Why does it always feel like the ai have 8 players perfectly placed in defence when I get the ball? Is it just the way that the comp teams are set up? It just gets very samey very quickly. Getting quite frustrated playing this game at the mo'.
This is exactly how I feel.
The problem is this dropping back too often leads to a lack of midfield...it prevents you ever moving through the gears as a team because there's nothing progressive in the way the cpu transitions from attack to defence.
Too many of my games devolve into me coming up against a rubber band-type brick wall-which I absolutely love in theory, it's my idea of a football game (not every game should be like that of course).
However, instead of probing for gaps or playing a kind of cat and mouse game with the defence, it just becomes a slog as my teammate AI can't cope with the structure of the cpu defence and either stands still or just runs up against that brick wall.
There is so little horizontal movement from teammates the whole thing becomes a bit dull.
It's virtually impossible to play a barca type interplay with little triangles which you could in pes 17 and 18 because a) defences leave no. Space behind them and so don't engage you which means you can't take anyone out of the game and exploit space b) your team mates barely move, they keep equal distances between them at all times like they would in fifa in the past.
It feels like konami have screwed up with bad design decisions somewhere along the line and it's ruined teammate ai, for which pes has always been the gold standard (not in the efficient way fifa's teammate ai works, but through making creative runs and truly associating with your moves).
I went back to.pes 18 two days ago. I stopped playing it well before the final.patches as I fell out of love with games in general.
It's a breath of fresh air compared to 19. It has it's faults of course but the game feels free, dynamic, more compressed than 19, as bayern or napoli I can move through those gears and open the opposition out.
And although the pitches have less detail, the grass colour and tone matches real world pitches far more closely to my eyes.
And although the ai has it's issues, playing against real, Ronaldo benzema and bale can be a real handful, doing tricks, driving at my defence and generally scaring the scrap out of me.
Playing Dortmund, they swept the ball from right midfield on halfway out to reus with quick high cross field pass, reus drove at my right back, went past me with a proper trick than hit a low dipping drive into the far corner of my goal.
I genuinely like parts of pes 19 and I want it to succeed, maybe with patches it will. But right now, pes 18 feels more fun, more alive and more free. Whereas pes 19 feels oddly stale. I wonder whether subsequent patches will unlock whatever patches they've built into it's code like the ai patch did?
