eFootball (All Platforms)

Mikhail said:
Exactly my feelings. PES 2021 is a hideous game and I don’t want to play it ever again.

I’ve seen people here say it’s the best PES ever - and they’re more than entitled to their opinion of course. But - really? Jesus Christ. I can think of 5 PES games straight away which are much better. Then you can arguably make a case for games like PES 2014 and PES 4 being better (two games which I didn’t rate at the time).

FIFA is on another planet to PES now. Someone at the soccer gaming Reddit summed up modern PES - it was their first experience with the series and they said it was like those old arcade games where you just press a button to score. Strip down PES and it’s an arcade game and has been for ages. It’s archaic - when I score a goal in PES 2019 onwards it doesn’t feel like I’ve scored it - feels like the CPU has done it for me and I’ve just pressed a button to make it happen (yes I know essentially that this is exactly what has happened but you get my point).

FIFA, even when it’s shit - is still far deeper than PES and has been for years, both on and off the pitch. So it doesn’t surprise me that Konami have said “F**k it, let’s just make a free myClub game for the masses, they only focus on player faces and hoarding classic Totti and Beckham player cards anyway.”

And here we are: an even more simplified version of PES, called eFootball - dumbed down, end-to-end, tap-shoot-to-score arcade soccer.

It’s over for PES but it has been for years if you really think about it.
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It's because EA moved towards systems-based design a decade ago whereas Konami stuck with the old school "brute forcing" method. Brute forcing being where they predefine or "script" a finite set of possibilities and interactions in an attempt to create an illusion of simulation, vs systems based which tries to replicate the underlying real life physical systems resulting in "emergent behavior" that leads to vastly more possible outcomes but also greater unpredictability (plus likely greater development complexity). Because the technology hasn't really been there for one approach to vastly outmatch the other, Konami have been able to maintain a style of gameplay that is preferred by some due to various characteristics like its weightiness, but the problem with that is once the technological gap gets big enough you will likely be left in the dust, just as happened at the start of the PS3 era when EA had moved to animation sets built with motion capture resulting in far more fidelity and variation whilst Konami were still hand-crafting each animation. The same thing is going to happen again with things like greater involvement of AI/machine learning in animation and player behavior, full match captures etc. FIFA 22, while there is a lot of things I don't like about it so far, looks like a fairly solid base for future development, especially if they were one day persuaded to make a realism/sim mode resulting in things such as fouls and defensive urgency.
 
staffan said:
It's because EA moved towards systems-based design a decade ago whereas Konami stuck with the old school "brute forcing" method. Brute forcing being where they predefine or "script" a finite set of possibilities and interactions in an attempt to create an illusion of simulation, vs systems based which tries to replicate the underlying real life physical systems resulting in "emergent behavior" that leads to vastly more possible outcomes but also greater unpredictability (plus likely greater development complexity). Because the technology hasn't really been there for one approach to vastly outmatch the other, Konami have been able to maintain a style of gameplay that is preferred by some due to various characteristics like its weightiness, but the problem with that is once the technological gap gets big enough you will likely be left in the dust, just as happened at the start of the PS3 era when EA had moved to animation sets built with motion capture resulting in far more fidelity and variation whilst Konami were still hand-crafting each animation. The same thing is going to happen again with things like greater involvement of AI/machine learning in animation and player behavior, full match captures etc. FIFA 22, while there is a lot of things I don't like about it so far, looks like a fairly solid base for future development, especially if they were one day persuaded to make a realism/sim mode resulting in things such as fouls and defensive urgency.
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A really interesting post, thanks for this and it explains hell of a lot.

FIFA 22 has me interested and I’ll probably buy it because PES no longer exists and I won’t be wasting £100 this year on two games.

I just can’t get into modern PES - it feels so dated now. Konami would be better off making a 4K remake of PES 5/6 with up-to-date squads and kits, a stadium creator and editor and a return to a deep Master Laague. They could still have the myClub mode in there too - I wish they’d do away with the super clunky and unresponsive gameplay the series has adopted since PES 2019.
 
Mikhail said:
A really interesting post, thanks for this and it explains hell of a lot.

FIFA 22 has me interested and I’ll probably buy it because PES no longer exists and I won’t be wasting £100 this year on two games.

I just can’t get into modern PES - it feels so dated now. Konami would be better off making a 4K remake of PES 5/6 with up-to-date squads and kits, a stadium creator and editor and a return to a deep Master Laague. They could still have the myClub mode in there too - I wish they’d do away with the super clunky and unresponsive gameplay the series has adopted since PES 2019.
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A 4k remake of PES 6 would surely be more dated than 2021 if you think 2021 feels dated.
 
Don't misundertand variety and randomness. Agree mostly with @elloco , except that you don't need to play full manual on both game to see it.
Fifa to me won the PS360 battle easily, PES was always the "game i played when FIFA bored me, offline as online was unplayable"
But to me, lost completely the PS4 one /one exception is PES 16 VS FIFA 16, the only enigm in their PS4 odyssey... Even if i'm not super fan neither already explained why but to resume : no pleasure to score simply /
 
Rip-IssPesFifa said:
A 4k remake of PES 6 would surely be more dated than 2021 if you think 2021 feels dated.
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At least PES 5/6 are fun. That’s been missing from PES for years.

I’m talking about console versions too, there are some amazing mods for PES 2021 on PC which I’ve tried. But I still find it too sluggish and boring.
 
The classic PES games are definitely fun but they are missing the modern touch. PES 2021 definitely has it's problems but it's still really fun and I can probably get another year out of it. Only thing I hate is the lime green pitches and lighting which is why I bought PES 2018.
 
Rosters were responsible too. There's no comparison in terms of charisma, variety and specialists (very strong but in only one area) from PES PS2 era and what we got now, players are looking all like all-rounders. There's still rare exceptions btw, but i don't see anymore a super crosser LB Ian Harte type or a real classic 10 with super high passing and low speed. Or small but super tight defender like Ivan Cordoba or Cannavaro, also players who didn't carried about technique but all about recuperation and pressing super agressive like Gattuso, Roy Keane etc.

Ah i forgot completely one of the most important : real 9, just strong for scoring suck as Inzaghi, Trezeguet, Shearer, Batigol etc. just some names coming in my head, they were most common, Van Nistelrooy too even if he was a bit more technical...
But what i said, is they form attacker to be all-rounded now. There's some exception of course, but pretty rare.

They were fun to play with. In fact the era is also a less interesting, i lost also interest in football like many of you from what i readed from the past due to all those things, those media annoying youth players, social medias and fans, the thing that nobody carried before a certain era like "sportive/players that needs to be an exemple for the youth"...
Bullshit, they're just professionnal in a sport i don't care if they were in a gangbang last week or completely drunk 3 days before the match as long as they performs like they should when the match is launched. That's all.
 
Dillion said:
- The best pes iterations had skipping animations also. This made the gameplay feel crisp. Realistic animations take long and result in unresponsiveness and a laggy feeling. The same goes with player momentum. It's ok to have some, but ultra realistic momentum is something you don't want in a game in my opinion. It just add to the unresponsiveness.
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Agree with the responsiveness thing.

This is why I prefer PES 13 over any of the later pes games. Being that said, the animations look way too slippery in that footage.
 
Sobakus said:
Hi Vialli, FIFA 11 for me likewise. Probably my favorite football game of all time. I tried PES 2011, but didn’t like it. I think that was the first PES I ever played.
But I have to try PES 2013, since there is so much praise for it. The physics thing probably won’t bother me so much. As long as all the famous players feel like individuals and the gameplay is fun. Plus it’s all around the sweet spot: new enough to have nice graphics and stuff and old enough to be fun. I think 360/PS3 was the best era in gaming. Footballwise too, 2013 feels like a couple years ago to me, so many of the same players will be there, but then also stars from my childhood too, like Beckham, Riquelme, etc. I order it for Xbox 360. Hopefully datapacks/patches are still available for downloading on 360, if not I may be screwed 🤷🏻‍♂️
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I’ve been looking for 11 but can’t find it anywhere. Does anyone know of a valid place to purchase it from ?
I’ve tried and tried with 16 but there’s still something “Fifarish” about it that I just don’t like . Maybe it’s the fluidity within the animation as I still play PES 5 and can’t enjoy recent PES releases either
 
elloco said:
sorry mate but your opinion... iam playing a lot PES 2021 full manual against a friend and that game can be really good. if we talk about simulation or arcade then it is for one of the best games in PES history. and scoring on full manual can be really satisfying!

Fifa for me was the last years a big mess with ridiculous animations, ping pong passing and awakened skills... i cant even get my 10 hours origin trial full, because it was absolutely not my game. if you want fun on the pitch fifa could be right but if you want play football then pes on full manal is still its own class for me...

Kids opening FUT packs and showing ridiculous goals with 100 skill moves, that's what I connect with FIFA... and i try it year for year... :SNACK:

"Time change but Fifa never" - Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865
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Do you feel the same against the AI? Because I love pro but 21 and recent iterations are awful, for myself as always and not a definitive thing.

My biggest bug-bare is players all of a sudden stopping their runs completely as you are tracking it and in the process of playing them in. I keep going back on it but after a few games, I’m pretty frustrated by it, so I just go back to PES5.
My AI players also always seem to be running in the opposite direction just before I take control of them and it’s infuriating you can’t slide tackle unless someone has control of the ball, as in they’ve touched it so technically it’s in their possession:

If you try to slide as someone is receiving a pass , it doesn’t work it for 50/50’s
 
The whole good animation causes lack of responsiveness thing is patented nonsense. Look no further than fighting games to disprove it.
It's something that probably got spread into the community by Konami talking heads and is still accepted as plausible.
 
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If you somehow believe that SF V is an unresponsive game then there is no point in arguing with you.
Animators either are good at their jobs and have resources or don't and aren't.

MLB The Show is not an unresponsive game.
NBA 2k is not an unresponsive game.

PES and FIFA have bad animation because it's not a concern (since most people don't actually care) and it costs money they're not willing to spend, it's that simple. Not because of some 'it's unresponsive' boogeyman. What's actually unresponsive is your player locking into 2 possible directions when receiving a pass, away from the ball and towards it. That's unresponsive. You're pressing a different direction and the game locks your player into a possibility of two because it's still built with 2005 sensibilities.
 
Dillion said:
Thats my point. The question is does that make the game more fun or playable. Everyone his own opinion or taste of course, but for me it ruins the fun of the game. In real football players can't sprint for as long as they do in pes and fifa. Should they adjust that too? No of course not because that kind of realism doesn't contribute to the fun factor.
A game is a game and doesn't need to reflect real life 100%. Imagine a fight game to be 100% realistic. One punch and the opponent would be knocked out or injured.
A shooter would't be fun if the player was shot dead each hit or couldn't sprint for more than 1 minute.
It shouldn't be black or white, realistic or arcade, but a good mix of both. And I think it now too much focused on animations and stuff.

But i'm curious, what do you think konami needs to improve than in pes or efootball, to get it back to the 'old' level. Or maybe you think that think pes didnt go downhill the past few years?
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I agree with this. We cannot say that PES prime was PES 5 and 6 and then say that we want realism over responsiveness. PES 1 to 6 were great games because they were an almost perfect balanced arcade/sim games, they were really responsive but at the same time managed to maintain the tactical aspect of the game and the unpredictability of football, that is what makes it so special.
Nowadays and more even on PS4 the game is sluggish as hell. Playing an online game is like driving a truck, everything takes a lot of time to execute, which makes it a battle not just against our opponent, but against the responsiveness or lack of it , and the shitty scripting.
PES on PS2 were games that were a little to fast , but games were you always feel you have a chance, and that anything could happen. That feeling is long gone, and the games of today are not fun at all. FIFA is the opposite, it tries so hard to please the UT audience that only wants a fast paced games with plenty of goals but no sense of football whatsoever, no inertia, no weight. It feels like that games on the street were everyone just want to show off and no one cares about defending, bus even in that street game’s there’s one thing that is better than FIFA and that’s phisicality, contact, fouls.
 
Mikhail said:
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lover of FIFA in its current form.

But for me, there are so many different ways to score, so many different things happening on and off the pitch (Career Mode, let’s forget FUT and myClub for a minute because I don’t go near those modes).

Master League in PES is just playing matches. You don’t ‘manage’ a club. It’s boring arse.

And then on the pitch - the way the CPU plays in higher difficulties is just so tedious and unrealistic. They sit deep, let you pass pass pass to the 18 yard box and then BAM the CPU defender will assault my player. No foul given, no penalty or free kick - the CPU will counter attack with a super scripted manoeuvre and score the same kind of goal every single time.

PES 2021 with its yellow pitches, terrible sound mixing, oversaturated graphics, monotonous gameplay and shallow Master League was the final nail in the coffin for me and it’s why I play PES 5 and FIFA 16 now.
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Come to PC, it solves some of your PES graphic issues..
 

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h3li0 said:
I agree with this. We cannot say that PES prime was PES 5 and 6 and then say that we want realism over responsiveness. PES 1 to 6 were great games because they were an almost perfect balanced arcade/sim games, they were really responsive but at the same time managed to maintain the tactical aspect of the game and the unpredictability of football, that is what makes it so special.
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Why is responsiveness synonymous of Arcade?.
Football games must be responsive.
They could be slow paced and still be responsive.

Although, personally I would want them to be balanced. Not slow nor fast. I think today's football is getting faster. The problem is most of us automatically and almost subconsciously tend to link 'fast' with 'arcade' or 'end to end'. When I watch EPL or UCL games, matches are faster and faster every year. And, obviously that's not the case for second or third division matches So that's why we need a balance. And Sliders. And options to customize games however we want.

The arcade part of the old (great) PES versions was that you could pretty much score the same goal or create the same type of play, with the same player from the same position over and over again. Like the long shots with Adriano or sprinting down the side with Roberto Carlos time and time again. It made them fun but probably not 100% realistic.
 
Chuny said:
Why is responsiveness synonymous of Arcade?.
Football games must be responsive.
They could be slow paced and still be responsive.

Although, personally I would want them to be balanced. Not slow nor fast. I think today's football is getting faster. The problem is most of us automatically and almost subconsciously tend to link 'fast' with 'arcade' or 'end to end'. When I watch EPL or UCL games, matches are faster and faster every year. And, obviously that's not the case for second or third division matches So that's why we need a balance. And Sliders. And options to customize games however we want.

The arcade part of the old (great) PES versions was that you could pretty much score the same goal or create the same type of play, with the same player from the same position over and over again. Like the long shots with Adriano or sprinting down the side with Roberto Carlos time and time again. It made them fun but probably not 100% realistic.
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Basically you are saying what I said in my post, that I want it to be balanced. Because something ultra realistic would be impossible and boring in a 10m match. I think that we had realistic animations and movement for that time on PES prime, and they were responsive, but fun and realistic even if a bit faster, way better than this new FIFA games animations. Nowadays it seems that realistic is really synonymous of slugish in these recent PES games.
And the arcade part of PES wasn’t just what you mentioned, it was the ultra quick 90• turns (except for PES 5 when they introduced the sidestep) , it was the ultra powerfull shoots, and the exaggeration in some player attributes (Adriano, R Carlos, shevchenko etc), but it was well balanced because almost all of that was possible to counter, was possible to defend with the right players and tactics, and that was where the fun of those game excelled.
 
Mikhail said:
At least PES 5/6 are fun. That’s been missing from PES for years.

I’m talking about console versions too, there are some amazing mods for PES 2021 on PC which I’ve tried. But I still find it too sluggish and boring.
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Yeah i do tend to agree when you go back and play PES 6 it feels fun. Back then it felt simulation but if you play now its very arcade but every minute of it is fun and i have do agree while i like PES 2021 and think its the best PES since i would take the less serious PES 6 over 2021 every day of the week.

Both Konami and EA have got lost on what makes a game fun and have strived for simulation too much while both companies have not achieved simulation and both companies have not really achieved fun either.
 
The_Knight said:
Looks like FIFA'22 is no longer an option. What the hell is this garbage?



I won't even bother go deep into everything wrong with the ball physics, the passing physics and player momentum (is there even, player momentum?) The whole clip is just garbage.

So with FIFA'22 out of the way, we're either playing eFootball or modded PES 2021 (I'll call it PES 2022).
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Gameplay reminds me of FIFA 06, Especially the camera.
 
ninety3twenty said:
Do you feel the same against the AI? Because I love pro but 21 and recent iterations are awful, for myself as always and not a definitive thing.

My biggest bug-bare is players all of a sudden stopping their runs completely as you are tracking it and in the process of playing them in. I keep going back on it but after a few games, I’m pretty frustrated by it, so I just go back to PES5.
My AI players also always seem to be running in the opposite direction just before I take control of them and it’s infuriating you can’t slide tackle unless someone has control of the ball, as in they’ve touched it so technically it’s in their possession:

If you try to slide as someone is receiving a pass , it doesn’t work it for 50/50’s
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i barely play against CPU, so i don't can judge but i know here are a lot offline players and i know and understand that is a problem.

PES 2021 is far from perfect and my concerns even on full manual are:
- variations of shooting
- Team AI (stop running)
- Player switching
- GK Reaktion (sometimes overpowered)
- GK Positioning (always on the line)

These problems are there and could be fixed even the last two years, but Konami didn't, the whole "bugfixing" by Konami the last years was ridicules.

even with that problems the game can be really good and if i play against my mate we had that feeling back in times and a lot of strange things happen in the box :D i play on FM since pes2014 so i would say i can handle this.
 
UEFA Made...
Champions League
Europa League
Conference League
They need now...
The Losers League
And it's for Tottenham.
 

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So, I see here a lot of people defending FIFA, and I feel FIFA has many good things, but also too many bad things, and not only related to handicap and online modes. I am talking about ice-skating animations, about not needing to build game va the COM because they are overly stupid and you can beat them with a perfectly placed through pass and, as the best of all this... a ridiculous gameplay where spamming the right stick tricks make you surpass an enemy, like if this was some kind of FIFA Street.

Let's face it. Neither of the franchises are at their peak, and still though modern games are better than old ones because technology. Because now you can make a swift touch of the stick to move the ball to a side and you couldn't before in f.e. PES6. Sadly this is not useful cause COM will steal the ball from you anyway, but at least THERE IS A BASE TECHNOLOGY TO DO IT that there was not before. Now you can make swift moves that you couldn't before. And through mods (God bless this community) you can tweak AI reactions to make the game closer to a simulator. I am using now Jostike exe with a dt of my own that works great, been playing up to 90 minutes and after 45 minutes in the 3rd highest difficulty, I am only loosing 2-0 in halftime. Pretty realistic result. There are still many gaps like defensive positioning, where my players should be closer to their marks, but aside from that is pretty ok.

For me FIFA has some things that should be implemented in PES. To be noted:
- Their Stamina system, where you have a max stamina that decreases as you go through the match and a sprint stamina. Spending all the sprinting stamina will make your player run less and be less precise in shoots and dribblings and once the sprinting stamina is spent, if you keep on sprinting, your max stamina starts depleting faster.
- Better Strategy menu where you can give orders to each player to position in the pitch, and better positioning specially defensively speaking.
- Players have vision as an attribute, meaning that being precise with your pass doesn't mean necessary to have pass and game awareness.
- and of course a more polished career mode, both as a player and as a manager of a team.

So summing it up, FIFA has a better strategy building and even positioning on the pitch, but no need of game building with over the top dribbling and through passes and vertical game is too easy to do and far superior to slow paced game building, more realistic approach, and besides from that, player running animations are weird at times and seem like ice-skating, without any kind of mass into them.

PES on the other side is sometimes a bit unresponsive, but has superior animations, you need more game building to get into the AI goal, and dribbling is more difficult, in fact too difficult and useless within Vanilla gameplay, but quite useful within certain mods.

So summing it up, if we mix Modded PES strength + FIFA strengths, we get a decent game that could be the base for a simulator. That pretty much sums it all up and gives us an idea of the genre state...
 
The_Knight said:
I'm feeling more and more pessimistic as we move forward. I feel that this eFootball will just be a mobile game that looks better on consoles, that's all. They have hundreds of millions of players on mobile, and Konami is officially now a mobile game company, not a console game developer. We'll see, I guess.
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I had that feeling long ago after they sheeeeshly inserted more and more those nasty adds about cards and myClub popups on the main menu spreading like a cancer. From that point I was thinking that even if I can still play offline & still enjoy it this year, navigating feels like a mobile game to me because of those nasty popups with adds about coins, rewards, cards etc. The "CONGRATULATIONS!!!" popup about reaching millions of downloads on mobile was the cherry on the cake for me. Of course I was raging about it, because I don't want those news in my PC offline main menu, but they were apparently very happy about spamming it various times like it was some big news for us, and here we are now... But in some way I was very WRONG about my prediction, because I was also thinking that will be two branches: one still called PES 2022 just for offline and cool awesome fantastic and modest guys like me and you guys, and another game implemented for rich & experienced casino roulette consumers, a poker card game with some RPG football elements in it called eFootball...

In other hand I'm very disappointed, I was SO HYPED because they falsely advertised PES 2022 + Unreal Engine last year when they also introduced PES 2021 Season Update, and when I saw this year that excuse of a "demo gameplay stress/depressed test servers" and watched the mobile trailer, I was thinking that I'm in a total nightmare. This can't happen after so many years, you know... PES to just... die...
 
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Has it been said anywhere whether the next gen gameplay will be the same as the mobile iteration?

As it is cross platform I cannot think of what else it could be...
 
Mikhail said:
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lover of FIFA in its current form.

But for me, there are so many different ways to score, so many different things happening on and off the pitch (Career Mode, let’s forget FUT and myClub for a minute because I don’t go near those modes).

Master League in PES is just playing matches. You don’t ‘manage’ a club. It’s boring arse.

And then on the pitch - the way the CPU plays in higher difficulties is just so tedious and unrealistic. They sit deep, let you pass pass pass to the 18 yard box and then BAM the CPU defender will assault my player. No foul given, no penalty or free kick - the CPU will counter attack with a super scripted manoeuvre and score the same kind of goal every single time.

PES 2021 with its yellow pitches, terrible sound mixing, oversaturated graphics, monotonous gameplay and shallow Master League was the final nail in the coffin for me and it’s why I play PES 5 and FIFA 16 now.
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Comparing those two games and their last versions are like comparing apples with pears actually.

I would choose any day the FIFA offline OFF the pitch presentations, menus & UI, commentaries, graphics, 1 vs 1 animations, set pieces animations, tactical defensive system, referees.

I would choose any day the PES offline ON the pitch ball physics, manual controls, gameplan tactics & options, battle for the ball on the middle of the pitch, player models.

In terms of "Teams & Players ID" are both nowadays very bare bones, stats are just there to boost a player, every team & actions feels the same in terms of animations and active situations, GK are in both scripted superhumans or just bad, attacking situations unrewarding, and scoring nowadays in PES isn't that varied like in previous games. Online, well I'm preety sure FIFA wins by a mile, but modes filled with microtransactions are not my cup of tea...

To conclude it: FIFA feels modern in everything it does but with bad gameplay (without taking in count the defensive system), and PES feels old in everything with way less content, a slightly better gameplay in various aspects (without taking in count of course the defensive 1 vs1 situations that are horrendous and the brainless referees). But making the counts to give an overall score between both, FIFA wins...
 
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