Here we are then! The final version to send to Konami...
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Dear Sir or Madam,
After discussion with several Pro Evolution Soccer fans on the forum of a Pro Evolution Soccer fan-site,
www.evo-web.co.uk, a great deal of the 65,000+ members are of the opinion that PES6 is not a game fit for release. After Konami UK's contact details were published on the forum, some of the site's members have telephoned and emailed already with their complaints, but most doubt that anything will be done about these issues (especially considering that the code base of the game is developed in Japan for the Japanese market). To most gamers who enjoy football, Pro Evolution Soccer is the game of choice, which is why it comes as a
massive blow to us all that PES has become the game that it is today.
Personally, I have played Pro Evolution Soccer since the game was first released on the original PlayStation; I have purchased each version and enjoyed it more than the last. However, with the latest release, PES6, I am absolutely stunned at the state of the game. "Seabass", the project leader of the PES games, has been quoted since before PES5 was released as saying that the game had "reached its limits" on current-gen consoles. So, of course, we were all looking forward to the next-gen version; finally, the game would have the CPU power it has needed for the last few years. The future of football would soon be upon us.
So, with this in mind...
Several features (International Challenge mode, Random Match mode etc.) have been stripped out. The edit mode has been stripped down to player names and player stats only, meaning that Liverpool will always be known as "Merseyside Red" wearing their dull red shirts. The German league is missing without any replacement, meaning eighteen less teams (and there are barely any teams as there is). There are only eight stadiums. Lots of people are having difficulty with the XBOX Live mode, finding it impossible to play in any matches at all apart from one-off friendlies played via invitations, and even when they can connect the lag when pressing buttons differs between each match, meaning you'll never hit the shot you're supposed to. The gameplay hasn't "Evolved" further than it has in any previous release, now that "Seabass" has been granted the power he has supposedly wished for. And finally;
you can't even save replays, despite the manual claiming otherwise - further cementing the view that the game has been rushed out into our stores to compete with FIFA 07.
So can someone at Konami explain to us why we've paid £300 for an XBOX 360 and £50 for their game, when you can "fix" most of the above problems by purchasing the game for the PlayStation2 for £40? Why are 360 owners playing a game with a feature-list from a pre-PlayStation era?
For years Konami have had the opportunity to add so much to the game, but have failed to deliver. Examples of this can be seen by playing rival games in the genre; FIFA and This Is Football (and even other games that were originally developed in Japan for a Japanese audience, such as Virtua Pro Striker) have always featured lower-league teams, meaning that you can always give yourself a different experience by changing which level of team you choose. In PES, when you play online, the majority of the opponents want to be Brazil or Barcelona. If you could arrange online leagues, people would be more willing to go the teams they support. It wouldn't cost the earth for Konami to give this to us, the lower-league teams wouldn't have to be licensed (the Premiership isn't) and so it would only cost the wages of a few additional researchers and data inputters. After the money we have poured into each new version of PES, they could at least put a small portion of that money back into the development of the game, and give us Europeans the deeper experience that
all of the other football games offer. If EA SPORTS, SCEE and now SEGA can do it, then why can't Konami?
Another example of an area desperate for improvement is the "Master League". This has always been nothing but fantasy, a set of inter-European leagues where players aren't worth millions of pounds; they're worth thousands of "points". You can't have a full English Premiership (or a full premier league from
any of the included European leagues) because you're limited to 16 teams in the top division, and you can't have even ONE realistic lower-league because it's limited to 8 teams. Can you name one professional league in the real world that has 8 teams? And even then, you have to mix European teams into that lower league. So you can have a 16-team English Premiership, and an 8-team league with 4 other English teams in, and then 4 from the European countries of your choice. Wigan versus Villareal, realism? I don't think so. The realism that's supposed to be on the pitch is most certainly not reflected off it.
PES6 on the XBOX 360 was supposed to be the future of football games. Many people love PES so much that they have bought an XBOX 360 purely to play the game. Teenagers, students, average Joes, have saved and saved in anticipation of the 27th of October, and what have they been given for their savings? A game with half the features of the game they've already got. PES5 with better graphics. Have the creators of this game forgotten what it used to be about?
I would appreciate any explanations that you can obtain from the appropriate departments at Konami (or "Seabass" himself, although I somehow doubt that he would offer any) for the above issues. While I realise that building a game from scratch will take time,
why should we be playing half-a-game for full price? Why was the game not held back until it was actually ready? To make a quick buck at our expense?
Konami have already lost a large portion of their fan-base this year, judging from the amount of complaints that you can read every day on Evo-Web. If "Seabass" doesn't develop a game that amounts to something more than PES5 with half the features and a 3D crowd, then he will begin to lose the race between himself and the other football game producers. We have stuck by the relatively few changes in each PES for years, hoping that one day we will be given players who move in full 360 directions rather than 8. To see the demolition of the Master League and the introduction of a career-mode, where you can manage a team at the bottom of a full four-tier league structure and take them to glory, being offered the job at Man United, or even England, at the end of your illustrious career. How much fun would that be? But will we ever see it in our lifetime?
Will we ever be rewarded for the millions of pounds that we have given to Konami? Or will we forever be "treated" to games like PES6? As computer game lovers, as football fans, please help us to get this message to "Seabass", because I think we deserve an answer to at least one of these questions.
Yours faithfully,
Jack Bauer
FFS this game was the main reason i bought a 360! 
