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PES 2010 70% Code previews
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17-08-2009 10:09am#1http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/pes-2010-pro-evolution-soccer-hands-on_5You have to feel for Konami. Even when it was the critics' favourite football game, Pro Evolution Soccer was still the plucky underdog - the Havant and Waterlooville of the games industry's FA Cup third round, scoring a couple of goals in front of the Kop and leaving with its head held high, even after getting pasted in the salesy second half. But things change, and they certainly have. PES 2009 was by no means a bad game, but its angular, sped-up one-dimensionality felt like a throwback next to the increased realism of EA's improving FIFA series, and the world gave it the hairdryer treatment. Back to the drawing board?
Our first, brief hands-on may not have suggested as much on the surface, but by the typically conservative standards of the PES series, the new Team Style and Player Card systems, not to mention the expanded range of directional control, were and are blue-sky, helicopter thinking. They've even removed the forcefield around throw-ins, allowing you to jostle and compete in a more natural manner. Imagine! Extended play on near-finished builds of the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions suggests these changes make a big difference. But all the same, the boys at EA Canada are anything but complacent. Will it be enough?
We love preview code. In the one we've got the players' shorts flap in the wind at insane speed. It's mesmerising. Goalkeepers are very slow to take goal kicks, too.
We won't be able to answer that for a while, but in the meantime we can give you a better sense of how Konami's revisions stack up. On the pitch, the developer is touting something akin to FIFA 10's 360-degree directional control, which would be about 45 times better than PES 2009's (or whatever 360 divided by eight actually is). In practice it doesn't feel as though you get that many degrees of response from the analogue stick when dribbling or playing the ball, but there's no denying that it's a dramatic departure from the fixed lines and diagonals of the past, and much closer to the effect achieved by EA Canada with last year's FIFA.
The vastly improved graphics engine helps here too, restoring humanity to the faces of the players thanks to something as simple as realistic lighting, and expanding the diversity and nature of animations considerably to accommodate the freer range of movement. There are still some work-in-progress horror shows (stand up Adebayor - actually, better sit back down again), but most players are suitably recognisable, and animations continue to reflect distinctive running and movement styles - one of PES' historical strengths. Overall the improvement is considerable, and 2009 is almost unrecognisable in contrast.
The final game will also allow you to manually request the ball when running into space alongside a team-mate.
With the pace more measured, PES has crept back up from an abstract game derived from football to something more directly resembling what we see on TV. A lot of the little flicks and feints that used to require complex contortions of various sticks and button combos are now performed in-line too, and prove easier to commit to muscle memory. The result is a strong footballing foundation that respects intelligent use of space and tactical imagination on the pitch, and makes for a more deliberate, precarious feeling in control, punishing slips and spillages swiftly but seldom falling into predictable patterns.
Elsewhere Konami has tightened the AI, particularly goalkeepers, who can't be rounded so easily, with manual control returning for them as well. Keepers can also be unsighted, which helps you make more of free kicks and players with an aptitude for long-range drives. The overall first impression is that PES 2010 plays out like FIFA 09 without the bias towards pacy attackers, making for tight, competitive multiplayer matches.
Potentially just as worthy of applause is the increased transparency off the pitch, with a number of structural changes that allow you to understand and adjust players, positions and tactics without the need for laborious trial-and-error. Player Cards are individual characteristics, some of which highlight strengths such as reactions, touch and particular types of turn, while active cards can be switched on or off, or between several settings. Every player has a card for changing their attitude between defence-minded, attack-minded and balanced, but some of the better ones have adjustable specialties. Frank Lampard has a long-range shot toggle, for instance, which sees him moving into better positions to line himself up, while Luca Toni has a fox-in-the-box card and others can be encouraged to poach and set themselves for eye-of-a-needle passes. You ultimately need to step up to take advantage of their skills, but the cards work to help you.
Player Cards may be the most eye-catching element of the new PES - the kind of trademarkable bullet-point concept more typically associated with the old EA Sports - but Team Style is arguably the more broadly impactful, allowing you to fine-tune things like a team's compactness, how much support the team provides players advancing into the opposition half, the style of your defensive line and whether players will instinctively swap positions to mix it up. Superficially similar to FIFA's Custom Tactics, Team Style allows you to transform a team's behaviour in concert with the Player Cards, and this is likely to ease progress considerably when you're forced to withstand assaults from tougher teams by pressing harder and holding your ground in possession, for instance.
Online isn't something we can test right now, but having ditched Konami ID, the company's representatives are promising a significant change.
One of the quirks of our preview version is that a lot of the line-ups and formations have yet to be calibrated for release, so you fire up almost any team and discover players wildly out of position. This will be fixed by the time you can buy the game, but in the meantime it helps to highlight another significant change - the loss of the occasionally ambiguous skill pentagon in favour of a 1-100 player rating more akin, again, to FIFA. Individual players have a peak potential rating - Buffon is 95, for instance - but if you put them in a role they're not comfortable with, that drops off, so it's important to keep an eye on their preferred positions, highlighted on the same screen.
All of this is likely to help you back into the revitalised Master League, where there's a new Youth Team section for managing younger players and fast-tracking the best. Konami reckons the new menus should be easier for players to deal with, despite the volume of new options for things like sponsorship negotiations. Veterans of the Master League system may also be pleased to hear that you can qualify for and take part in the Europa League and Champions League, forcing you to deal with fixture congestion and other issues, although we didn't get that far during a week of testing (mostly because of my bitter, ongoing feud with the Eurogamer Expo's Tom Champion).
The menus and music are still, er, an acquired taste, but you'll have a lot of fun on this one, the Team Style page.
For all the game's seeming improvements, however, Konami must know that it has work to do to win back the core fans who finally took the plunge on FIFA last year, and PES 2010 will struggle to do so in one swoop no matter how much it reduces the quality gap. After a week at the controls, PES 2010 appears to play a game much closer to FIFA 09, with less of the latter's polish but a more quantifiable relationship between decisions on and off the pitch. However it stacks up in the final reckoning though, there's no question Konami has turned sharply away from the cul-de-sac into which the series appeared to be disappearing last year, and if nothing else PES 2010 looks like it will serve as a decent manifesto for the Japanese developer's future plans. The difficult question is whether it will be enough to see off EA Canada's own efforts, which we'll be considering in a thorough hands-on with a near-finished build tomorrow
http://forums.pesfan.com/showthread.php?p=8378104#post8378104andyofbramall on PESFan wrote:Tell you what Jon, it’s that time of the year again. Yup, Konami have released the latest code of PES2010 to the press, and here at the bright lights of PESFan towers we’ve managed to get our grubby little mitts on it for your benefit. Oh happy days.
As always when trying a new build of PES for the first time, I headed straight for Exhibition mode. What better way to test the ins and outs of a new code than by reliving that most classic of world football matches - West Midlands Village vs. East London.
The first thing that struck me about the game was just how hard it was to run with the ball now. Granted, every time I play a new version of PES there’s always that little adjustment period, but I was completely beyond all redemption. Every time I tried to dribble around a player I came unstuck, it seemed almost impossible. Even faster members of the squad like Ashley Young could only run a finite amount before being thwarted by a member of the Hammers defence. Before I knew it, I was a goal down inside 10 minutes. What on earth was I doing wrong?
Several games later - it hit me.
I was playing PES like I always had. A general rule of thumb I’d previously employed was a few long passes to a member of my team on the wings, sprint for a while, cut in and shoot. Probably about three or four passes in total from receiving the ball. This sort of thinking failed me utterly in PES2010.
As soon as I realised what I was doing wrong and started to actually pass the ball around, the game opened itself up to me. It felt more realistic, goals actually took…effort. There was no bolting around seven men and planting the ball easily in the corner of the net, these were worked build ups and felt genuinely satisfying.
Mind you, I was hardly playing with world-beaters (Steve Sidwell excluded), so next on the agenda was Barcelona vs. Manchester United. As you would expect with a higher quality team, it was easier, but the dynamics were still the same. Even Messi wasn’t able to just buzz past players like he was some sort of mutant fly.
One of the reasons for this is that changing direction at speed is no longer painfully easy. The new turning animations ensure that the pace of the game slows down when trying to dodge past a defender, and although this movement feels unnatural and weird at first, when it clicks - it really clicks. It’s something I ended up missing when going back to an earlier version of PES. Although you can still gradually change your direction while running with the ball, 2010 made me want to cut down on the easy ninety-degree turns I'd got so accustomed to, instead opting to pass.
The AI also seems to play a part, with both your team and the opposition providing much sterner challenges to work around. From personal experience, it felt the AI was far more competent at covering gaps in its defence, and would eagerly close me down at the earliest point. Goalkeepers too seem to be more skilled, and in my opinion managed to position themselves and cover goal much more successfully than before. There was still the occasional unwelcome spill or unnaturally acrobatic mega-save, but overall I felt they were a definite advancement.
The new Cards and Team Style systems are an interesting addition, and I found combining them both results in quite a variety of games panning out. The changes are subtle, but they are there, and I'll be curious to see how people use them differently as time goes on. One point of note was that I could only find twenty-one different cards (with two even being allocated for goalkeepers), but I should mention this was only by investigation of Master League at the start of the game, so don't quote me on it.
Penalties are another area in which Konami has tweaked for 2010, with the idea being that how you take a pen now lies in a) how much power you give the ball and b) which direction and how much or how little you point the analogue stick. However as of writing this the system seems to be either too sensitive, resulting in penalty after penalty being blasted miles high and wide, or not quite finished yet. Out of about twenty penalties taken I only managed to score two using the new system, although this may just be down to my lack of skill. I actually found it was a more successful tactic to press no buttons at all, as after a time the computer automatically takes one for you and usually scores with a minimal of fuss.
The animations show real promise at this stage, and are already a step above previous instalments. Even with a fair percentage of them yet to be included, they still look fantastic, smooth and as genuine as I’ve seen in a PES game. Injured players even hobble around the pitch when they aren’t being called into action.
I regret to inform I'm not able to comment on the game's new 360 degree movement control, as this is a feature that has apparently been left out of the Xbox version's current build due to technical limitations of the hardware. We are informed that this will feature on the Playstation 3, and perhaps 360 control on the Xbox is something the makers are looking into for the near-future.
It's worth mentioning that the overall presentation is a big step-up, even in this preview build. The early lighting effects look brilliant, the menus feel slick and player faces have seen a ridiculous level of improvement. Having said that, some lesser known players from smaller clubs can still resemble beings from an alien world, but for the most part even they looked more like their real-life counterparts than in 2009. I think it's safe to assume the player faces are still a work in progress, you can tell that a lot of the teams in the game haven't been properly dealt with yet, so hopefully it's still on the to-do list of Konami's efforts.
Areas of the audio have also been tweaked. It was great hearing my fans jeer the visiting team if they had too much possession of the ball. Jon Champion and Mark Lawrenson return to their seats as commentator and co-commentator respectively, with Lawro continuing in his tradition of making sarcastic comments at me when I’m at my lowest. The overall commentary doesn’t seem noticeably different at this point, but it’s difficult to say at what stage in 2010’s development any new lines would be included.
Master League on the other hand has evolved considerably and now includes proper team budgets, coaches, athletic trainers scouts, youth teams and more. You can change the way the league is organised; do you want it to be structured by goal difference after points or head-to-head results? It’s up to you. There are some interesting improvements, and I’ll be discussing these in much more detail in a special Master League report tomorrow.
Unfortunately the much maligned Become A Legend has not seen a similar overhaul. Apart from the general gameplay improvements implemented in PES2010, the mode itself hasn’t changed noticeably, which I found a bit troubling. I can only hope that BAL is scheduled to be upgraded closer to release date, because in my opinion it’s something that showed a lot of potential when it debuted in 2009.
Overall, I think 2010 is showing a lot of promise. but is PES2010 a return to form? Personally I think it could be. On the other hand, in the same way beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, playability is in the eyes of the player. But for my money, it already presents a good, solid game of football, with only minor glitches preventing it from being the best I’ve played in a long, long time. With Konami really under the spotlight to make this year's PES the best ever, I've no doubt most of these will be ironed out in the coming weeks.
Note: As this preview is based on the Xbox 360 current code only, information may well change before the final release.
Some more pics on WENB if yo can get it to load up.
Will be more info released throughout the day.
360movement (or something like it....) in the PS3 version of the game, but not the XBOX360 version. Quite shocking imo. Makes my decision to buy the PS3 version very easy though.
EDIT: Some spanish site seems to be saying 360 movement will be in the PC and 360 versions on release, not sure what the official word is.0
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