pitch. The same thing happened against Blackburn Rovers at their ground.

For another thing, the CPU teams this year are majorly annoying. They’ve been annoying for a couple of years, but this year the annoying is turned up to 11.

PES2008, more than any other PES before it, uses its foreknowledge of what button(s) you have just pressed to give the CPU team an advantage. In PES5 and PES6, it used the knowledge to avoid your sliding tackles on the wings but rarely anywhere else. Now, it uses that knowledge all over the park, and can sidestep or hurdle any and every sliding tackle with ease. And it will do this multiple times within seconds. For example:

Yes, that’s absolutely awful defending from me, isn’t it? But it looks worse than it is. The camera angle doesn’t help – at least one of those four attempted tackles should have stopped the other player. The above clip is an example of what the CPU players do a lot more in PES2008 than they ever did before — they turn into untouchable supermen. After the CPU player evaded the first two I kind of knew what was coming.

Am I feeling disillusioned by PES, or by PES2008 in particular? Is the hurricane of fan dismay and negative press affecting my judgement? Possibly.

[ANOTHER EDIT, Tuesday 27th November 2007. The PS3 patch has finally been released, and seems - touch wood - to have resolved the bulk of my complaints about offline play. I have reset all the settings detailed in this post and it still seems - touch wood again - to work OK. It's still relatively early days, though. We don't yet know if the patch is the final patch. (Online players certainly hope it's not the last.) It's likely that slowdown will never be fully eliminated from the PS3 game. So I will leave this post below as written.]

[EDIT, Saturday 27th October 2007: I believe I have found my solution to slowdown, but will let this post stand as it was originally written. I have edited in the details of my solution at the bottom of this post.]

I never wanted to write posts like this one. I wanted this blog to be pretty much an episodic recounting of my day-by-day adventures on PES2008. It still will be that way, I’m sure, in time.

For now, though, there’s a turd in the punchbowl. I’m talking about what many PS3-owners have discovered upon firing up PES2008 for the first time. Yes, the game’s now-infamous framerate issues on the console. I’ll call it slowdown for short.

Many people don’t see it. They don’t know what we’re talking about. They stop short of calling us liars, but they suggest that we’re exaggerating, or that we’re over-fussy and over-critical. “I played 20 games today and saw slowdown just once on a corner OMG what are you people on about!” – that’s about the size of it. Things can get brutal out there in the wild.

What they’re not seeing, and what I’m seeing – along with many others – is a disastrous drop in the game’s framerate that can happen dozens of times during every game.

Most often it will happen when the screen is full of players, or when playing a long ball or having a long shot. The previously silky-smooth game suddenly slows to a crawl. It’s similar to a Bullet Time effect. It can last anything from a split-second to a couple of seconds, depending on the situation. It’s exceedingly ugly and frustrating, as it plays havoc with your timing.

If it happened just on occasions when the screen was packed with players, I think I could live with it – grudgingly, and indeed grumpily, but I could live with it. I played an entire year of PES4 with ‘packed penalty box slowdown’. But I’m seeing the problem under all conditions, at random times.

Just this morning I was playing a big International Cup quarter final, England vs Italy. I was on a breakaway attack. There were four players on screen. Four. I played a through-ball to my other attacker, and the slowdown happened. I had anticipated the ball arriving earlier, and cued up a shot. A shot that never happened, because the ball was still on its way to me. The defender intercepted easily (my attacker completing his shot animation too quickly).

Most games I play have at least one instance of this kind of thing. Some games have several. Some other games have dozens, as I said. I’ve conceded penalties and free kicks and missed easy tap-in goals galore because of it.

PES2008 is a really great game – even with slowdown, I can see that – but for those of us who have yet to play more than two games in a row without potentially game-wrecking slowdown, it’s a great game with serious issues right now.

And maybe I’m even one of the lucky ones. My slowdown is not as bad as some others I’ve heard about. Some people testify that their games are ‘crippled’. Their framerate drops so low so often that the game is totally unplayable. I believe them.

Even at this early stage – today is the official release day – there are suggested solutions to the problem. I’ll recap the main ones:

• Turn off Stadium Effects (in the game’s System Settings)
• Turn off Entrance scenes (in the game’s System Settings)
• Install the game data to the PS3 hard disk (in the game’s System Settings)
• Change your PS3’s output resolution to 720p (in the PS3’s XMB Display Settings)
• Switch off various in-game display options, such as Player Name Bar and the like (from the in-game menu)
• Use the Normal Long camera (in-game Camera menu)

I know, I know. We bought a games console for a reason. Having to tweak this setting, and alter that gizmo, and check the other widget, and so forth, is uncomfortably like PC gaming.

I have tried all of the above and some of them have made a difference. Only two had no effect: changing the camera and changing my PS3’s resolution to 720p – these actually seemed to make things slightly worse for me.

But, using the other measures, my slowdown is about 50% of what it was at first. I can go longer periods without slowdown, and indeed sometimes play entire games without slowdown. But then in the next game, it’ll be back. It’s like toothache: it hurts, and there are periods of respite, but you can never feel totally at ease while you know it’s there, waiting to happen again.

Different stadiums in the game are worse than others. If I could, I would choose to play all of my games at the ‘good’ stadiums. But I cannot choose. In every game mode but Exhibition, the game chooses the stadium for me. And, as Sod’s infamous Law would have it, the game often seems to favour the ‘bad’ stadiums. I played the entire group stage of a tournament at some bad stadiums this morning. It was not pretty.

Grief-stricken would be too strong a term to describe my feelings right now. Away from PES I do have a full and active life. (Honest!) But I do feel something like grief. I also feel betrayed. I have spent so long looking forward to this – the first next-gen PES! on HDTV! – that the corresponding feeling of let-down is intense.

What has not improved my mood is hearing that the Xbox360 version of the game is problem-free. This does not surprise me, having played the 360’s demo a couple of times. I found it to be excellent in almost all respects. Vibrant colours. Good graphics. Smooth gameplay. Only its replays seemed to be afflicted by very minor slowdown. I saw none in-game.

So now I am straining at the leash to go out and get an Xbox360 to play PES2008. But why should I have to do that? I have a perfectly fine next-gen console in the PS3. It is supposed to be the superior console, technically-speaking. The game’s developers must have had it to work on for over a year now. So what has gone wrong?

Perhaps the fault lies not with Konami but with some element of our individual setups. Perhaps some TVs are less compatible with the game than others. Quite how this would be I have no idea. In fact, I think it’s pretty unlikely. Every other game I have on my PS3 runs smoothly without any issues at all times. Oblivion, Resistance, Warhawk, FIFA08(!), and many more – none of them have ever given me a moment’s trouble. FIFA08 in particular represents a kick in the teeth for Konami. It shows that there is really no excuse for even a single framerate drop in a football game.

So there’s no real conclusion to this so far. Konami is reported to be working on a patch for the PS3 game that will arrive ‘in weeks rather than months’. That’s some good news. I hope that they understand just how important this is to the game’s fans on the PS3.

For now I will continue to play the game. I will continue to watch out for news and tips about how to cope with the problems. There is nothing else I can do right now.

What I will never do is do what some well-meaning but misguided people suggest. I will never simply buckle down and get used to it. I will get an Xbox360, or throw myself off a cliff, or both, before I ever just meekly get used to it. If I ever find myself playing the game and trying to take the slowdown into account when making decisions, I will instantly switch off. Permanently.

[EDIT, Saturday 27th October 2007. Late last night I came across a list of settings to tinker with on the PS3. Having nothing to lose, I went ahead and changed them. The result? The end of slowdown! Well, the end of 99% of slowdown. Have a look at the list and try it out if you're at your wits' end as I was.

• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [Booster DVD]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [BD 1080p/24 output Hz (HDMI)]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [format audio output BD / DVD (HDMI)]> [Bitstream]
• [Settings]> [Settings game]> [Revamp PS/PS2]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings game]> [Smoothing PS/PS2]> [No]
• [Settings]> [System Settings]> [Message notification]> [Do not show]
• [Settings]> [Network Settings]> [Connecting to multimedia server]> [Disabled]
• [Settings]> [Network Settings]> [Internet]> [Disabled]