I actually think it's brilliant. As do all of my long-time PES friends.
We had our weekly Lads Night last night, and decided NOT to give to PES 2014 another chance, as everyone, including myself, has hated multi-player action on that game.
Within 5 minutes of playing PES 2013, everyone literally screamed the same thing, 'Fuck !! this is miles better', 'So much better to control, better shooting, better keepers, better Ai' and on and on.......
It actually looked like football again, and Zero Assistance Passing was a dream. We played it for 4 hours straight, all 2 v 2. What a breath of fresh air. And R2, wow R2. God, did we all miss R2.
PES 2104 will never see the light of day again in my home, unless I give it another try after another 10 patches, but only on single player against the CPU, never again in Multi-Player.
Sure PES 2013 isn't perfect, but in my opinion, and my friends, it's the best PES by a mile. I don't get what others don't see in that regard.
I'm not sure if I prefer either. I like both games.
Regarding manual passing in both PES13 and PES14, I actually prefer neither. PES14 requires you to play manual passes very, very carefully, regardless of distance. It's a bit unrealistic when 2 players are facing each other and have eye contact/mutual acknowledgement, and the pass played right in front of him, the receiving player can still has trouble reading/collecting the pass in moderately short distance (not too close). On the other hand, PES13's manual passing has a bit too much magnetism on the tail end of the pass. I've played against manual players in ranking matches who had a passion for spamming mid-to-long blind passes. The receiving player is a bit too aware of all sorts of passes, regardless of context. The defensive players do not understand the context until the ball is collected by the receiving player. For mid-to-long passes, a lot of them are not 50/50 enough, in situations that the context should play out that way. PES14 doesn't have this problem at all in manual passing.
I like the feeling of "open space" in PES14. Defenders can get wrong footed. Once wrong footed, I can have some time on the ball, or even stand still. The pressurer freezes. Pressuring players in PES13 is too much like homing missiles. There's not enough "freeze time" when a pressuring defender misses the ball. Double pressure, however, feels just as unrealistic in both versions. Only difference is the space left behind by double pressurers are more exploitable in PES14, and sometimes in PES14 you can isolate the double pressuring players into 2 1-on-1 situations, if you plan ahead, and then wrong foot them/take them out individually. In any case, double pressure is still too rewarding in both games. I want to see drastic draining of stamina in continuous pressuring.
What I don't like is the lack of error in R2 control in PES13. That is one big problem in human vs human games, it's too easy to kill the clock in your own half. Manual vs manual adds a layer of error/mistakes, but it'd be nice to introduce some more poor touches. I feel like R2 is too reliable when my defenders are on the ball.
Manual shooting is definitely better in PES13. Double touch command felt better as well.
What's wrong with PES14 is that the tricks are almost not error prone at all. What's with being able to use sombero flicks and rainbow flicks with ease with every player? Why not introduce errors where players will actually miss the ball entirely? Or at least introduce a poor touch for less technical players during a trick where the ball carrier is surprised of the outcome himself? And then the ball becomes loose and then becomes a 50/50 chance? Ball carrier has too much advantage in awareness of ball outcome ATM.
Player changing works better in PES13. I rarely make mistakes with selecting the right player.
There's more variation in the support offered by AI off ball players in PES14.
Even though I rarely use it, the ability to suddenly accelerate to full speed is very unrealistic in PES14.
I really don't know which game I prefer playing manually. I also think PES13 feels great when dribbling with nimble players in the box. But I also don't want to dribble like that everywhere on the field...so I don't know. And I play mostly online since PES11, so I can't speak for games vs COM.
Drunk posting BTW. Sorry if it reads like a mess.
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. Yeah, I wish I had some like-minded people to play PES 2013 with on zero assistance, it would have been excellent - I envy you PS3 guys who seemed to have a great thing going with that PEEL league you used to mention. 
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