Hi all,
This is my first post here (though I've occasionally lurked), and I wish it was a more positive one.
PES 2020 has actually been perhaps my biggest disappointment with the franchise.
I've been playing PES for nearly 2 decades (and honestly prefer calling Winning Eleven still).
It has, to me, always been the best football game every year--this year included.
Hell, I'll go as far as to say that this is best football game of all time. Unless you count PES 2020 Demo, that is...
I'm an offline-only, top-player AI, PA0, manual shooting, basic pass-through player.
When I got the demo, I was a bit skeptical at first, but it grew on me a lot within a few days.
The pace was close to perfect, the passing and shooting very enjoyable, players moved and reacted very naturally, there was physicality but also fouls, and dribbling was fun but not overpowered.
I don't think I was particularly good with RS, but I was willing to give it a try--I could imagine it being interesting.
But when the game came out on Tuesday, something felt off. The game plays "faster" and there are no fouls. I feel like it became more like a game of hockey in many ways.
I was concerned that it was a placebo effect, so I kept playing (and will still).
But whenever I go back to demo, I just can't help thinking that there was a serious downgrade.
Most of it looks and plays the same surely, but the little that changed were mostly important parts of the soul of the game. And the changes were for the worse.
Now I understand that demos are a useful mechanism to gather people's opinions on a game and make changes accordingly. But it's also a deeply flawed process in many ways.
Firstly, initial impressions are not indicative of long term enjoyment. New players, in particular, will almost want to lower the learning curve. But this often results in a simpler and worse game in the long run.
Fouls is one example of this. Don't get me wrong, some fouls called in the demo a were bit silly. But what we have now is absurd--the AI just has its players slam against mine constantly, and I can just hold X to strip the ball away from them. The game is so physical that dribbling feels much less useful.
Secondly, most feedback is negative. Especially towards a rival of a much more famous franchise.
I like FIFA actually--not as much as PES, but it's a good game.
But some FIFA players have a lot emotionally invested in it and see PES as a threat (the same thing happens in the opposite direction, just in fewer numbers).
You can try to make PES as close as possible to FIFA, but it won't matter.
Thirdly, people will always ask for what's familiar. And to a lot of them is this arcade-like feel of most sports game. They don't necessarily know they want something else, until you give it to them.
Lastly, as a customer, I feel like the demo should also give me an accurate representation of what I'm purchasing. If you are going to change the game significantly, it'd be nice for the demo to be patched as well, or for a new demo to be released, before I shell out $60.
As it stands, the demo feels a bit like false advertising to me.
There are other problems with the game (e.g. the menus are awful), but I'm willing to mostly overlook these.
I mostly care about the gameplay. Which is good--really good. But not great, like the demo's.
And I can't help feeling that the devs know the demo was better, which is why they released it.
As artists and professionals, they gotta listen to feedback, but also be able to stick by their work.
And I wish they had, because their initial product was amazing.
Edit: 2020, not 2019
