Long time Evo-web reader here. Can't believe it's been almost full 10 years since I've made an account and never shared more than a couple of posts. To (re)introduce myself briefly: ever since I played Winning Eleven 6 Final Evolution (equipped with the great WeDoIt patch) the PES series has been pretty much the most important part of my gaming hobby, at least when it comes to amount of time I've spent on ML careers, international cups and editing across every single release since the first PES for Playstation 2 (I believe the only one I've skipped was 2012 which wasn't very remarkable as far as I know), with 3, 6 and 2013 being my (not very original) favorites. I try FIFA every year as well but despite the shiny coating of licenses and other small things it just never does it for me, always found PES, even in it's darker days, to be a better representation of football than EA Sports efforts. There is one FIFA game I do respect and regard as one of the best footies ever and it's the 2010 World Cup edition which I still own and play every once in a while, but aside from that it's all about PES.
As you can see this is going to be a wall of text.
I've followed the releases of subsequent PES titles very closely for a good number of years, always with cautious excitement, but this is the first time I've actually bought a copy almost immediately after the release, despite having some doubts.
Between the full game and the demo I've only played maybe 25 matches or so (just some frendlies in between the editing; already scored, and conceded, some "nice ones"), so it's way too soon for some strong opinions, but for the moment what I see may be the best PES since the good old days (PES 5/6, though I recognize 3 as almost equally brilliant). The game finally feels natural and organic, the plastic and rigid feel of PES 14-16 has pretty much gone, everything has weight to it, the shots do not feel soulless anymore, the balance has been restored in many parts of the gameplay - fouls, physicality, goalkeepers, AI... The phrase "King is back" has eventually become a joke at some point, but this may be the time when it actually is almost 100% true - but as usual we have to wait a couple of weeks if not months to actually tell.
So, the overall impression is one of the best I've had while getting acquainted with the new PES, but there have to be some things that make me bit bothered:
-There are some rather important issues regarding ML/Cups and I don't know if they have ever beeen adressed, and they are present in the game since PES 2014. I've only noticed this quite recently, when trying something out in PES 2016 Master League by skipping a lot of matches, and it goes like this - simulated matches, that is every single match aside from the one you actually play on the pitch, do not generate bookings or injuries for players. This means there will never be a situation where, for example, you face Barcelona in the next fixture and Messi won't be there to bully your defenders because he's suspended for a red card or suffers from an injury. He, and the rest of ~12,000 players in the game, will always be ready to play against your team because he never could actually get suspended. Well, with one exception - in an actual match against your team, but that may only happen a few times in a season. Ever noticed that when the squads come up before the match begins, it's usually only the players on your team who have a yellow card (or cards) next to their names?
Try it out - start a new ML and skip 10 matches, then go to your player stats - they will have some goals, assists and ratings, yes, but the columns for yellow and red cards will show "0" from top to bottom. You will also notice another thing - no player was even substituted in all those matches, the starting eleven will have 10 matches played, with the remaining squad resting at 0. The team spirit, regardless of performance, will also remain unchanged.
After finding this out I concluded I can live with it but I realise it might be one of those gamebreaking things for some people. Just to be sure I checked the old games to see if it ever was like that but old saves from PES 3, 6 and 2013 showed me everything was okay, same goes with FIFA games.
-The issue that has been already mentioned - stadium settings not getting recognized in any other mode than exhibition. Just tested this myself, it's true and really makes me wonder how something like this has been overlooked - I have experience with video game testing and it has taught me that glaring issues like this surely must have been noticed by the QA team. If they still appear, they must have been ignored or given a very low priority by the dev team, at least that's what I'd like to believe. Hopefully Konami will acknowledge this, seems like an easy fix a next patch could sort out.
-Speaking of stadiums, the licensed ones are still "region locked". Can't assign, say, Stadio Olimpico to a brazilian team - why?
-A bit disappointed with cut-scenes featuring "cinematic" 30fps - I liked how PES on PS4 reintroduced smooth 60fps for these.
-Konami is getting really lazy with the unlicensed content - I realize where they come from (the players will fix it themselves real quick), but there are still people who can't be bothered with editing and all that mumbo jumbo, why sentence them to play with teams with such lazy names like "MD White" or "AN Yellow Blue"? Especially when you have other teams like "Derbyshire" or "Tyneside", which is at least tolerable. It's been like this for quite some time, same goes for the kits (one pattern for the whole league, they only swap colors which don't always match up). And now you also get the national teams like Poland and Hungary having fake names that don't even look Polish or Hungarian (which was the usual strategy). There were times when Batistuta was called Butatista (fake but recognizable), nowadays Lewandowski is a born-again German named Stegers - is there some licensing issue that forces Konami to make some fake names as fake as possible? I'd really like to know, it actually makes me worried about future releases.
-I mentioned I had some doubts before getting the new PES and it's about the difficulty. PES 2016, as unfair and scripted as it was at times, could always provide some challenge on Super Star. 2017 on the other hand feels less rigged (which is a good thing) but at the same time the AI seems to have trouble with building an attack that requires effort to break down, and dispossesing seems a bit too easy at times. I've tried out different team pairings and got some interesting, if inconsistent results. I've lost all 3 attempts against England, although visually I had the advantage while playing as Poland, then I've won two against Germany. Played as Lokomotiv from Uzbekistan vs PSG while applying a slightly defensive approach - no parking the bus stuff - and not only have I lost just 0-1 instead of being hammered, I did have some close chances of my own (like shooting a volley from 5 meters away close - went over the bar, a result which I appreciated, felt like the good old days when nothing felt 100% certain). Picked up Albania against Italy and without even trying I ended up leading 2-0 with most of my best players warming the bench, as I noticed late in the game while making subs. And finally got dominated, but maintained a goalless draw, against River Plate as Fluminese, so two evenly sided teams.
Granted, all of this was just in Exhibition which always feels a bit lite than other modes, especially ML and more especially nowadays, with all the Team Spirit and Player Role features (nicely expanded this year as I see). Maybe it's the case of interaction between certain tactics, but I'd like to see a bit more consistency when playing against stronger sides. I also wonder if the adaptable AI applies only to a single match, or does it work across multiple games, with the AI learning the patterns you repeat in every game, as well as recognizing the context of a particular match - like rushing for attack when losing on aggregate or playing safe, defensive football to secure a draw needed for qualifying to the next round. Lots of stuff to figure out this year!
If you made it this far - cheers!
why the hell edited stadium don't exist when you play away in competitions? can they fix this with patch? I hope... if not they have shooted in own foot again
