Konami/EA have no real desire to cater for the full manual/ sim crowd. They know that their scripted and on the rails engine is designed for the manipulation of the online crowd, Which is their top priority.
Sliders in Fifa are still not effective enough and they're getting less and less influential on the gameplay sadly, With every patch after release the game turns into a counter attacking mess that has no resemblance to football.
As for Konami their engine just can't handle loose balls, or creative play despite having all these arrows, pass indicators and off the ball control settings. Full manual and shooting types are less scripted options but are still influenced by the online element which decides outcomes and so on.
What's even more worrying for me is that we're seeing a trend of eliminating essential parts of a football match for the sake of making the game easy to influence IMHO. Stuff like Fouls,Penalties, Keepers coming out, Handballs, Injuries as well as fatigue have all been sacrificed and it has hurt the authenticity.
I would be happy to buy a game of football without a SINGLE license if it plays like it should.
A post from the heart, i see where your coming from man.
I agree especially on the Penalties, injuries and general incidents ingame.
A 15 minute game on PES 5 took forever, sometimes even half and hour in real world time due to all the fouls, incidents. 15 minutes in PES 2018 feels short, sadly at times halves go buy with very few incidents and the ball going out of play. to sum this issue up, its the exact same core problem which has been in the engine since 2014. Yes, 'Tron Running'.
The game still suffers from lack of a movement gradient from still moves, to jogging, to running then sprinting. If you look at the developments since PES 2014 Konami have left this base the same and built cautiously around over the years focusing on building a huge library of animations and physics.
This 'Tron Running' effect restricts creative play unlike in the PES 2011-2013 games where responsiveness was instantaneous. Obviously PES 2018 has a animations and physics engine which is night and day better than the previous gen but still, it seems Konami have had issues upgrading this fundamental over the last 4 games. I've spoken about the same thing every single year since 2014, repeated this post every year like Groundhog Day. Good thing is like in the film the game has been getting better every time.
This interests me, i have heard about the key developments for PES 2018 early last year the reply was PES 2018 would be a moderate upgrade in all areas enhancing the game to work with PS4 Pro better and upgrading graphical elements. What was also said was PES 2019 would be the game which would see substantial revolutionary changes. For me this would allude to Konami finally addressing this issue and allowing greater freedom in dribbling and movement potential, hopefully finally breaking that 'on rails' tron system.
To understand how core this issue is to the engine, this is the reason why STILL only 2 players can jump for a header because this engine is not 'coded' to handle more than 2 players contesting an air ball. The last generation from PES 1 to 2013 and best shown in PES 2010, you could literally have all 20 outfield players jump up and contest a ball in the air.
I feel as if Konami have enough animations already to finally develop this area. This I think has always been their vision, however they didn't realize just how many animation where needed to actually produce this.
Scored a beautiful volley though that had that "old" PES feeling which was nice.
