I don't know if it's nostalgia, but last night I decided to revisit PES 2019. I tried both vanilla and a modded dt18 and the results were the same as they've always been for me; a game that feels good on the ball, but absolutely killed by a comically bad AI.
Doesn't matter what difficulty I play on, it just ends like this:
Me scoring early and often. Raising the difficulty doesn't fix this. All it does is increase the tempo the AI wants to play at and increase the frustrations you have to deal with as a human player.
I think the biggest problem with the AI is how it manages it's defensive line and defensive shape:
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Look at the radar. What the hell is that last defender doing? Happened in both vanilla and with the modded dt18. Marking instructions and no marking instructions. No matter what I did, one or two players completely compromised my team's defense line and shape. That, I feel, is this game's fatal flaw.
Well one of them. Because this right here, I genuinely have no words for
I wasn't even mad. I think I chuckled bit and decided to wrap it up for the night.
This game was full of potential. In a way, it was the perfect balance between the old and new; the things that made both 2017 and 2021 good. But as a fixed cursor player, it's missing the most important ingredient and that is the AI.