Like many of you old gamers, I am addicted to football games. I mean, I grew up with football games since childhood, like many of you gamers.
Also, a large part of our past life was spent with various football games and very happy memories of that time are recorded in our minds. Football games that gradually improved and became better and better with each passing generation. Perhaps the peak of the development of football games was in the sixth generation of the game industry and the PES series at that time, and it was the king of sports games.
Of course, in the seventh generation of the game industry, the FIFA series had a crazy leap from the FIFA 08 version, and the animations of the seventh generation FIFA were wonderful, and the quality and gameplay improved year by year, and finally, FIFA 12 was truly a revolution in sports games.
The eighth generation was not bad either. After the bitter events that happened in the Konami company, the high-level managers of this company decided to withdraw from the production of expensive games. Then the budget for the development of PES 8th generation was limited, and with the closure of Kojima's studio, all the trouble of developing the Fox graphics engine fell on the shoulders of PES studio and many other sidelines. Anyway, the PES development team in the 8th generation was able to organize this series to some extent and at least in the gameplay part, we can face an acceptable game. Although they could never return to the glorious days of PES 6th generation.
After that, the wonderful teaser of eFootball PES 2022, which was a real version of the 9th generation console and was supposed to be made based on the 9th generation consoles, and the spark of hope came alive in the hearts of all the fans of this series. The sad story was that due to COVID-19 and the bitter and painful events that covered the whole world, the development of games in the game industry remained half-finished during that time. Many games continued to be made indoors. The plans of the companies for the development of the games were messed up, and in short, it caused the fact that due to COVID-19 and the change of the graphics engine of the PES series from the Fox engine to the Unreal 4 engine, and the production process was prolonged and the cost increased. The excuse fell into the hands of Konami managers to cancel the original version of the ninth generation and the free/service-oriented-mobile-cross platform game named eFootball was born and practically football games for many football fans reached the end of their way!
FIFA 9th generation game, no matter how much I wanted to deal with it, I couldn't!
Really, I was able to adapt to every weak point of this game, except, except for the part of the animations of the foot to the ball of the players in the field and the animations slipping on the grass and the ball sinking into the foot and the low quality animations of the foot to the ball I really can't deal with it and this section has severely affected the visual gameplay of the game. (Other basic problems such as poor body modeling design of players, weak ball physics, lack of balance between defense and attack, cartoon coloring of the game and synthetic cloth physics and many other problems aside)
Do you want a reason? You really want a reason! The reason is very clear! The 9th generation of graphics engines, physics engine, animation and motion capture technologies have made amazing progress, but this is the tragic and bitter situation of today's football games, which have become a competitive online game. And the concept of realism is the last priority for the development teams of current football games.
Just look at this FIFA 08 seventh generation gameplay (FIFA 08 console version)! It is really shocking. Look at the animations of the players' foot to the ball, what a great quality it is and how natural it is designed, and consider that it is a seventh generation game, considering the power of the hardware and software of that time! But its quality is far better and brighter than today's football games! ( Note that the FIFA development team in this section has not even reached the standard of a seventh generation football game and the quality is much lower! )
This was the bitter end for us fans of simulation football games.