This will just be me uselessly venting.
I am just disappointed about the recent news.
Konami made a point of saying how their new engine allowes for great light effects. They showed off stadiums looking almost identical to their real-world coutnerparts.
I immediately thought "I can't wait to play a match on afternoon and have some beautiful relaxed pre-sunset lighting, that always has such a nice ambiance to it".
What's that, no afternoon setting? Great use of your engine guys...
Also the reasoning that them implementing rain also needs to have alot of other factors like different ball physics, etc etc. To me atleast, they are missing the point completely.
I am potentially playing this game for 300+ days. 100s and 100s of hours. I want diversity, plain and simple. Give me some rainy visuals so that every match doesn't look the same. Meet the basic things I would expect ANY football game to have. Should you expand on that to include smaller details in future games, great. Not including rain because, quoting Adam, "you'd want to also implement things like teams used to playing more in rain being more powerful in those conditions" is either an excuse for purely graphical problems with implementing rain-soaked kits and waterdrops without dropping framerates, or it shows that again, you don't get it from the user perspective.
I would rather have 40 generic stadiums than 10 licensed ones. Because diversity. Sure, it would be nice to have Barca playing at Nou Camp, but having 10 teams in my ML playing with the same "generic small town stadium" is by far more distracting.
Making the world seem alive, vivid, and breathing, is to me far more important than making it authentic. A licensed stadium is nothing if I constantly get the feeling that just outside the stadium walls, there is a blue nothingness rather than a city with people, cars etc.
I'd rather be playing in unlicensed stadiums that feel like they are placed in a real world, than licensed stadiums that are always, every match, lit by the sun in the exact same angle, never changing, never a cloud shadow moving over the pitch, never a raindrop...
Why would I want to play a game that just feels flat and fake? That's one reason I am always excited by non-gameplay touches like cameramen, seeing the subs on the sideline etc. It makes the world seem more genuine, and that alone can make me go back to the game more, since it can really feel like you are spending some time in a convincing alternate reality.