eFootball (All Platforms)

80% Steam discount on <PES 2021 Season Update Standard Edition> (offer ends October 4). Good for me, that never got to buy it.
My only fear: if Konami retires the game from Steam, will I still be able to play?
 
Visually, It reminds me of how nerfed PES 2014 was on the PS3 compared to it's trailers. It's literally a disgrace to look at considering it's not much more ambitious than PES 2021 in terms of art direction yet it looks like an unstable hobbyists project.

Other than the vulgar menu's and font's, I think the thing that actually angers me the most about this game considering I've downloaded it and willing to give it a chance is - How much of a unnecessary mindfuck completely needlessly remapping near enough the entire controller is. It completely destroys any long serving muscle memory we have of the franchise. It accomplishes nothing ground breaking.

For instance, a longstanding staple of football games is the :square:+:x: shot feint. Instead of :x: to cancel, it's now :l1: while :x: after a shot does.... NOTHING in it's place. So they mechanic is still there but it's been moved to the other arse end of the controller for no beneficial reason at all.

Oh, and you can't even remap buttons for attack and defence respectively. I tried to put the "duel" (single player pressure) input from :square: to :l1: so it matches my FIFA setup which I thought "OK, I can get onboard with this universal synchronicity... But guess what? Your defensive remapping also replaces your attacking remapping too - Which means shooting goes from :square: to :l1:!

Once again, Fuck that. Such a simple thing, Something that you could do literally on the previous game, Removed for no proactive reason at all.

I think people laugh at EA for releasing the same incremental upgrade every year but at least there's no dysfunctional surprises or drastically illogical regression like this series. I rode through HARD during those brutal storms of 2008, 2014 & 2016 knowing there was hope an potential across the knoll, I embraced the Season update of 2021 and took it for what it was but this is just really sad, not tragic, not a shame, just really really sad.

I don't even recognise it anymore, It's like when they reprogrammed Robocop and removed any humanity, personality or charm from him. He's just shallow, mindless and merciless, the way OCP truly wanted him to be. Well, that's what PES has become. It's become corporate Robocop.
 
I just played two matches and most of the things just felt alright. No visual errors or bugs with player movement. For everyone just looking for errors and bugs it should be clear that this is not the final state of the game. There might be a lot of room for improvement though I am not that salty about the game. It was just fun and the visuals in some perspectives give you the feel that you are part of a real match. I also like the zoom-in feature as soon as you get in a duel. What I didn't like was that some AI defenders (played against Portugal) like to do fancy dribblings instead of building-up the game from the back. This is the only thing that bugged me but I'm sure it gets fixed with a later update.
 
Man, PES2022 is my only hope for next-gen, considering how much of a shambles FIFA21s gameplay is.
That aged well ..

Seriously, I have mixed feelings after all the pain in the past two months. And since it's the worst-rated game on Steam today, I'm pretty sure Konami eFootball will cancel sooner or later. Perhaps this could lead to a restart of PES, or it could lead FIFA back to a monopoly on simulation football like Madden already has.

One final positive thought ... might it be possible to export the few good elements from eF2022 (like pre-game intros, new animations, kits fonts) to PES2021 as it appears to be still using cpks. Maybe it could help improve PES2021 in some ways
 
Just wanna say I read through almost 30 pages of this. And while I myself haven't touched the game, and likely won't at least for a long time, I have to say I'm suffering with all of you.

From the announcement, this has been calamitous from Konami. The decision to go f2p was eye catching one and not just a shock to PES fans and players; it was a decision I saw talked about amongst other sports game userbases. It was one I saw mentioned on outlets where I typically don't hear about PES from.

Why? Because I suspect f2p to be the future models for a lot of sports games. So a lot of people are paying attention to how this lainch goes. And 24 or so hours in, it's disaster.

F2P was supposed to mean more freedom and flexibility. Why release it now? Why not when game is more stable? Why not when more content is available? I know there's the argument about releasing before FIFA, but that shouldn't matter when you completely removed the fee for entry; football gamers have every incentive to try your game for free. And they may have even more incentive if FIFA turns out to be another dud.

And that's why they went f2p; to get as many people as you can playing your game. Forget the 2 years of development. This game's first offering after going free to play should've been a knockout from the minute it unlocked. Because it's free. Because that would give the greatest amount of non players incentive to give your game a try.

So now we watch and wait. Because what the game is its current state, what they've shown thus far, is likely to current players away instead of bringing new players in.

Until then, I'm here for the memes. It feels like watching a house fire with mates. I love all of you
Why release now? Because this is what happens with every 'live service' game. I despise them because they've changed gaming for the worse. Ship something half arsed, then slowly over time patch it until it's playable and has the same amount of content as a normal game.

Of course most of these 'live service' games are full price, which is the most egregious type. Still you only get one chance to make a good first impression, and eFootball has been buried before it even kicked into life.
 
I also love the new game. Everything I hated on PES21, they fixed. Ping-pong passes gone, dribbling is back, defending takes skill, no more scripting.
Graphics are bad and sometimes there are some weird animation glitches, but these can easily be fixed.
Gameplay is top. I win every game with 5+ goals in multiplayer because skill actually wins you games. In most games the opponent doesn't get a single shot on my goal.

Just don't play it like PES21 and have an open mind.
I hate this game for being as unfinished as it is because there is definitely something interesting in there.

I've been getting more used to the controls, and what the game allows / does not allow you to do.

Being patient and thoughtful in defending and the building of attacks seems to be actually rewarded now. As does choosing the right moment to up the tempo.

It seems the nerfed performance of defenders in the box is gone so you can actually keep on passing and doing stuf without three defenders on your back out of nowhere. Feels more fair.

Weird, i think i've actually been enjoying the learning proces these last few games, which resulted in some nice situations. Game is still awkward as fuck and Konami management can suck my R3 stick o/c., but yeah, maybe there is a slight glimmer of light at the end of this hemorrhoids invested anal canal experience.
 
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Has anyone messed with the right stick while the CPU has the ball? Press it in any direction and it produces a white cone, kind of like a line of sight type thing out of the CPU player.

What's that about?

EDIT: It actually comes out of the ball, not the player. Interesting....

Further Edit: try it at a goal kick for you, it then comes out of your players depending on which direction you press.

Isn't this the same kind of thing from the mobile game for passing and power?!? The further you press and hold the bigger the cone gets. Oh dear, mobile game confirmed?
When I play with my right stick, sometimes white stuff comes out, but not from the balls tho.
I must be playing it wrong.

Sadly after playing this game my right stick shows no interest in being played with for quite a while.
 
I just DL'd it, installed the modded dt250 and given it a try.
Judging from the reception, I expected worse.

Not that it's brilliant, of course, but it's not as bad as I had thought.

Some things like players having more momentum, feeling heavier, and needing more time and space to perform a 180° turn while running (look at when it happens near the goal line/touchline to see what I mean... A player running towards the line chasing the ball, stopping it, going past it and way out of the pitch because of the momentum, then turning and going back to re-collect the ball) are indeed enjoyable.
Others, like the CPU pulling shirts like there's no tomorrow and getting a slap on the wrist each and every time, need fixing (I've been denied a blatant penalty for that).

Let's take this for what it is: an unfinished (and definitely not polished) beta which at times gets things overwhelmingly wrong (I faced many WTF moments, can't deny that).
It's been rushed to be available before FIFA, and the result is what we've seen. I'd give it more time and see how it is come November.
I don't expect much, knowing Konami, but who knows.
 
One thing that worried me all along is that this new F2P model could alienate my dad, since he's more old fashioned and isn't really into modern gaming with its current bussiness models, I was afraid that not having yearly and physical releases like before would make him feel less excited when we tried playing coop like we always do, thankfully I was wrong.

We booted up the game last night on our PS4, which seems like the worst version due to the more limited hardware, and it was one of the most fun football gaming sessions we've ever had, every few minutes something would happen that would make us laugh! The first thing we saw was the UI, I actually like the team selection with the world map, and the kit selection in the dressing room, but besides that it's an eye sore, I don't know where the UI designer for PES2011/PES2012 is nowadays, but Konami need to hire them immediately, the overall UI was not only ugly, which is something we joked about, but it was laggy for some reason, which just left us feeling confused. Before getting to a match we also took a look at the gameplan screen, it's ugly like pretty much all of the UI, it was laggy too which made me not even want to make substitutions, and when we realized there were only 5 tactic settings that were both for attack and defence we laughed again, how could they thing a downgrade like this was reasonable?

Finally, a match, and it was unplayable because I made a severe mistake, I'm not sure if the PS5/XSX/PC versions have this issue, but I decided to go for a daytime match, and we could barely see anything, it was incredibly bright where there was sunlight, and incredibly dark under the shadows, that was very annonying, I'm not sure if it was my TV or my settings, but here's the thing, and it's the same problem I've had with previous PES titles, I don't have to mess around with settings for minutes in order to make things look decent with any of my other PS4 games, just PES, so I'm not sure if it's really my fault there.

Now, gameplay, there were obviously many things that bothered us, like many have already pointed out here, it's very unresponsive, which I'm not totally against, if it's too responsive then it becomes arcade like and fast, it also decreases player individuality, but there's a limit, I think the responsiveness in previous titles was decent, there was no need to make it more sluggish, another thing that was sluggish, and I imagine this is mostly on the PS4 version, but I'm not sure, whenever there were too many players on the screen the whole thing would lag so much, offline, of course me and my dad laughed at this aswell, because it's seriously comical for a game to lag as much as this one even when playing offline, our other football games on PS4 don't do this, so why this one? There were issues with player behavior and awareness too, from both our teammates and the CPU, the turfs look atrocious on PS4, I could go on and on about all of the things that got a chuckle out of us yesterday, like the 5 minute limit, the overall lack of options available for difficulty, weather, even balls, etc... but all of you have already read most of those in the last 30 pages or something, it's bad.

Now, it's not all bad, like I've said the team selection and kit selection menus were nice, I also like the arrow under the player, it reminds me of ISS. Besides all of the superficial things I like, there are also more important things that are good, gameplay related aspects. Even though this game is sluggish and laggy now the actual tempo of the match feels decent, I'm also getting more fouls than in previous titles because there is indeed more physicality than before, even though it's buggy and needs a lot more work. Players also feel like they have real weight to them, and you're punished for sprinting too much since you have less control. Another thing I like is that even with the most assisted passing setting there is a lot more passing error, they just need to increase the pass speed as soon as possible, because it's too slow and feels off, but the error, which depends on context and body positioning, is very welcome. I like the fact that the ball is always in play too, no more black screens to transition, if I have a goal kick the keeper puts the ball in the position and kicks it, it feels more real than before and keeps the action going. However, the addition I like the most, at least in concept, is the new defending system, it reminds me of what they attempted in PES2012, something more focused on the jockey, on timing, more manual, though at the moment it does feel rough and the L2 button messes it all up because it turns your player into a homing missile, it's also more efficient than trying to defend properly, I have no idea why they've added this, either way with time we could have the best defending system in a Konami football game.

Right now I have the same feeling I did when playing the demo of PES2014 all of those years ago, there's a decent game of football somewhere in here, and with time we could have something special, and it does feel that, at least direction wise, they tried to achieve a genuine simulation here, which I appreciate. However we already had a solid core with FOX, all of the new features they want to add to improve the game, like the ones I've mentioned in the previous paragraph, could've been achieved in FOX, so why change it? I believe it's due to Unreal making it easier to scale it up and down, so it can have crossplay between generations and with mobile, which is a terrible reason to scrap so much progress in favor of this.

Still, there's a decent game of football here, and in the following updates we could end up enjoying it, it might takes months, or over a year, but as of today all we have is a game that's unfinished, buggy and unpolished, it needed a lot more time in the oven and releasing it at this stage was a terrible decision which might've doomed it for good, it'll be hard to recover from this because people won't simply forget this release. I mean, lowest rated game ever on Steam, that's not easy to recover from, I'm not sure if eFootball will be able to survive this terrible start in the long run, at least not on consoles, and honestly Konami deserve this, all of it, we were told lies for so long, such poor marketing, no transparency, so many cut corners... the people in charge which took all of the poor decisions until now deserve to have this game bomb, and I'm glad they've changed the name, it doesn't deserve to be called PES, this launch was a disgrace.
 
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Has anyone messed with the right stick while the CPU has the ball? Press it in any direction and it produces a white cone, kind of like a line of sight type thing out of the CPU player.

What's that about?

EDIT: It actually comes out of the ball, not the player. Interesting....

Further Edit: try it at a goal kick for you, it then comes out of your players depending on which direction you press.

Isn't this the same kind of thing from the mobile game for passing and power?!? The further you press and hold the bigger the cone gets. Oh dear, mobile game confirmed?
It's the new mechanism to select a player with the right stick. The cone is a visual representation to help you select one of your players close to the ball. Basically you select someone within the cone displayed on the screen.
 
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What do you guys think the best pass assist level is? 1 is way to slow, 2 feels pretty good to me, allows to power up the passes a bit more. Haven’t tried too much level 3 and 4 (manual)
I've been playing with 3 for most of the day & really struggling. Knocked it down to 2 which is more assisted but the game feels a bit more responsive & players react better.

It's still shit though 🤣
 
One thing that always boggles my mind is how konami think ground passes are slow and soft. They're not, especially in direct, forward play.

Watch any match, players will put considerable power and some spin on passes that the receiver has to kill, because at a high level tempo and speed is fast.

This is really lacking in eFootball, I've never seen a slower passing game. Game speed seems ok, if a little slow. Same with shots, they lack the oomph of reality. Only long passes make 100% sense to me.

As for animations, motion matching genuinely seems to work, transitions between different animations are barely noticeable in normal viewing, making it look very fluid, it's just a shame the underlying game mechanics are quite broken, as well as the AI, which act as if they're operating on the processor from a Nokia 3310
 
Thoroughly enjoying this now with the demo expander on PC. I don't remember ever being more at odds with the general view on here or around the PES-themed web. I'm gobsmacked that it's as poor a reception as it is. I think perfectly reasonable technical and immersion-breaking reasons are dominant, but a massive reason will be that you just can't pick it up and play it like any previous edition. You have to learn new controls and new approaches. E.g. one of my favourite scoring methods in PES2021 -- finesse from the outside corner of the box into the opposite corner -- doesn't work in eFootball, but I'm still automatically trying it all the time. How many of those familiar PES moves are we all trying automatically all the time? And when they don't come off... There are huge differences. Currently watching a streamer complaining that it's all too slow and considered and he can't do one-touch passing through the opposition as he's used to. I have a feeling he wishes he could 'pack' Messi and get it over with.
You are the 8%
 
For instance, a longstanding staple of football games is the :square:+:x: shot feint. Instead of :x: to cancel, it's now :l1: while :x: after a shot does.... NOTHING in it's place. So they mechanic is still there but it's been moved to the other arse end of the controller for no beneficial reason at all.
Just shows that you don't know how to play the game. It's now R1 to feint because you can not only shot feint, but every action can be feinted. Feint pass, feint lofted pass, feint shot, feint chip shot, etc. This would not be possible on X.
 
I just played two matches and most of the things just felt alright. No visual errors or bugs with player movement. For everyone just looking for errors and bugs it should be clear that this is not the final state of the game. There might be a lot of room for improvement though I am not that salty about the game. It was just fun and the visuals in some perspectives give you the feel that you are part of a real match. I also like the zoom-in feature as soon as you get in a duel. What I didn't like was that some AI defenders (played against Portugal) like to do fancy dribblings instead of building-up the game from the back. This is the only thing that bugged me but I'm sure it gets fixed with a later update.
Football sims are not supposed to be fun.
 
Thoroughly enjoying this now with the demo expander on PC. I don't remember ever being more at odds with the general view on here or around the PES-themed web. I'm gobsmacked that it's as poor a reception as it is. I think perfectly reasonable technical and immersion-breaking reasons are dominant, but a massive reason will be that you just can't pick it up and play it like any previous edition. You have to learn new controls and new approaches. E.g. one of my favourite scoring methods in PES2021 -- finesse from the outside corner of the box into the opposite corner -- doesn't work in eFootball, but I'm still automatically trying it all the time. How many of those familiar PES moves are we all trying automatically all the time? And when they don't come off... There are huge differences. Currently watching a streamer complaining that it's all too slow and considered and he can't do one-touch passing through the opposition as he's used to. I have a feeling he wishes he could 'pack' Messi and get it over with.
Pes has always struggled with unresponsiveness, yet always remained enjoyable. This game is purely unplayable. AI awareness is almost non existent, passes seem to disregard where you were actually aiming, collisions are broken well beyond the degree of the last game, and the passing is extremely, woefully sluggish. I'm not sure what you find to like mate
 
Sorry if it has already been asked/said:

Why the hell are the controls different now? When defending i always hold down button A and my player tried automatically to get the ball. When i press A in it-was-a-football-game-before-2022 nothing happens. Is this function gone?
Would be 1 more point on my list why this game is "not so good" :)
 
Sorry if it has already been asked/said:

Why the hell are the controls different now? When defending i always hold down button A and my player tried automatically to get the ball. When i press A in it-was-a-football-game-before-2022 nothing happens. Is this function gone?
Would be 1 more point on my list why this game is "not so good" :)
Its new defending mechanics. Personally I like the more manual approach but God is it fundamentally broken
 
One thing that worried me all along is that this new F2P model could alienate my dad, since he's more old fashioned and isn't really into modern gaming with its current bussiness models, I was afraid that not having yearly and physical releases like before would make him feel less excited when we tried playing coop like we always do, thankfully I was wrong.

We booted up the game last night on our PS4, which seems like the worst version due to the more limited hardware, and it was one of the most fun football gaming sessions we've ever had, every few minutes something would happen that would make us laugh! The first thing we saw was the UI, I actually like the team selection with the world map, and the kit selection in the dressing room, but besides that it's an eye sore, I don't know where the UI designer for PES2011/PES2012 is nowadays, but Konami need to hire them immediately, the overall UI was not only ugly, which is something we joked about, but it was laggy for some reason, which just left us feeling confused. Before getting to a match we also took a look at the gameplan screen, it's ugly like pretty much all of the UI, it was laggy too which made me not even want to make substitutions, and when we realized there were only 5 tactic settings that were both for attack and defence we laughed again, how could they thing a downgrade like this was reasonable?

Finally, a match, and it was unplayable because I made a severe mistake, I'm not sure if the PS5/XSX/PC versions have this issue, but I decided to go for a daytime match, and we could barely see anything, it was incredibly bright where there was sunlight, and incredibly dark under the shadows, that was very annonying, I'm not sure if it was my TV or my settings, but here's the thing, and it's the same problem I've had with previous PES titles, I don't have to mess around with settings for minutes in order to make things look decent with any of my other PS4 games, just PES, so I'm not sure if it's really my fault there.

Now, gameplay, there were obviously many things that bothered us, like many have already pointed out here, it's very unresponsive, which I'm not totally against, if it's too responsive then it becomes arcade like and fast, it also decreases player individuality, but there's a limit, I think the responsiveness in previous titles was decent, there was no need to make it more sluggish, another thing that was sluggish, and I imagine this is mostly on the PS4 version, but I'm not sure, whenever there were too many players on the screen the whole thing would lag so much, offline, of course me and my dad laughed at this aswell, because it's seriously comical for a game to lag as much as this one even when playing offline, our other football games on PS4 don't do this, so why this one? There were issues with player behavior and awareness too, from both our teammates and the CPU, the turfs look atrocious on PS4, I could go on and on about all of the things that got a chuckle out of us yesterday, like the 5 minute limit, the overall lack of options available for difficulty, weather, even balls, etc... but all of you have already read most of those in the last 30 pages or something, it's bad.

Now, it's not all bad, like I've said the team selection and kit selection menus were nice, I also like the arrow under the player, it reminds me of ISS. Besides all of the superficial things I like, there are also more important things that are good, gameplay related aspects. Even though this game is sluggish and laggy now the actual tempo of the match feels decent, I'm also getting more fouls than in previous titles because there is indeed more physicality than before, even though it's buggy and needs a lot more work. Players also feel like they have real weight to them, and you're punished for sprinting too much since you have less control. Another thing I like is that even with the most assisted passing setting there is a lot more passing error, they just need to increase the pass speed as soon as possible, because it's too slow and feels off, but the error, which depends on context and body positioning, is very welcome. I like the fact that the ball is always in play too, no more black screens to transition, if I have a goal kick the keeper puts the ball in the position and kicks it, it feels more real than before and keeps the action going. However, the addition I like the most, at least in concept, is the new defending system, it reminds me of what they attempted in PES2012, something more focused on the jockey, on timing, more manual, though at the moment it does feel rough and the L2 button messes it all up because it turns your player into a homing missile, it's also more efficient than trying to defend properly, I have no idea why they've added this, either way with time we could have the best defending system in a Konami football game.

Right now I have the same feeling I did when playing the demo of PES2014 all of those years ago, there's a decent game of football somewhere in here, and with time we could have something special, and it does feel that, at least direction wise, they tried to achieve a genuine simulation here, which I appreciate. However we already had a solid core with FOX, all of the new features they want to add to improve the game, like the ones I've mentioned in the previous paragraph, could've been achieved in FOX, so why change it? I believe it's due to Unreal making it easier to scale it up and down, so it can have crossplay between generations and with mobile, which is a terrible reason to scrap so much progress in favor of this.

Still, there's a decent game of football here, and in the following updates we could end up enjoying it, it might takes months, or over a year, but as of today all we have is a game that's unfinished, buggy and unpolished, it needed a lot more time in the oven and releasing it at this stage was a terrible decision which might've doomed it for good, it'll be hard to recover from this because people won't simply forget this release. I mean, lowest rated game ever on Steam, that's not easy to recover from, I'm not sure if eFootball will be able to survive this terrible start in the long run, at least not on consoles, and honestly Konami deserve this, all of it, we were told lies for so long, such poor marketing, no transparency, so many cut corners... the people in charge which took all of the poor decisions until now deserve to have this game bomb, and I'm glad they've changed the name, it doesn't deserve to be called PES, this launch was a disgrace.
this looks as some game for kids from konami , big shame
 
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