just read a bunch of pages of this thread and yours is the comment I found most interesting.
Which football videogame would you say captures that living machine feeling the most?
First of all - thank you for kind words and very interesting reply.
When I think about football games that somewhat delivered this immersion and a feeling of teams being "living machines" - I think about all the early PES games, up to around PES 5/6, with them being a pinnacle.
They were all crafted with passion and love and developers stuck to their vision.
All the best AI players had this long forgotten
individuality. They behaved like their real life counterparts.
R.Carlos would dash down the wing and shoot from distance, Zidane was a real threat, with laser passes, incredible shots, dribblers would dance through your defense. It was almost like every player was crafted individually, from scratch.
I dont know much about coding or game developing in general, but I presume there was some background decision making algorithm, that would decide how often certain players would attempt to shoot/dribble/run/tackle.. and these were adjusted individually, same as stats.
Speaking of stats - this is another thing that made these games special.. stats really mattered. There was a huge difference between players and it was clearly visible. The grind to score your first goal with default ML players was a very rewarding... torture.😂
In the winter transfer window you might have saved enough "money" to buy one player. And you could affort only 3 players that would be slightly better than your starting 11. But you had to make choices. Will you go for player A, who is fast but cant shoot to save his life, or B who has decent shots, but is slow as fuck. Or maybe guy C, who was average on both, but was tall and physically strong. Everything mattered.
Now we have army of copy/paste clones.
So even if you played a match - your AI team mates would still behave like they did playing against them. You felt like its a living team and you are part of it.
Its not nostalgia. There's a reason why people still mod and play these games. They had something that was lost long ago. They had proper AI and stats that mattered.
Sometimes I feel like online crowd does not even realise that they dont need less AI, but more. Because if we had proper AI, with some players making runs, some being more defensive, some being aggressive - it would all balance itself out and provided great experience.
Now developers are adjusting the whole thing. They are adjusting whole defensive line, all midfield, all runs. Its either a wall in front of goal, or no one there. Either all team pressing, or no one. It will never work this way. And they will always be unhappy.
I love the idea of open source game developed by some passionate crowd who understands how football works.
And I wish I see the day when game like this is out.
Until then, for my own mental health - I walked away from football games and I dont regret it.