On a different note, more related to gameplay, I've played a few more matches, and they were some of the best I've played on eFootball 2022 so far, all of the positives managed to shine, while the negatives didn't show up much, though I'm avoiding L2/LT on purpose so that might have something to do with it, but 0.9.1 really is an improvement over 0.9.0 in many regards, I barely see any of those odd collisions anymore. I like what they attempted here, on the ball it still feels decent, like you'd expect PES to feel, but sprinting is a lot more punishing, passes are intercepted more easily, there's more passing error even with assists, and it's contextual to what kind of pass you're attempting in regard to body positioning and inertia, and the more manual defending system makes the defensive side of things more interesting and intuitive, with a lot more fouls, though I'm still getting very few free kicks, most fouls are against me, which I don't mind much because I do miss the timing on tackles, I just wish the CPU would do it more often too, either they tackle perfectly or they don't go for the tackle at all, they need to be more aggressive or else we'll continue having few free kicks for the player. I feel that if it was more polished, if the club I support was added already, if they made all settings available so I could play for more than 5 minutes, and if they added some basic modes like a Cup, I'd play this often and enjoy it for what it is, as dreadful as Konami is, I can see there are many people who worked on this that wanted to make something special here.
So, I finally understand the few members here on the forum that defend eFootball 2022, at first was really confusing to me, but now I'm starting to like it a bit too, either way I'm not 100% on board yet. I don't agree with the comparison to PES2014, which I see often. PES2014 still had the name, a physical release, it came with every mode we'd expect, alongside an online mode with no microtransactions at all, every team and settings being available from the get go, it was different. Yes, it was released in an unfinished state, and because of that many of its gameplay qualities and concepts were ignored and eventually removed from the franchise, this can be compared to eFootball 2022, but I don't think it's fair to say that we as a community are making the same mistake or anything like that, because what are we supposed to do? All we can do is say that there are elements that we like and would like to see being kept, if Konami eventually removes it all it won't be our fault, the playerbase is much wider than Evo-Web and I'm sure their main focus is the mobile playerbase, we can't forget their crossplay plans for eFootball. I'd say we need to talk about the things we like on the current build, but not much more than that, we shouldn't defend Konami too much because nothing changes the fact that they ended PES and replaced with eFootball, adopted a F2P microtransactions focused model, with the main plan being crossplay with mobile, they then did a disaster launch and expected us to play it as if we were beta testers, they don't deserve anything from us.
I see a lot of potential in eFootball 2022 when I play it, but that doesn't make me excited, because I saw potential in every single PES for the last decade, especially with the FOX Engine. All of the additions I liked here, that I've mentioned in the opening paragraph, could've been added in any of the installments we had in the last few years, and it probably would've played better than eFootball, they just chose not to do that. I saw a lot of potential in PES2011/PES2012/PES2013, and while I liked them all, I never felt they fulfilled that gameplay style's potential before ditching it. Then came the FOX Engine, and with PES2014/PES2015 I saw an opportunity for Konami to finally surpass their PS2 selves, but they never really did. Konami having potential means little to me nowadays.
