PES is dead, eFootball goes free-to-play

£33 for some premium bundle with first thing in that not coming to November oof

Not good but that's not exactly uncommon for most free to play games, is it? I never go for these kinds of bundles/microtransactions anyway & I was put off more by the leaked gameplay footage a week ago.

I got round to downloading eFootball 22 last night and I played a few games against the computer. It seems as shabby as I’d heard, and it was a bad decision to release it in this condition. Build-up play was boring, the AI was mad, the animation and controls felt stodgy and I saw a couple of graphical bollock-ups of my own. This is nothing like PES right now. It’s much more like one of those random low-budget PS2 football games, where they’d spent all their money on photographing James Beattie in a JJB Sports tracky to appear on the box.

The thing is though, that I want to see how it develops, and I think this free-to-play model has loads of potential. It’s surely got to get much better, right?

To make things a bit weirder I know of some PES youtubers who got early access at an event a few weeks before the release and apparently played a build that was much further along than this one.

That's really weird. I hope it does get better. The idea of a good free to play footy game that's cross platform is a good one in theory, but I was dreading the execution and then this happened. If things do improve one day then I wouldn't mind at least giving it a go.

Thank God they weren't charging for it off the bat, think that would've killed it right there but at least as things stand you could look at this as a poorly communicated beta maybe?

Muss wrote:

Thank God they weren't charging for it off the bat, think that would've killed it right there but at least as things stand you could look at this as a poorly communicated beta maybe?

Yeah, smurf said he sees it as a beta in another topic & maybe that's what Konami meant by saying it was to be "like a demo" than anything else. Also I just read that update 0.9.1 is due on the 28th which confirms it as a beta, doesn't it?

Not really going to keep a close eye on it but I'll likely check it out again once it get's to or past a full 1.0 launch.

Trouble with releasing in this state is even if you make massive improvements later, your game is forever tainted with how it was when it came out. Konami's dropped the ball massively here.

Said elsewhere could be next No Man's Sky or Final Fantasy XIV.

Balladeer wrote:

Trouble with releasing in this state is even if you make massive improvements later, your game is forever tainted with how it was when it came out.  Konami's dropped the ball massively here.

Yeah you always at least want a strong base to build on and this version is just so shaky but with that said in the world of early access/free to play there has probably been games brought back from the brink. It's just going to take years to do it if at all.

masofdas wrote:

Said elsewhere could be next No Man's Sky or Final Fantasy XIV.

I can't say for FF but weren't the reviews for No man's sky very mixed?

Not really from what I remember and now those games are very different are were turned around.

First look at UFL


Doesn't look bad and Celtic, Rangers, West Ham, Monaco are part of the 9 teams so far partnered with game then players like CR7, KDB, Firmino etc are as well. Which to me means Utd, City and Liverpool aren't in the game.

Definitely making all the right noises so far but part of me is expecting that one thing that turns it into a shit show.

Can't lie, played a few matches of eFootball over the weekend and it's improved quite a bit. I may have even enjoyed it. It still lacks a whole load of essential options, however. At the moment you can only play offline multiplayer, offline one-off matches against the CPU, or matches against randoms online. The matches online either are "Casual" matches for fun, or "Event" matches that give you XP and you have to achieve objectives as an incentive for said XP. They need to get that Master League released pronto because they usually shut down their old game servers (PES 2021) in the summer two years later. They'll piss off a lot of people if they do that before sorting out eFootball.

After reading that, I think I’ll give eFootball another go. I’m sure that it’ll eventually become good, and I get the impression here that it’s (slowly) on its way there. I’m looking for something different anyway. I’ve bounced off the FIFA series now, basically having not been arsed to put any time into 20, 21 or 22. The world (me) needs a good alternative.

Bizarrely, the best football game on the market right now is the Evercade port of Sensible Soccer from the Mega Drive.

That is good to hear but I think I'll still hold off until the full 1.0 launch.

My brother still plays this online regularly and when I've watched him I've definitely been tempted to download it again as it does look like it had a lot of the classic PES moments when it works, like Jas I'm still gonna hold off as I'd prefer to have more options.

X ENGLAND
ASHLAND ENDGAME WHALE
ENG ERR LAND ENG ERR LAND
ENGLAND OH ENGLAND

Buskalilly wrote:

ASHLAND ENDGAME WHALE

If I call my next game project this, I'll give you some of the royalties.

The_Jaster wrote:

That is good to hear but I think I'll still hold off until the full 1.0 launch.

This is probably the correct decision. I had another go last night and got battered 8-2. Because it depends so much on the online, it does chug a bit if your connection's not great (I'm only on 10mb), and it's not as responsive as PES 2021. There's definitely a part of me that wants it to be good.

1.0 is out April 14th & sounding good on paper, let's hope they stick the landing this time.

https://www.konami.com/efootball/en-us/page/update_announcement_20220406

EDIT:

Chris Scullion has a hands on preview of 1.0 as well.

I don't know if eFootball has Master League yet, that's what I would want to play, but seems might be a few options for football games in the coming years.

Got eFootball which is out, and is f2p live service and can only improve with time you'd hope.

Then doing similar is UFL, which you'd hope will learn from eFootball mistakes at launch.

Now this year will be the last FIFA under EA, then from next year it will be EA Sports FC which is in line with EA Sports Rally (what was Dirt) and guess going forward will be EA Sports NHL etc. Even though not till 2023 for the first EA Sports FC, we've already seen marketing for it with teams posting we're in the game.

Of course will still get FIFA games, from a statement from FIFA look like a game will come for the Men's World Cup and talks about something for the Women's next year. Apparently they want to licence out the FIFA brand for various games, with the main FIFA costing a lot (why EA ditched it) which I can only really see 2K picking it up for the annual FIFA 2K24 etc

Nice to have options

Nah, no master league yet.

I've played a fair bit of this now and it's a decent game (still prefer PES 2020 I think) but building your dream team has a really fun loop to it where you actually get to mould a team to the way you want to play by improving various stats individually for each player as well as your teams overall play style. (possession, counter, long ball etc) Even though I only play the CPU events I get the impression that if you are interested in playing people online you can easily compete against the players that will drop money on the highest rated/legend players by purely knowing the ins and outs of the gameplay and building a half decent squad.

Hopefully when ML does come out two things happen: 1. it's at a fair price & 2. they just lift the stat/team progression system from the Dream team mode & have a standard transfer market system replace all the in-game currencies/log in bonus stuff. Do that? And master league can probably return to the glory days of early PES.

And the wait for Master League will continue.

https://www.eurogamer.net/efootballs-master-league-will-be-paid-content-available-in-2023

I’m still hoping that eFootball can eventually return to the glory days of early PES, and I had it in my head that I’d play eFootball instead of buying FIFA 23. But with this news, to be honest I think I’m just more likely to buy PES 5 on the PS2 for 50p than wait until 2023 for them to sort this out.

Aye, as good as eFootball now plays that's probably the best call and I've thought about doing it myself as well.