Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 Hands On Previews (Eurogamer, IGN)

This was the first time a representative from PESGaming.com has been invited to such an event, and it was an honour for me to attend. As I become more savvy with how these events are carried out, our relationship with Konami will improve, and hopefully we will get more reps for future events going more regularly.

The actual event itself was held in a private room in a hotel in the West End. There were several test rigs set up all on Software Development Kits, so we were seeing the generic product prior to them cutting code for specific machines. Having signed the NDA eagerly, I was immediately seated at a rig and the play testing began.

The game itself has a new front end which shows the game modes, of which only the option to play a friendly match was available, as was expected. The teams enabled were Liverpool and Barcelona.
So I started the game, and the first thing I had to say was “wow” at the look and feel of the game. Don’t get me wrong, I value substance over style, but you can’t help but marvel at how good the game looks.

First Impressions

I’d like to make it clear that this is the first time I have been to an event of this nature, and so had mixed expectations from Konami. The scene was set prior to playing the game – I was told that the game was only around 50% complete. What we were witnessing was more a statement of intent, rather than the finished game. Having spoken to a few other guys present from other PES fan sites, it was made clear to me that the game will come on leaps and bounds from what we were currently seeing. The game would almost be unrecognisable from the one that we were playing now. So this is a very important statement I’d like you guys to note now.

I am a cautious person by nature. One of my mottos in life is to expect the worst, but hope for the best. It’s a mechanism to try and keep my emotions in check for everything in life. So please bear this in mind with what I have to say about PES2010.

So having got over the graphics of the game, I can tell you that the game still has the same camera modes we’re all used to – nothing new to surprise us, which was a little disappointing. I’ve always wanted a fully customisable camera view where you customise the pitch angle and zoom, but that’s just me.

I’d like to begin by listing some bullet points on what I thought was good and bad about the game, and then talk about them within the context of a game that is still in development – I cannot emphasize this point enough – so please remember this!

This article is all about my own personal impressions of the game, and what I took away from the event.
On this basis, my main focus was to see what issues which are in PES2009 are still present, and what improvements from the list submitted (last year in conjunction with PESGaming regulars) have been implemented. So here goes:

Minus points:

Invisible barriers still in place which is very disappointing for throw ins.
8 way control hasn’t been advanced upon. This will be a major sore point for many gamers. Will need the player animation ranges to be near perfect to appease fans.
Keepers still pass to the nearest player with short goal kicks.
Keeper actions still very limited. Keepers should come off their line more, reading danger and running out of their area to cut out dangers when they see them.
Can’t chip a ball ahead of player to cross or volley.
Chipping the keeper is poor. Can’t chip him when running with the ball. Attempting to chip the keeper would result in the ball ending up in the keeper’s hands at chest height every time.
No trick stick return. Same crappy random skill moves using left stick.
Not able to perform many special skills when I choose to do them. They are very random. The trick stick would remove this major irritation.
Grass texture needs some work. They look very flat in wide view in particular – they could be improved.
Plus points:

Graphics are stunning.
Slower game pace gives the game play a more simulation feel.
Player animation is much improved. Still some work to be done, but it’s good to see it taking place.
New slider system is brilliant. It is immediately obvious what strategies are being deployed when you choose them.
Putting players out of position results in player stat degradation which is brilliant. This stops people from playing players out of position.
Can’t run the length of the pitch with a single player and beat the whole team.
Can’t perform 90 degree turns when dribbling at speed any more. The player slows down and turns 45 degree which is very good.
Ball pace is good. Perhaps more tweaking is required, but so far so good.
Set piece takers do not freeze immediately after playing the ball any more.
New revamped penalty system with pressure sensitive shooting is a very welcome improvement.
Referees appeared not to be brandishing red cards as regularly as in PES2009.
Improvement Suggestions:

(this is a list of improvements, most of which may be quick fixes which can fit in the timescales left for PES2010 development hopefully)

Remove the invisible barriers for throw ins in particular
Goalkeeper should use a power bar to throw out. They should be able to choose whether to throw underarm or overarm.
Allow keepers to take goal kicks and play the ball short to any of the defenders at the back, not just the nearest one. Letting the keepers use a power bar to kick/throw the ball would be brilliant. Keepers like Reina should be more effective at turning defence in to attack. This is not possible right now.
Remove chants in-game. Use forums to provide downloadable team chants. This way the dev team can concentrate on capturing crowd atmosphere which is very important.
Crosses from wide positions should use player crossing attributes to be more realistic.
At the moment all players pretty much have the same crossing ability. We should see a visible difference when crossing with good players and bad crossers.
Trick stick needs to return. Why not give players a choice of which mode to play with? Either allow us to use the classic control method of using the trick stick, or the current implementation of special moves using the left stick.
Passing should be power sensitive. A power bar or the length of time the button is pressed should vary the strength of the pass. This should also apply to shots. If you can afford to keep the button pressed for longer before getting shut down by defenders, then you should be able to get more powerful shots on goal.
16 way movement must be in place for pes2011. (probably too late to try to implement for PES2010)
Downloadable foreign language commentary. (something FIFA have already implemented) why not allow us to download commentary packs with Japanese commentary, or other Asian languages, or South American languages?
If all club teams are region specific, why not allow us to download each other’s leagues? As a PAL region gamer, why can’t I download the J-League teams, or Brazilian League for my game?
Different types of pitches having an effect on your game would be great.
Online play – we need more assurances that it has been addressed and will be perfect for launch. Beta testing of online play would help to ensure that it is working properly.
I don’t know what you guys will be thinking having just read the lists above. For those of you who are despairing at now knowing that we still have 8 way control, and that FIFA’s 360 control hasn’t been matched for example, I would like to say to hold fire on any frustrations you may be feeling. This demo of the game served several purposes. Konami wanted to demonstrate that they are listening to what we want from the game. They wanted to show that they are putting the game back on the map, hence giving representatives from key PES sites early visibility to gauge our impressions of it.

New stuff

I’d like to discuss several new concepts which have been introduced to PES2010 now, and hopefully shed some light on the motivation behind them.

Firstly the new card system (see the thumbnails above for a refresher)
Basically the old star ratings for players have been revamped for PES2010. They have now been replaced with cards. Every player has a number of cards (depending on how good the players are) which may be viewed as RPG style special skills which can be switched on and off as a new tactical system measure.
We had the concept explained to us, but it was still a little confusing to be honest. My interpretation of it was that the system is in place to allow you to customise how and when a player uses their cards (star abilities) in games.
To give you a full example of a card – Messi has a card for mazy dribbling which you can switch on or off.
This confused the hell out of me, because why on earth would I want to switch off a special skill, especially one as rare as mazy dribbling? I disabled the card and played with Messi only to find that he was still capable of mazy runs, since he was in my control. But the system became more clearer to me when other cards were seen. For example the two cards shown above P12 and P01 show the skills Incisive Run and Overlapping Run respectively. These are more strategic cards which control off the ball movement. So switching these on or off will make a tactical difference. For example if you are Stoke City (no disrespect intended Stoke fans!) who are 1-0 up against Manchester United at Old Trafford, you would want a real back to the walls performance to protect your hard earned lead. So therefore you would want to curb attacking instincts of players, and have them sit back and fight hard. By switching off these two cards for example, you wouldn’t have to worry about players suddenly deciding to leave their position to go and attack, leaving the team vulnerable.
When you think of the card system like that, then you appreciate the improved strategic thinking that you can add to your game.

The other two screen shots from the Card and Tactics System again show the level of strategic tinkering you can do with your team to have them play the way you want them to. It has given us a much larger element of control of how we deploy our teams in matches. You get an almost limitless number of combinations of tactics and team structures to use and perfect.

The new slider system for teams is also pretty amazing in my opinion. I tried to set the team formations from one extreme of being very rigid in their formation, with no overlapping or pressing of the ball when not in possession, to the opposite extreme of having a very dynamic team structure, who almost play in a pack (a little like when we first played football as kids in school playgrounds where everyone ran to where the ball was), pressing the play, with overlapping runs, interchanging players and fast breaks. I have to say I was very impressed with the abilities given to us to control. It was amazing to see the team behaving according to how I had programmed them to behave. This means that every team should have their own style of play, with team sliders set to varying degrees, according to their playing style. This really should be evident, and I can’t wait to test that!

The game in action

Ok so now to talk about the actual gameplay itself. The pace of the game has been slowed right down from the comedy pace of play from PES2008 and PES2009. The arcade feel to the game is definitely gone. It felt good stroking the ball around the pitch with either short or long passes. I was personally disappointed that there wasn’t a power bar for short passes, which would open up play a bit more, but for what it is, the PES passing system is back to being more akin to PES6, which is a big bonus in my eyes. I played the game for nearly 4 hours during my time at the session and I have to say that I was more and more impressed with the game as I played. The ball physics were very good, and shooting felt quite good, though to be honest I didn’t spend too much time taking shots.
I was interested in trying to dribble with the ball using a highly skilled player like Gerrard or Messi, taking the ball from the defence and trying to run straight through to goal, but am happy to say that I was unable to do so. I’m a pretty good player of the game, so it’s not like I am unable to do that on PES2009.

I attempted to run full pelt with the ball, and to try to turn 90 degrees as you currently can with no loss of pace. Again I was very pleased to see new animations kick in which made my player turn 45 degrees and to slow down when I tried a 90 degree turn. As I mentioned earlier, the full player animation set hasn’t been totally incorporated yet, so we can expect player abilities on the ball to improve further yet. I can’t imagine all of the motion capture material that Messi carried out recently has made the game yet. Once again I must state that there is scope for improvement with player movement and dribbling – and fingers crossed this is taking place right now. Players still currently run as they do in PES2009, so they have their backs straight and almost have that comical Scooby Doo feel when he runs on the spot before speeding off. But that should have a more realistic feel once the game is complete.

Goalkeepers were apparently not completely finished yet either, so I expect key improvements to be made to their abilities. In their current state they performed quite well for me. The shot stopping was good, with no obvious ball spillages to the feet of waiting attackers in my play time. I can also say that for goalkeeping glove fetishists out there – the gloves no longer look like they have been inflated to cartoon like proportions.

The penalty system has been revamped and is pretty fantastic I have to say. You now have a pressure sensitive shooting mechanism which really makes taking penalties a real hit and miss affair (sorry couldn’t resist the pun there). You now finally have to spend time practicing penalties to be good at them. When have you ever had to do that in a game? Once you suss how to take them, it really does make a difference.

I did see evidence of untucked shirts too – which I know really does it for some guys out there.

The crowds could do with more work. There are still unusual chants in place for teams, but the sound quality is improved, so they don’t sound as nauseating as they currently do in PES2009. I am hoping again that they get rid of chants from the game, and concentrate on the crowds following the action as it ebbs and flows. I think allowing the community to supply chants of their own for teams (with larger capacity than the current system which just loops the chants continuously till you vomit) will be a better compromise and allow us to customise the game to our liking. This will be possible for PC and PS3 versions, but unfortunately Xbox 360 owners will not have this luxury. Microsoft do not allow gamers to customise option files at all, and as a result 360 owners are needlessly penalised in this respect – so don’t blame Konami 360 owners. I have actually bought a PS3 specifically for the editing abilities that are open to the PS3. A decision which I do not regret.

Once we had played the game sufficiently, Jon Murphy recorded mini-interviews on video where he wanted candid, honest thoughts of what we thought of the game. He was keen to share our views at this stage with the dev team in Japan to let them see for themselves what we expect from the game. So I told them how I saw the game, which I will talk about next.

Overall Summary

When I initially played the game, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed with the game engine. If this build was a statement of intent, then it initially felt to me that we were looking at micro steps forward, rather than steps or leaps forward.

I was looking to see which of the problems we wanted addressed have been fixed, and was very disappointed to see that most of the issues were still present. I hope that improvement suggestions I have made will be revisited by the team and addressed. I don’t think that they are particularly hard to fix.
If more resources from the pool available were thrown into fixing these issues right now for PES2010, then it would give a more meaningful statement of intent.

Even with the improvement suggestions addressed in the game, there will still be a fair amount of disappointment that the series hasn’t made more of a forward leap. With our more powerful gaming systems, people expect a lot more than we’re currently seeing.

FIFA have raised the bar with FIFA ’09, and I fear FIFA ’10 may produce a bigger gulf for PES to overcome.
To be fair, whilst people are raving about having 360 control over players, I think there is potential for players going from the fairly rigid control of 8-way controls to having the total freedom of 360 degree movement as too much control too soon. Will this impact playability? I think progressing from 8 way movement to 16 way movement now would have been a smarter move, as we would gain a lot more control of play, and to maintain playability a lot better. We have to realise that as much as we kick and scream for more and more realism from our football games, a balance has to be struck between control, playability and fun.

Yes I am disappointed we still have 8 way control, but if the control is very tight, like PES6 was, and all the new additions made to the game are successful, then we have one hell of a game on our hands.

I was given verbal assurances that the online system will be perfect this time round. The PES6 online system will be the basis for online play, and hopefully it delivers. We have all time and time again made it abundantly clear that the online playability must be problem free this time for PES2010 to have any meaningful credibility. There are no planned online beta tests as far as I know, so we will have to wait and see how the system works.

We can expect the next play test of the game in a few short weeks time to be an almost unrecognisable improvement, going on what the guys who have been to these events had to say. This is very encouraging I have to say. Had this been a 75/80% completed game with a few final tweaks left to make, I’d have been disheartened and probably gone and kicked the nearest cat. There are definite improvements in place, there are still areas which need some serious work, but most importantly there is still time for Konami to get it right.

I am going to be very interested to hear what you guys have to say about this article which I have spent a great deal of time putting together. I’m sure there will be lots of questions too, so please use the comments section to ask questions, and I will look to answer your questions to the best of my ability in a special Q&A this Friday.

I hope my impressions of the game hasn’t left any of you thinking the worst, and giving up on Konami. I truly believe that they are listening to us, and that we will not be let down come October.

Thanks for reading

Dougiedonut
([email protected])