Thoughts on the PES 2014 Preview - kelvinmak's Blog

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Thoughts on the PES 2014 Preview Stuck

Posted on March 13, 2013 at 05:08 PM.

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And so it begins.

PES fires the opening salvo in the battle of previews, with fresh details on (mostly) PES 2014's new Fox Engine. What to make of them?

Barycentre Physics: Great, another feature name, like FIFA'sImpact Engine, that I'll have to remind myself not to overuse in the articles/reviews.
This is a particularly interesting tidbit from the writeup: "You control the player and the physics drives the animation, not vice versa." Now obviously much of it depends on how it's executed, but there's a lot of potential if this works as advertised.
Just throwing this one out there: With the game now more cognizant of a player's weight and gravity, this has potential to slow the game's overall pace down without artificially controlling how quickly the players move. More stop-starts and feinting (and hopefully, more risk and reward to them) rather than simply taking the ball and run.
"Agile players can unbalance defenders with dropped shoulders or ball skills, and push the ball further ahead to exploit their acceleration." I may be a tad optimistic, but hopefully this can work off the ball as well: Imagine a striker faking a break forward, unbalancing a lumbering centerback, and then immediately dropping back into the huge chunk of space the centerback vacated.
Just in general, the focus towards contact and physicality is definitely a good step forward, but only if it means that, once and for all, the "locking into place" thing is gone.
Unlimited editing slots: Yay, is all I can say.
Bye bye boots: You mean my $200 a pair Adidas doesn't automatically make me a better shooter? Damn.
Shirt tugging: The logical next question is how will PES' referees (never a sure thing) call them? Done properly, it can be another risk/reward action for players to consider. If not, worst case scenario is another potential exploit.
How about diving? Don't think the feature is going to be taken out for 2014, and you have to wonder how that's going to work in tandem with the greater emphasis on physical play.
New tactical settings: Sounds promising. The key is to have enough settings to reflect the decisions that go into formulating a strategy. There's a big difference between a low-tempo possession team and a high-tempo possession team, and hopefully there's enough meat in the tactical settings to distinguish between them.
Improved Graphics: We've waited long and hard for this. The writeup states that they're going for "photo-realism" in terms of graphics. I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, but photo implies being still, and visually PES' biggest problem was never whether the players looked realistic, it's that they didn't move that realistically-- as in, the animations. This will be interesting to watch going forward. In the meantime, anything to get them to brighten up the dull looking colors, I'll gladly take.
Also: "One closeup of a Japanese player�s face in EDGE shows detailed skin pores and individual eyebrows." Look, I'm all for photo-realism, but skin pores (and potentially, acne) is where I draw the line.
Defense is never a sexy marketing object, but even with that in mind, this is still quite an attacking-centric preview. If the attackers get more tools to work with, hopefully the defenders will as well, to keep the balance.
Of course, PES was never going to reveal its entire hand in one go. With the visuals and physics stuff out of the way, the biggest questions going forward are these: Does the AI play realistically, and whether there have been significant improvements to Master League and online play.
Well, there's also the audio commentary, but who are we kidding?