What is Project Odyssey?
Project Odyssey is going to take you on a trip around the world, to experience football as it exists on the many countries of the planet. While both PES and FIFA typically focus on the top leagues, we wanted to go further and play with teams and footballers that we've never even heard about before. Fortunately, there is no shortage of leagues and divisions out there, and the vast majority of them were never ever present on any football game ever - besides CM/FM, but in there you can't actually
play football.
Thanks to the progress that the PES6 editing scene has been making - albeit quietly -, with the help of people like
@peterc10, it was never as easy and fast as it is now to shape the database of the game according to our every whim. The choice of PES6 as the platform for Project Odyssey was therefore a no-brainer: solid gameplay, endless editing possibilities and endless available graphic mods is a combination that no other game is able to match.
But as always, nothing is perfect and PES6 certainly has its own problems as well. First, how do we shape the entire database of the Option File to fit our Project? And second, how do we get around the fact that playing an edited PES6OF always brings about issues regarding the ML?
A PES OF has many different things to be taken care of: from National Team players to ML newgens, the many different leagues...so, all patchmakers over the years had to be sure that their work was 100% perfect, no rough edges, or else the community would have a say if they found, say, a player that wasn't supposed to be on said team, or a couple of player stats which weren't up-to-date. This not only takes a hell of a long time, but is also too much work for too few people with too little time to edit.
The second problem is also important to take care of. PES6's Master League is a world of its own, one that has very little in common with the football world as it exists now in real-life, with idiosyncrasies such as the fact that transactions are carried out through PES Points, not real money; the structure of the ML world itself, the ML newgens, the regens...and also here, patchmakers have been trying for decades to "fit" the real world in this make-believe fantasy land of PES, have been doing their best to try and provide a realistic experience within this platform; but ultimately they fail because the game's structure simply doesn't allow it.
How did we fix those issues for Project Odyssey?
We didn't.
For to address the first problem, we reimagined what a PES OF should contain. Unlike your typical patch/OF, we edited only a very small percentage of the data on each OF. Let's say you want to play the Angolan league, and you download our version of it. The OF you get will only have the teams of that competition, the rest of the file will remain absolutely untouched. What we do here is we edit every file according to its purpose, and anything that doesn't fit it is ignored.
Regarding the second problem, we just accepted that for the purposes of Project Odyssey, our files are shaped to provide an experience on the Exhibition/League and Cup Modes, and not on the Master League. We want to play a somewhat realistic version of each league we make, not a Master League where inevitably we'll see all the types of things that we're not seeing in real-life: such as player transfers that do not occur in reality, player stats evolution according to what happens on the game an not according to real-life, etc. So if you download the Season 2019 of the Angolan League, that's exactly what you'll be able to play.
By now you already have an idea of our method behind Project Odyssey, but I'll clarify it furtherly.
Other patches try to fit a world in a single option file for PES6.
Our world is outside of the game itself.
Every time we release an Option File, we're actually releasing a League. Every league that is released is added to our Odyssey Database, with the purpose of establishing the first-ever League database for PES. So, before you click on PES6's executable you're already playing the game, as you'll have to choose which league you'll play before you actually run PES6.
This is the perfect way to overcome the limitations of a database that has a fixed number of available - and editable - teams: by creating a database that lives outside of the game itself. And here, there are no limits. The database can grow, evolve, and include whatever we want it to have. PES6 becomes only the platform, the "provider of gameplay".
Next up: Meet the World of Project Odyssey