PES Chronicles

[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]

Today I spent another few hours on the Xbox360 demo of PES2008. All the reports that are starting to appear on PESfan and elsewhere from people who already have the full game are making me grumpy, so another stint of quality time with the demo is more than called for.

I doubt that I’ll be going back to play PES6 again now. There just isn’t any point. So it’s officially farewell from me to a great game. Granted, PES6 was nowhere near as good as its immediate predecessor, the legendary PES5; nor did it quite match up in my affections to either PES2 or PES3. But it was better than PES4 and the original PES1. (In my opinion, of course.)

Damning PES6 with faint praise? Perhaps. The scripting (or, if you prefer, the ‘AI advantage’) was the most extreme we have ever seen in a PES game, in my opinion. While it didn’t exactly spoil the game, it didn’t enhance it either.

My hopes for PES2008 are sky-high. Playing the demo has really helped to set my mind at ease. I did worry that we were going to get a version of PES6 with next-gen graphics. Some would argue that that is what we’ve got anyway, but I see things differently. The players move differently. The ball behaves differently. You can’t first-time 40-yard shots into the net – or, if you can, it’s not immediately obvious how to do it.

The whole game just feels different from any of its predecessors. Reaching back in my memory for a PES with a similar ‘feel’, only PES3 springs to mind.

During my fresh stint with the PES2008 demo today, I managed to allay another one of my worries. I was very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to score long-range goals with such gay abandon anymore (see my PES5 videos – links on the right – for examples of this).

Recent iterations of PES have featured a long-range shooting mechanic that is one of the most deeply satisfying gameplay components of any game I have ever played. Let me just mention here a certain Mr Mathieu bursting past the halfway line and unleashing one of his left-footed rockets. I love long-range shooting and I have scored most of my memorable goals in that fashion. (Ive said it before and I will say it again: I am emphatically not a dribbler.)

So during my first stint with the PES2008 demo on the Xbox 360 last week I was a bit worried by the fact that every goal I scored – even the hatfuls of goals I scored with the difficulty set to Amateur or Beginner – were all scuffed kinds of shots from close or medium range. Despite making scores of attempts to bag myself a PES5/PES6-style 40-yarder into the postage stamp corner of the goal, none of them went in. Most of them barely even left the ground.

But everything is okay. I needn’t have worried. Playing as Portugal against Brazil on Professional difficulty, things were winding down at the end of yet another 0-0 draw. Then I broke up a Brazilian attack and emerged with Simao. I raced him past the halfway line and turned slightly in toward goal. Two Brazilian defenders moved towards me. I was about 40 yards out…

To hell with it, I thought, and pressed down hard on the shoot button. I flicked the analogue stick slightly toward the top right. Simaos right boot swung at the ball, and it flew through the air, travelling, travelling… and beat the keeper’s graceful dive, billowing the net in style.

The best goal I’ve scored on PES2008 so far (albeit in the demo), and a great fillip in advance of PES2008’s D-Day, later this week.

Speaking of which… Monday’s update will be at around 6pm. I’ll be spending the afternoon in town, looking for PES2008.

A special post today as I have finally, finally, finally played a demo for PES2008.

I managed to get in touch with one of my few remaining real-life friends (Minanda and Burchet et al unfortunately don’t count) who has two things: an Xbox 360, and a high-speed internet connection. A couple of phone calls and a bus ride later I was sitting on his couch, holding the unfamiliar bulkiness of the 360’s controller as the loading screen for the demo of PES2008 floated in front of my eyes.

First impressions, and I mean first:

It’s not as fast as people made out. It’s still fast, but it doesn’t run at the insanely fast, Defender-style pace that I was genuinely worried it might do.

The slowdown is so imperceptible as to be almost a non-issue for me. When I first saw the slowdown in a replay, I actually thought it was a feature, something deliberately inserted to add style and/or drama at key moments. Far more serious for me is the mammoth pause before the referee blows his whistle and allows you to take free kicks and penalties. It feels like an absolute age. It was mildly frustrating in the demo games I played. Time will tell if it’s even in the final game, and if so, whether it’s something I can get used to.

Gameplay: fantastic! It seems to be everything I hoped it would be. Not only is the gameplay slower-paced than I thought, but the shooting mechanic seems to have been completely revamped. In PES6 I could score first-time shots for fun. In PES2008, so far not one attempt at a first-time shot has led to a goal. Instead the ball has either skewed wildly off to the sidelines (on one occasion actually hitting the corner flag), or rolled tamely into the keeper’s waiting arms.

The shooting is heavy this year. When was the last time we had heavy shooting? It was PES5, I think, although for some reason PES4 is nuzzling at my memory right now.

As for the graphics… So many reviewers and previewers remarked that the next-gen visuals were nothing to get excited about. Well. Call me Mr Easily Pleased, but I was almost literally speechless when I saw my beloved PES playing out in full HD next-gen graphics before my eyes. The qualitative leap seems as great to me as it was from the PlayStation to the PlayStation2.

I stayed at my friend’s place for a few hours, playing about 30 games in that time, making sure to sample all the teams and all the difficulty levels.I’ve gone from being slightly underwhelmed by the prospect of PES2008 to being extremely excited again.

The only cloud on the horizon is represented in this thread over on PESfan (membership required to view). Two of the UK’s leading PES players have got their hands on advance copies of the full game on PS3. One of the players – the European champion, Rob McLean -reports that the game is insanely fast. Most worryingly of all, it seems that the PS3 version may have significant slowdown. More significant than the 360 demo version’s slowdown? It’s tough to get a straight answer out of them, as they’re being bombarded with questions from all angles, and they understandably want to play the game. But it seems likely, especially given some comments reported from Seabass himself, that the poor old PS3 has once again been afflicted with lazy-developer-itis.

Certain kinds of 360 owners are cock-a-hoop at what they see as the latest victory in their ongoing battle with the notionally superior console. Me, I don’t care about the so-called console wars. I’m not 15 years old. I just want to play my favourite game in the most ideal conditions possible. I will wait to see the quality of the PS3 version for myself. If I have to get a 360 to experience PES2008 at its optimum, that is what I will do.

Who would be a PS3 owner at this time? If in the future the smoke clears, and the PS3 does emerge to achieve its full potential, those of us who were here at the start will never forget the cold, clammy feelings we had at times like this.