Because despite claiming that I'm not an idiot in my initial post, I am in fact, a massive idiot.
I've got football video game addiction, man!
Guilty.
I have to have a football game to play. It's not like playing other games. You could assign certain games onto a "fun scale" and say you prefer playing The Witcher to GTA or whatever - but for me, as a football fan, football games don't go on the same scale. The thing I
really want to play is a football game. I want to recreate the football world as realistically as possible. That would be off the scale of "fun" and onto the scale of "virtual wish fulfilment".
It's like trying to compare Game of Thrones and the live Premier League match that day. They both have entertainment value but they're not the same thing. If you're a football fan, the football match is more, it's almost "important".
But the value of a football game relies on its gameplay (particularly if you want to recreate the football world with realism, not play with cards online) and when that recreation doesn't move with the times, taking full advantage of the technology (there is SO MUCH MORE that could be done with the CPU power of the modern consoles), then... We're left with a game that, in essence, we've already been playing for years.
I've always hated it when people say "PES/FIFA is the same every year" - but after taking an enforced break from football games for a while, coming back to them and playing PES 2015 to 2019, it's pretty shocking just how little has changed. You can argue that year-on-year changes are going to be small, especially with the same engine.
But the "feel" of the game, your approach to every match, the AI variety and intelligence - when that's the same over the course of £250's worth of football games... You're buying a simulation by definition (recreating something from real-life) and it's not simulating anything new. It's like buying Flight Simulator every year and all the physics models etc. staying like they were on DOS.
It really makes you realise that we're getting nothing for our loyalty and continued investment, other than (the old cliché) updated teams and kits. Plus the graphics, of course - because that's what really sells games.
So I have no football game to play. The old ones aren't good enough by today's standards (set in other genres) - but neither are the new ones.
So that desperation sets in and then you go "sod it, maybe FIFA can be improved enough with the sliders" and "maybe PES will be modded into a decent game".
Then after a couple of months of kidding yourself and trying to copy everyone else's settings (because they're all loving it, why aren't you?)... You go back to the old ones... Then you just stop gaming for a while... Then you wait for the hype train to start boarding again, in the hope that there has been a significant development. And when there isn't... You get the "over the top" reactions there have been in this thread. Because we're desperate.
(That's my experience, I realise it isn't everybody's!)
