There is a masquerade of the incompetence to design a proper sport game by creating a smoke screen of faked difficulty (exaggerated or unfairly applied ball behaviour and physics, situation-based interference with player momentum, collision and animation) to handicap and sabotage the player's effort, to falsely give an impression of sophistication.
I believe the "scripting" actually is a key design concept hard-coded in every aspects of this game mechanics. It is in every fiber of the game at any given situation of the game.
1/ The ball physics, collision, trajectory, player momentum does not only follow the rule of real world physics as a simulation. That rule can be changed almost always to obey another ultimate law of the game:
The Ultimate Rule Of Handicapping The Player:
Handicap and disadvantage the players so that he always has to be on his toes to a masochistic level. The game finds pleasure in frustrating the player, be it obnoxious, annoying, incessant pressure from computer AI or the unexplainable illogical behaviour of the ball and your AI team mates as well as the deliberately biased refereeing.
This is the first football game in which the ball has its own AI programmed to play favorite the whole match either in impossibly STUBBORNLY REPEATEDLY bouncing back to an opponent feet regardless of your skill of tackling or persistently magnetized to an invincible god-like opponent feet. The science of physics simulation has been sacrificed for the science of cheating.
The ball physics and behavior is also synchronized with opponent position to dispossess You or to take control away from You. You do not have to make any error in the game. The game will literally "manufacture" stuff-ups after stuff-ups on your behalf to dispossess You.
Your first touch suddenly becomes impossibly bad for no reason at all (even after receive a well-prepared, well-placed and soft pass) which resulted in the ball drifting impossibly away from You or bouncing uncontrollably whenever there was a convenient opponent nearby (all your teammates' clumsy animation has been pre-coded and has a specific purpose of a smoke screen to mask the delay imposed unfairly on your response and control so as the opponent could have time to dispossess You).
There is a universal law of ball behavior in this game: drifting ball, deflected ball, bounced off ball, loosed ball will always be directed to/snapped to/ locked on to opponents running paths.
There is also a pattern of series of repeated stuff-up of your defenders combined with illogical weird stubborn ball behavior which always bounced back, persistently magnetized back to the penalty area in front of your goal, no matter how much effort You put in to clear it because the game tries to "manufacture" chances for CPU (again not by science of faithful simulation but by cheap cheat).
In long passes, the ball running speed will suddenly slow down or speed up in perfect timing to be intercepted by your opponent regardless of your timing, strength of pass and intention, your passing skill does not factor. You find yourself asking the ball a lot of questions about the way it disobeyed You.
This is the game of the perfect invisible grid in which the ball and your opponent are mutually locked into each other at all time, while You were trying to run between them in vain like a headless chicken on an unstoppable unicycle on a pre-determined rail. Sometimes I feel like I play PES-Cirque Du Soleil Edition. Do I have any chance at all?
2/ To further this masochistic and malicious ruse, the player input is severely interfered with to his disadvantage. Player never has real control to his avatars in the game. They are programmed to disobeyed the controls at triggered chosen moments.
There is always delay, dazed, running away from the ball after a tackle. The cursor switched suddenly to another player at the most crucial moment for no apparent reason when it needs to focus on your controlled player the most.
3/ Pre-determined lock-in mechanics event , in which player has no input in anything:
Your player always keep delayed by being obstructed by the body of a falling opponent after your successful timing tackle.
After a successful tackle, instead of continuing running towards the loose ball, your player is dazed, confused, the cursor suddenly taken off him.
There is always a perceivable pre-programmed pre-synchronized distance between your defenders and the opponent strikers with perfect timing so as he can always have plenty of time to evade your tackling as you approached him. In these impossible and desperate moments, the sliding tackle will certainly earn you an instant yellow card.
Your player always run on rail slowly along side the opponent striker, then neatly tucked in behind him like ducklings follow their mother, regardless of your bust-a-gut running direction changing effort and speed.
The game is full of such annoying unjustifiable hard-coded, delaying, locked-in-place micro-events like that, it is so easy to see the scripting and handicapping.
Sometimes playing the game makes me feel like I just watching a series of animation of "manufactured" stuff-ups on my side and God-like response on CPU side played over and over again at numerous predetermined moments.
In fact, the game is nothing but a series of faked animations to create a hallucination that You are in control, but the outcome will never change. It has been pre-decided by being hard-coded into the game.
Hard to believe the same company that develops MGS also makes PES. PES is a good game this year but it's also quite shit in some ways.
