Compared to FIFA11, PES' speed is perfect. Plus you can adjust it to your liking, which is awesome. Playing FIFA11, I feel I'm more in a battle with trying to stop my players from running into the opposition because the players actually move far to quickly from a stationary point. The ball movement speed and sprint speeds are fine, it's just the speed in which you can accelerate and make sudden, drastic movements without any consideration for gravity, body height or weight.
You can literally move one way, then flip back into the entirely opposite direction at a bizarre speed in the blink of an eye in FIFA. PES doesn't allow you to do this. But rather than FIFA's player model speeds actually allowing you to do amazing dribbles etc, all you do is run into the opposition alot because the AI utilises the 'reaction' and acceleration times of the player models to close you down in an insane way. In short, I don't see FIFA's animations and physics to be remotely ahead of PES. FIFA's look perhaps slightly more fluid, but they certainly don't mimmick any kind of real world physics.
Having played both games this year for an extended period of time, PES for me is technically better. The animations look fine to me, jostling is far superior to FIFA's 'quarterback' style bulldozer tackling, the pace of the game is better, player models (faces in particular) are far superior in PES. Check out FIFA's player models, they just don't look right even if they do move in a slightly more fluid way. Player shoulders are oddly sloped for one thing.
That said, I still prefer the ball physics on FIFA, and I'm still raging about the AI pressure in both games, I think it's a cheap way for the developers to make the game 'harder' without actually needing to bother coding decent defensive AI. Without this being drastically altered, all the animation issues or collision detection in the world will still make me switch them off. And another problem I'm encountering in both games is the high level of possession you have compared to the AI, with minimal rewards. It's as if neither game can really compete on a decent footballing level, neither can score from using patient build up, instead it soaks up pressure and hits you hard on the break on occasion. And dominating a match only to lose against the run of play, which is what happens every time I ever lose on either game, is actually the most frustrating way that teams lose a match in real life. So that doesn't really bode well for making a game challenging but fun.
I seriously wouldn't mind losing occasionally on either game if I played an even game where both teams had decent chances, but the AI takes more of theirs. Instead, what always happens, is that I have at at least 60% of the ball, 10 shots to 2 for example, and somehow lose the game 1-0. This happens on PES and FIFA and is the only way I ever lose a game, and is indicitave of poor AI. That said, PES is less frustrating, at least it has a high variety of ways that it scores against you, FIFA can literally ONLY do one move where a central player plays a long high ball to the wings and over your full back, crosses, heads into the goal. Every single time.
But all in all it's the AI that's putting me off playing both games for the moment, I've gone back to Battlefield Bad Company 2 online recently and totally ignored both games for a while. Which is rubbish.
.
