I've said it before and I'll say it again: leaderboards are the worst thing to happen to online gaming.
Leaderboards have been in games forever. Don't forget that old arcade machines were all about putting your three initials on that high score list. Or AAA. Most people were called Adam Arnold Andrews back then, I think.
They exist today for the same purpose: to give punters an incentive to keep coming back to play the game some more. This is especially important in an annual title where you want to sustain interest in the franchise and the profile thereof. Keep as much of them playing as much of the year round as possible. If the leaderboards went, so would the attention of that large portion of gamers who are motivated by climbing those rankings.
I don't play FIFA online, but it strikes me that (at least part of) the solution would be more intelligent match-making, making it easier for people to find like-minded gamers to play with.
FIFA looks boring in comparison and pes looked, well, fun.
I think the one thing I like from the PES videos in comparison to FIFA is that the ball looks more like an independent object. It can bounce free and loose in PES more, by the looks. In FIFA it feels an extension of players - in a bad way. There's so rarely a scramble for a genuinely loose ball, and every rebound appears to fall straight to a player. I could swear they fudge those rebounds, give them a bias towards a nearby player, or maybe the players just home in too immediately. Any wildly hacked clearance still seems to be met right at the bounce point by a teammate or opponent. It's unnatural.
Boil pretty much any ball sport down to its basic component: ball trajectory. Is it bouncing inside the court, is it heading between the sticks, is it within the goalkeeper's/goaltender's reach, is it falling toward our team or their's, is the unexpected deflection lucky or unlucky. It's smooth and spherical and bouncey; the unpredictability is half the fun. The effort toward manipulating this elusive object
is the game, any game.
This is another reason why people use the dreaded 'scripted' word in FIFA. Whether it's caused by the ball physics or the way players behave/move - probably both - the ball feels too neatly attached. Throw in the repetitive, un-inventive off-the-ball movement (if I see another CPU striker make that same in-to-out diagonal run for a ball down the line every time... argh) and everything feels so samey and predictable.
'Predictable' is never exciting or emotional.
Speaking of exciting and emotional, in FIFA you never seem to get the ball really thumping off the goalposts. It's one of the most electric moments in the sport, when a shot crashes down off the bar or cannons away wildly off the post. There are a couple of moments in the PES footage in that video. In FIFA the goalposts seem too soft, or maybe shots don't travel fast enough. I want to hear an almighty clang and see the frame rattle and the ball spin away to who-knows-where.
In FIFA it would probably cushion the ball nicely into the path of the next CPU player...
EA themselves have used the phrase 'emotional response'. In football it's the intake of breath as the ball bounces loose around the penalty area, the unknown of the ensuing desperation to reach it first (where they could actually use this 360 contact thing they're banging on about this year), the gasp of 30,000+ as Pienaar's curler pings off the crossbar with Friedel rooted, the shock as Tevez shanks one over an open goal from eight yards, the appreciation of an imaginative one-two that comes off in creative way... and so on.
I understand that such emergent unpredictability is a difficult thing to engineer with ones and zeros, but it's something both games would do well to focus on, I think. Because right now, when people use the words 'scripted' or 'on rails', you can see what they mean.
Pes looks fantastic but not perfect and there's two things I see that really bother me: first, after FIFA the lack in freedom of movement is noticeable; and second, the way the ball travels is unrealistic and visually jarring - too speedy and too straight.
Something that bugs me about PES videos is how often you'll see the recipient of a pass stop dead and stand still, awaiting the arrival of the ball. That looks jarring. It happens very rarely in real football, particularly in the opposing half of the pitch. They would step towards the ball and shape themselves to receive it at the orientation they want, not plant their feet square and wait stationary until it gets there.
