Must say, I'm not convinced the game's better overall since the patch.
Yes, it's tightened things up a lot. Yes, in some areas it's greatly improved. But what's been lost is that open, free-flowing feel I liked so much. The original PES 2014 was a deeply flawed game but it had something very special in amongst all the annoyances: a sense of freedom and depth. Suddenly it feels a bit like PES 2012 all over again - a fast, rigid, button-mashing game where the same things happen time and time again. I know it was a bit too loose in midfield, and there was so little pressure on midfielders that at times it looked like something from the 1950s, but ffs Konami, do you always have to take things to the opposite extreme?
I wouldn't mind so much if they'd actually fixed the main irritations with version 1.0. But no - I'm in midfield, I put my foot on the ball... oh, a computer-controlled Ryan Giggs has somehow been propelled fifteen feet across the turf - faster than the speed of sound - and smashed into me, completely missing the ball, which just rolls slowly to another computer-controlled player who runs off with it while three of my midfielders take a step in the wrong direction so that once I get control of them they can't catch up with him. I've had 78% possession and 99 shots on goal to Manchester United's zero, but suddenly this guy runs down the wing and rolls the ball at 1mph to the near post... oh, the computer has denied me control of my centre back, who's taken two steps backwards so the striker has a free shot. But wait, he's hit it straight at the keeper with all the power of a kitten's sneeze! Oh... my keeper's palmed it straight into his own net. 1-0 to them.
Also, is it just me or have defensive lines actually been nudged even further up the pitch? I've got my defensive line set to 1, and my attack/def level set to 4, and my player support also set to 4, and I concede at least one goal a game from being kicked off the ball 40 yards from goal (no foul, obviously) and the computer playing a through ball in between my two CBs who are standing on the halfway line. The only way I can keep a clean sheet is to hit "back" on the D-pad to lower the defensive line every single time I lose the ball. I do at least get some amusement from looking at the radar and seeing where the defensive line indicator appears on the map (i.e. where a defensive line should be standing), compared to where they're actually standing.
This is what Konami do every year: release a game with a load of faults but a very clear vision of what it's trying to be, then respond to criticism of the faults by removing the clear vision, and patch it into the same old 100mph thrash / through-ball-fest (with most of the faults still there). Then, if we're lucky, we get another patch turning it into some kind of hybrid between the two versions of the game, sometime in early Spring. Gone so far beyond sick of this now.