Quick preface, I love these games, have been playing since WE6. But here is my question: What has really changed?
WE6 was masterful. PS2 amazement. Great models, fantastic gameplay, realistic looking animation. Awesome, simply wonderful. Okay good job Konami, take the rest of the year off. Make some adjustments, allow shirt editing, couple more perfections, WE6:FE. Best footie game ever created.
WE7. Make some tweaks. Adjust the AI a little. Add a couple animations. Work on the master league a bit, but not too much. Oh and maybe up the team # to about 1/100 of other games. Okay cool.
WE7:Int. Make the headers a bit better. Maybe the shooting too.
WE8: Couple more animations, smoother gameplay. I think they slowed it down a bit. AI improved a bit. Actually got a couple liscenses.
WE8:LE: Big revolution, online play. That I will credit as a masterful and probably very taxing achievement. Though almost every sports game released now is also online, so I guess everyone else is doing it too.
Essentially Konami released a great product over 3 years ago (is it 4?). They then tweaked that product over the next few years. That's it. I mean, this is a full on development team. What do they do all year long?
Before everyone jumps to their defence, I was thinking about this because other franchises really do change. A bunch of EA games have completely changed engines 2 or 3 times in the same time. And those were good games (NBA Live for example) to start with. Konami adds some new growth curves in the master league? Phenomenal.
Its just really frustating, cause they are clearly amazing at what the ydo, but they only seem to turn on the effort once every 4 years or so.
WE6 was masterful. PS2 amazement. Great models, fantastic gameplay, realistic looking animation. Awesome, simply wonderful. Okay good job Konami, take the rest of the year off. Make some adjustments, allow shirt editing, couple more perfections, WE6:FE. Best footie game ever created.
WE7. Make some tweaks. Adjust the AI a little. Add a couple animations. Work on the master league a bit, but not too much. Oh and maybe up the team # to about 1/100 of other games. Okay cool.
WE7:Int. Make the headers a bit better. Maybe the shooting too.
WE8: Couple more animations, smoother gameplay. I think they slowed it down a bit. AI improved a bit. Actually got a couple liscenses.
WE8:LE: Big revolution, online play. That I will credit as a masterful and probably very taxing achievement. Though almost every sports game released now is also online, so I guess everyone else is doing it too.
Essentially Konami released a great product over 3 years ago (is it 4?). They then tweaked that product over the next few years. That's it. I mean, this is a full on development team. What do they do all year long?
Before everyone jumps to their defence, I was thinking about this because other franchises really do change. A bunch of EA games have completely changed engines 2 or 3 times in the same time. And those were good games (NBA Live for example) to start with. Konami adds some new growth curves in the master league? Phenomenal.
Its just really frustating, cause they are clearly amazing at what the ydo, but they only seem to turn on the effort once every 4 years or so.