PES 2012 demo - My Thoughts

With the release of the PES 2012 demo I guess it was almost certain that my blog would get an update yet it’s a very conflicted blog today.

First of all I suppose that I should mention that my opinions/views are based on playing on the Playstation when I have always played my games on the Xbox 360 so there is always going to be an air of conflict as I just do not like the PS3 control pad.

The reason I am playing on my PS3 is because there seems to be some kind of issue with the Xbox 360 demo and Konami have not managed to get it out on Xbox live. The reason for this is unclear but my guess is that Microsoft may have said no to PES 2012 having two demos. I understand Driver has two but one is for multiplayer and one if for single player and from what I understand this is not the same for PES 2012.

Anyway, enough speculation and on to PES 2012 itself, I think I should start by explaining that whilst I am a Gamechanger for EA’s FIFA series and an administrator for the FVPA which is a FIFA clubs website I am also a football fan and a gamer and thus PES has always been a game I am interested in. When PES 2011 was released last year I was not impressed at first and felt that PES was again a poor game with horrible animation flow and a lack of control and so I traded it in quite swiftly. Since then I tried it again and yet again I could not get myself into its foreign feeling controls and dated feeling flow. However my big enlightenment came upon buying it for the third time and forcing myself to sit down and play it a lot. After a good 2-3 days of playing it non-stop with no FIFA sessions I found myself discovering that PES has a lot of depth in certain areas that FIFA is no-where near matching and found myself not converted, but able to enjoy both football games with immense enjoyment.

The above statement may be very hard for some people to understand, the general view on football games is you’re with EA or you’re with Konami and there is no middle ground. More often than not any person found saying “I like both games” is looked at like a leper who is offering you cheesecake as he rubs his hands into the base of it. This said I am one of those people since PES 2011 was released as I’ve found it can offer many things I want from a football game that FIFA cannot.

So, with the PES 2012 demo released I suppose it’s time I have my say. I’ll start with the flow of the game as I think this is one of the areas Konami have improved immensely, the flow now seems to be great with a lot less jerking and the game feeling a lot more natural than it did in previous instalments. I’m not quite sure how to put my finger on what has helped achieve this as it seems to be a combination of changes more than anything but what is achieved is a much smoother feel that helps the player become a lot more immersed in the game itself.

The shooting seems to have been changed a lot, some have said that they prefer it, some have said they think PES 2011’s shooting was better, I’m somewhat in the middle. I think the shooting in PES 2011 could be very erratic but all in all it had a very realistic feel as putting the ball in the top corner was not overly easy and meant you had to take many factors into consideration such as the speed at which your player was dribbling, the position of ball to his foot, how much space he had etc I enjoyed this a lot as it meant when you did score a screamer it looked fantastic and felt just as good, something I just never experienced on FIFA as scoring a great goal is too easy and unless you hit a 40 yard screamer on FIFA it just never felt impressive. In PES 2012 I think the shooting feels a lot more like a combination of PES 2011 and FIFA 11 which is pretty much great as the factoring in taking a shot still comes into it but the eraticness seems to have been phased out. From what I have played so far I would say PES 2012’s shooting is a fantastic evolution that feels great to use.

The next thing I was really looking at was the dribbling as this was the area where most FIFA-first players found they could not adapt over to playing PES. In PES inertia is very much a part of the game and rightly so as it’s something that has always been missing in FIFA. The difference between an average Premiership player and Messi just doesn’t feel big enough in FIFA 11 and whilst dramatic steps have been made to change that in FIFA 12 I still do not feel like the inertia that PES creates is anywhere to be seen in a FIFA game. For a very long time I was not that fussed on inertia and so I could enjoy FIFA tirelessly but upon getting used to the dribbling in PES 2011 I realised just how vital it is to a football game. If you watch a football match you’ll see that some of the world’s best players and some of the best players in League 2 have something in common, a drop of the should or the shifting of the players weight can fool an opponent, it’s what makes football a joy to watch, anyone can beat anyone because at the end of the day we’re all human and no-one can change the law of physics. This is where PES shines for me, I can drop a shoulder and cause a defender to plant his foot and then turn sharply and by the time he’s shifted his weight I have that yard on him. PES 2012 further works on this but has done a great job in making it less “in your face”. When I first played the demo of PES 2012 I was worried that PES had lost one of its key selling points as I could not feel the inertia instantly. Upon playing more and using some of the precise dribbling I realised that the game just felt so much smoother that when you pulled off these key moments it just felt more natural than it does in PES 2011. PES really is leaps and bounds ahead of FIFA when it comes to this part of football simulation and it really makes a difference in game play as it makes tackling much more of an art and also makes attacking a lot more realistic, especially when it comes to beating a player, kudos Konami.

Now at this point I kind of wanted to get into graphics and presentation and whilst I can talk about presentation I can’t comment so much on the graphics as something is not quite right. It was something I noticed instantly when I started the demo, the screen looks very blurry and nowhere near as crisp PES 2011, yet I was playing it on the same TV so I wondered if this was down to playing it on the PS3, although I never thought the PS3 would look that much worse! I took to twitter and sure enough there were comments on the same thing but Adam Bhatti said that after speaking to Konami this is down to compressing the size of the demo to make it a quicker download so I feel that I can’t really judge the graphics based on a blurry demonstration code. I guess I will have to wait until PES 2012 is retail released before I can make any kind of opinion on the graphics.

Graphics aside one thing I can comment on is presentation. I quite like the menu system, it looks simple to navigate and the footage in the background is quite welcome. Now to the bit which really matters, the in-game presentation, first of all if you’re not aware of the new addition of having cameramen then I guess you haven’t been following the PES coverage as it’s been a very much talked about feature. What I am talking about is the match build up and off pitch changes which see’s camera men following players out of the tunnel, stewards clapping as players come out as well as standing around the pitch, they are small touches but very much welcome ones as they add an air of realism that has not been seen in a football game before. One thing that both made me laugh but also impressed me at the same time was when I saw a fat man dressed in black running behind the camera men behind the goal. I can only assume this is just to add a little feeling that there are actually things going on off field as well as on which is nice and very immersive but at the same time I couldn’t help but be distracted and think “where is that little fat man going in such a rush?!”.

Again another small touch that was pointed out to me is how the cameras on a swinging crane behind the goal also moves with the action, it has no impact on game play at all but it is a massive help on immersing the player in the game.

One thing that has been talked about a lot is the passing of PES 2012, I’ve heard great things about it but upon first playing PES I felt as if though the passing had become more like FIFA than PES. I think this made the game feel a lot easier which in many ways is great but at the same time I became a little worried that if I’d adapted to the passing so quickly that it would offer no long term challenges and would be far too simplistic. I asked a few people who were in the know and they told me about passing support which I could turn down which certainly helped when I turned it off but I still feel that the passing is a little too “automated” so to speak. One thing I don’t like about FIFA and love about PES was the passing error, PES 2011 has a realistic passing error system and it added to the realism when I over hit or under hit a pass only to see the opposition pick it off first. PES 2012 seems to have taken a step backwards here leaving the passing to be a little too accurate and thus making one-twos that split the defence in half far too easy to pull off. I felt like I’d become some kind of passing super genius in just a few games which was in a manner of speaking, disheartening. I love playing PES 2011 against the CPU because whilst I can string passes together the fun is in opening up the defence when attacking, in PES 2012 it feels a little too easy due to over accurate first time passes and the accuracy of the passing feeling a little too automatic, even on the most unassisted settings. I think with all of the great advancements that PES has made from PES 2011 to PES 2011, this is the one that needs to be addressed before release as it is currently too easy for my liking.

I think I’ve covered a lot already and what was meant to be a fairly short blog is rapidly expanding but I still feel I need to touch on goalkeepers. I’ve always felt the animations of goalkeepers have not been the greatest on PES and whilst 2012 sees a step forward it still doesn’t feel big enough in this department. I do think the keepers are great on PES and very realistic, especially in the reaction times and responses to the situations but I can’t help feeling they still take me out of the immersive setting that PES 2012 creates. The animations just don’t look natural and some of the diving animations look awkward and unnatural and it’s for this reason I think it’s an area that Konami still need to improve on.

The final thing I must address is the animations and flow. Whilst the flow of the game itself is a massive improvement the flow between animations and some of the animations themselves are still what is letting PES down for me. When I see FIFA 11 and know the impact engine is not even in it I can’t help but look at it and think it still looks much more natural and impressive than even PES 2012 does. I fully understand that EA have a lot of money and tech and therefore Konami and PES will always be chasing in this area, they may never catch up EA but I still feel the gap is too large and it’s one of the key areas holding PES back. PES 2012 still suffers with the god awful running animations where the player looks like he’s running on hot coals, still has the occasional animation that just doesn’t match the situation and most annoyingly, still only seems to have one animation for when a ball is in a certain position to the player which is the scissor kick. The most annoying and immersion killing things about PES 2011 was the way in which whenever a ball was around shoulder height the only animation/shot the game would use was the scissor kick. Now I can understand that when a ball is around shoulder height and you press to shoot it makes sense to scissor kick or lower the players head to head the ball but PES’ logic seems to be if the ball is shoulder height it must be a scissor kick. I think this is the number one immersion killer for me as it can happen 2-3 times a game and in real football it’s very rare that you see a scissor kick attempted.

I was going to summarise here about my thoughts but I’ve also just remembered about a new feature I have been playing with which is the off the ball runs. One really nice feature, if you turn assisted to manual, is the off the ball runs where you click down the right analogue stick to control the player off of the ball using the right analogue stick to direct his run. At first I found this very hard to use but with a bit of practice I had my player in possession playing a pass into space as I left my marker for dead using a manual off of the ball run. Konami have added a very nice feature that I have seen asked for a lot in FIFA and in doing so have given a lot more attacking creativity options.

Summary

To finish this blog entry off I need to give an overall impression and to summarize PES 2012 I must say it’s a very game play focused addition to the series that impresses and is a great step in the right direction. I am very impressed with Konami's decision to listen to the fans and work hard on game play without prioritizing new features over game play. Some may say that this year FIFA is still the better game because it’s likely it will outsell PES but I think for a hardcore football gaming fan PES is very much in contention and for myself I have a strong feeling that PES will be the better game to play against the AI. It’s a shame Konami have not yet tried to rival EA’s FIFA Pro Club Championship mode as I think it would be very interesting to see the numbers change if they did.