romagnoli
Misses Retri
- 7 August 2004
PES 2012 Playtest Impressions
A big thank you to Adam Bhatti and his family for their hospitality and generosity this weekend, as well as for the opportunity to get some hands on time with the preview code. A big thank you as well to Xaor, for rigorously testing out the referees - though in future I'd rather we weren't on the same team...
These are my opinions based on the same playing conditions as Rodelero. Please remember that 7 hours or so of shared playing time between four people is not really enough to know exactly how the game is going to feel on release, or how the game will hold up after 5 or 6 months of continuous play. All we can do is describe the positives and the negatives, and say how we felt at the end of our time with the game.
Too long, didn't read: Click
Part 1
It was probably around 3 hours into my 6 hour train journey to Manchester, having spent one of those hours parked in a drab and featureless station called Cheddington, that I started to wonder whether this year's PES was going to be worth the effort. As an old-ish lady got off the train parked across the platform, presenting her dog just in front of my window, I thought the trips to and from Guildford to play FIFA have generally been quite straightforward, even when pissed. At which point the dog did exactly that – pissed, right on the train platform. I looked across from my seat and saw that everyone else was watching this too, fully engrossed, thankful that at least something is happening.
The train kicked back into life soon after, sparing us from finding out if the dog-owner would try and up the ante. Two hours late I finally arrived, said my hellos and made my apologies to Adam, Callum of Grade-A.co.uk, and FIFA forum guru Xaor/Rodelero (he of the 12 Enemies of FIFA series of articles and subsequent proposals of marriage from readers). We set off to the plush Bhatti residence and made straight for the games room. With as little mucking about as possible, we booted up Adam's PS3 test kit and got stuck right in.
User Profiles and Team Selection
The first thing you'll notice when you try and start an exhibition match is the player select screen. You're now able to create up to 10 user profiles, to which you can attach control schemes, assistance settings (for passing, player switching, auto-tackling etc), even avatars. From the off it's a cool little touch for those who play multiplayer offline on a regular basis. No official word yet on whether any player W-L-D stats are then attached to those profiles or indeed if your avatar will just be a picture or tie in somehow to BaL/Challenge mode, but if not then that's surely the next step?
About ten minutes later, which was how long it took for our brains to re-adjust to Japanese menu buttons(!), we picked our teams using the new team evaluation stats, which replace the classic hexagon. It uses numerical values along with retro letter grading - A is 90+, B is 80-90, C is 70-80 etc. Displaying grades and numbers at once was pretty cluttered in truth - I'd sooner have the hexagon, or just the numbers. The problem was that it was too small in 2011, with a dodgy glow that completely killed any chance of spotting small-to-medium differences between teams. The answer to that is surely to make it bigger and clearer, not to remove it completely and replace it with this!
The Pre-Match Team Talk
On getting to the game plan screen, we noticed a few key changes. Firstly, the options underneath the formation of each team had changed. Most of the options from last year had been shunted off-screen, and you'd have to deliberately scroll across to reach them.
In their place? Well, instead of editing one game plan and one game plan alone, you can now edit up to four different setups, each with its own slider options and initial formation layout. It later transpires that, during the game, you can use the d-pad (or left stick if that floats your boat) to switch to different strategies on the fly. This would be accompanied by a basic but cool little inset of a manager shouting and waving his arms to communicate instructions - a little touch, but far more emotive and satisfying than the old face button display.
Secondly, when you click on one of the four game plans, you are presented with a new tactical slider popup. In addition to being able to just use whatever combination you want, the new menu gives you several preset tactical options that guide how to get the results you want. By selecting the Quick Counter option, for example, your slider values for player support would be anything between 16 and 20. With the Possession Game your player support and support range would be lower (8-12 I think? Should've jotted it down!) but your defensive line and position switching would be quite high; by contrast the Long Ball game would be faster paced and more expansive but your defence would sit very deep.
Unless I’m mistaken the teams in the game were already set up to be using some of these settings, which will be good news for those of you who were slightly annoyed by how conservative some of the team slider settings were in 2011. That’s not to say they won’t benefit from some further work by great minds such as those at http://www.justpes.com/ but at least the starting point seems improved.
It’s another simple, yet positive addition. By making the tactical options more accessible and giving people guidance on how to get certain tactical results, Konami is encouraging people to get involved with this aspect of the game and get more hands-on with instructing the AI - the result being that they become more aware of what the AI can do and how it behaves. It's subtle but it's PES teaching people about football on a level that Youtube, even highlights shows like Match of the Day, just can't convey. 2011 was very much a sandbox game for budding tacticians, and 2012 has certainly tipped its cap to them.
Best of all it’s good to see PES make moves to bring newcomers up to a higher standard of tactical tweaking, rather than dumb down from the top and lose a hell of a lot of depth in the process.
Owing to time constraints we chose to go the Arsene Wenger route and did away with such nonsense as a plan B, focussing on plan A and preparing our complaints about not playing in the spirit of the game if we weren't allowed to win.
On to picking the starting XI. Player attributes are laid out slightly differently. In PES 2011 they were essentially in one continuous list that you could page through using the shoulder buttons. This year, Konami have looked to split them up into a few areas, grouping speed stats and technical stats into separate tabs and then slapping a letter grade alongside that. A little touch, and time will tell how much it benefits you. I like the premise but technical stats holds everything like passing, shooting, dribbling and technique – I’d like to see a couple more splits because at the moment some of the gradings don’t really make sense.
Into the match we went, the camera hovering over the stadium and the players emerging from the tunnel looking much the same as last year, save for a few glitches with the shading. If we were the types to care about such things then we'd probably have started to worry, with anxious flashbacks to train platforms and dog wee.
But we weren't here to watch the game; we were here to play.
A big thank you to Adam Bhatti and his family for their hospitality and generosity this weekend, as well as for the opportunity to get some hands on time with the preview code. A big thank you as well to Xaor, for rigorously testing out the referees - though in future I'd rather we weren't on the same team...
These are my opinions based on the same playing conditions as Rodelero. Please remember that 7 hours or so of shared playing time between four people is not really enough to know exactly how the game is going to feel on release, or how the game will hold up after 5 or 6 months of continuous play. All we can do is describe the positives and the negatives, and say how we felt at the end of our time with the game.
Too long, didn't read: Click
Part 1
It was probably around 3 hours into my 6 hour train journey to Manchester, having spent one of those hours parked in a drab and featureless station called Cheddington, that I started to wonder whether this year's PES was going to be worth the effort. As an old-ish lady got off the train parked across the platform, presenting her dog just in front of my window, I thought the trips to and from Guildford to play FIFA have generally been quite straightforward, even when pissed. At which point the dog did exactly that – pissed, right on the train platform. I looked across from my seat and saw that everyone else was watching this too, fully engrossed, thankful that at least something is happening.
The train kicked back into life soon after, sparing us from finding out if the dog-owner would try and up the ante. Two hours late I finally arrived, said my hellos and made my apologies to Adam, Callum of Grade-A.co.uk, and FIFA forum guru Xaor/Rodelero (he of the 12 Enemies of FIFA series of articles and subsequent proposals of marriage from readers). We set off to the plush Bhatti residence and made straight for the games room. With as little mucking about as possible, we booted up Adam's PS3 test kit and got stuck right in.
User Profiles and Team Selection
The first thing you'll notice when you try and start an exhibition match is the player select screen. You're now able to create up to 10 user profiles, to which you can attach control schemes, assistance settings (for passing, player switching, auto-tackling etc), even avatars. From the off it's a cool little touch for those who play multiplayer offline on a regular basis. No official word yet on whether any player W-L-D stats are then attached to those profiles or indeed if your avatar will just be a picture or tie in somehow to BaL/Challenge mode, but if not then that's surely the next step?
About ten minutes later, which was how long it took for our brains to re-adjust to Japanese menu buttons(!), we picked our teams using the new team evaluation stats, which replace the classic hexagon. It uses numerical values along with retro letter grading - A is 90+, B is 80-90, C is 70-80 etc. Displaying grades and numbers at once was pretty cluttered in truth - I'd sooner have the hexagon, or just the numbers. The problem was that it was too small in 2011, with a dodgy glow that completely killed any chance of spotting small-to-medium differences between teams. The answer to that is surely to make it bigger and clearer, not to remove it completely and replace it with this!
The Pre-Match Team Talk
On getting to the game plan screen, we noticed a few key changes. Firstly, the options underneath the formation of each team had changed. Most of the options from last year had been shunted off-screen, and you'd have to deliberately scroll across to reach them.
In their place? Well, instead of editing one game plan and one game plan alone, you can now edit up to four different setups, each with its own slider options and initial formation layout. It later transpires that, during the game, you can use the d-pad (or left stick if that floats your boat) to switch to different strategies on the fly. This would be accompanied by a basic but cool little inset of a manager shouting and waving his arms to communicate instructions - a little touch, but far more emotive and satisfying than the old face button display.
Secondly, when you click on one of the four game plans, you are presented with a new tactical slider popup. In addition to being able to just use whatever combination you want, the new menu gives you several preset tactical options that guide how to get the results you want. By selecting the Quick Counter option, for example, your slider values for player support would be anything between 16 and 20. With the Possession Game your player support and support range would be lower (8-12 I think? Should've jotted it down!) but your defensive line and position switching would be quite high; by contrast the Long Ball game would be faster paced and more expansive but your defence would sit very deep.
Unless I’m mistaken the teams in the game were already set up to be using some of these settings, which will be good news for those of you who were slightly annoyed by how conservative some of the team slider settings were in 2011. That’s not to say they won’t benefit from some further work by great minds such as those at http://www.justpes.com/ but at least the starting point seems improved.
It’s another simple, yet positive addition. By making the tactical options more accessible and giving people guidance on how to get certain tactical results, Konami is encouraging people to get involved with this aspect of the game and get more hands-on with instructing the AI - the result being that they become more aware of what the AI can do and how it behaves. It's subtle but it's PES teaching people about football on a level that Youtube, even highlights shows like Match of the Day, just can't convey. 2011 was very much a sandbox game for budding tacticians, and 2012 has certainly tipped its cap to them.
Best of all it’s good to see PES make moves to bring newcomers up to a higher standard of tactical tweaking, rather than dumb down from the top and lose a hell of a lot of depth in the process.
Owing to time constraints we chose to go the Arsene Wenger route and did away with such nonsense as a plan B, focussing on plan A and preparing our complaints about not playing in the spirit of the game if we weren't allowed to win.
On to picking the starting XI. Player attributes are laid out slightly differently. In PES 2011 they were essentially in one continuous list that you could page through using the shoulder buttons. This year, Konami have looked to split them up into a few areas, grouping speed stats and technical stats into separate tabs and then slapping a letter grade alongside that. A little touch, and time will tell how much it benefits you. I like the premise but technical stats holds everything like passing, shooting, dribbling and technique – I’d like to see a couple more splits because at the moment some of the gradings don’t really make sense.
Into the match we went, the camera hovering over the stadium and the players emerging from the tunnel looking much the same as last year, save for a few glitches with the shading. If we were the types to care about such things then we'd probably have started to worry, with anxious flashbacks to train platforms and dog wee.
But we weren't here to watch the game; we were here to play.
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