Hi Chris.
I agree with what you say about the lack of team and player individuality, but that was also the case in PES2017 and you really liked that one.
But i don't want an endless discussion.
I don't think there is anything wrong with your communication. There is nothing wrong with Matt's either (or neither?), but i often don't agree with him. I have a completely different opinion about football (and now i'm talking real football, not PES) than him. His (imo) wrong view about football 'colours' his criticism about PES, and makes it somewhat invalid for me, no matter how good he makes his point with excerpts of PES matches... Don't ask me an example now, because that is almost impossible to give... Damn i will try one, but i'm almost sure that i will not be able to prove my point.
Matt showed a video of a specific situation were a defender had to make a choice and where he was convinced that the AI defender made the wrong choice. I remember that the weekend before his post in a match against Liverpool, an opponent's defender made exactly the same choice and Coutinho scored. Pundits in the studio claimed (with the benefit of hindsight) that the defender made the wrong choice and should have stepped forward to block Coutinho. In that case Coutinho could have played a simple pass to another Liverpool attacker who should have scored...this was exactly what happened in the PES video.
To put it simplistic, Matt asks perfection from the AI, irl you don't see perfection.
A lot of stick Konami gets is exagerated and even culturally determined. An example: the backheels. There are too many backheels... Lots of people on this (English) forum will agree with that statement. A couple of weeks ago, Chelsea played one of their best matches of the season and this against Brighton. Hazard, Willian and Batschuayi (according to lots of Belgian fans he is a much better forward than Lukaku) had some wonderfull interplay including quite a few backheels. James Richardson and his guests discussed this match in the Totally Football podcast and i heard Richardson say that English people don't like backheels. The same day Gabriël Marcotti and his guests talked about the same match and they also said that English football fans don't like backheels. South American people love technical skills and backheels and Konami does target South America...
I'm not specially defending Konami, because imo they really deserve some stick, but some of the things that are criticised are the wrong things (backheels for example).
One could 'tune' the amount of backheels with sliders...for example let the choice between different styles: English, German, Italian, Spanish and South American...
Sorry to jump in. I do agree with a lot of what's written here.
But the thing with backheels is, most of us (I even dare say NONE OF US) don't play real 45 minutes halves in PES. I'd bet we play 6, 7... maybe 10 minutes halves at most. So a lot of those automatic (this is the key word behind it all: automatic) backheels happen way too much, way too often, contained within those short matches. So the feeling you are left with by the time the match ends is that you remember seeing too many backheels compressed in such a short time frame. And, again, most of those backheels are decided automatically by the game, instead of forcing some other animation.
The same case scenario goes for fouls. One foul (IF one) in a 20 minutes match doesn't seem good enough. Take a real life football match at random and watch the first 20 minutes of it. I bet you, you'll see a lot more than 1 foul in 20 minutes.
I tend to disagree with Matt in many aspects as well. But if there's one thing that I agree with him a lot, is in players positioning and the battle for midfield, or... lack of. PES 2015, 2016, 2017 AND 2018 just aren't realistic AT ALL in this areas. Teams are split in two. Defense ------------- Attack. No in-between. You can get from you own box to 3/4 of your opponent's half with a pass or a lob, just because all there's a huge gap in between all that.
But I take that as a design choice. In fact, I know it's a design choice. They made all these years' games like that on purpose. They want the game to be broken and split in two like that. They want to give us that feeling of back and forth. Rushing from one box to the other. Getting a lot of scoring chances every match. When in reality, these matches should be an exception. They should somehow exist within the game, because we've all witnessed some electrifying, exciting matches like that in real life (recently, Liverpool V.S Manchester City, for example) but they should be nothing more than an exception and not a general rule.
If they could somehow get back the battle that existed in PES 2014, with the individuality of PES 2013, the animations and graphics of 2018, the variety in shooting that we had in PES 5-6, along with some new ideas and implementations, PES would be unbeatable.
