Season update. Two words that neatly sum up football fans’ years of anger with both PES and FIFA, and define what might ironically be the most major innovation in football games for years - or at least lead to it. But is this year's PES truly worth buying? It’s a more nuanced question than it seems.
You see, while Konami chips away at its vision for next-gen football arriving next year, PES 2021 arrives as an unapologetic stop-gap release, priced significantly lower than usual (including an additional 20% discount for PES 2020 owners) and offering distinctly fewer new features than you’d expect, even for a franchise with such a relentless annualised release cadence. The graphics? They’re the same.
Controls? They're the same too. Menus? Okay, there are some new background photographs, but you can see what I’m trying to imply. This is, in no uncertain terms, a compilation of updated squads, kits, and whatever Paul Pogba’s newest misadventure with peroxide might be.
Which is what both galacticos of the football franchise world have been accused of, year on year, from time immemorial. At least PES 2021 (or eFootball PES 2021 Season Update, as it’s bizarrely calling itself this year) is open with us about it.
Let’s talk about the football. For anyone who didn’t play last year’s game, which is also this year’s game, it represented a big step forwards for a franchise that had already been outdoing FIFA for on-pitch fluidity all generation. Passes just appeared that little more different, accidental elements that weren’t part of prefabricated animations gave each passage of play a genuine sense, and the complexity of control was worthy of examining hour after hour. By taking physical control of players just before they took the ball, you could curve runs viciously, take goal-beckoning first touches and acrobatic volleys.
Hit the pause button and back out into the menus, however, and you might as well have climbed inside a time capsule and put ‘2005’ on the dial. It was a cavalcade of typefaces that would make graphic designers sick in their mouths, depicting a sparse selection of modes that hadn’t altered much since you bunked off your sociology courses to play them on PS2.
FIFA, meanwhile, not only includes all the licensed outfits, names and badges you could ever want to speed over on the team select menu, but a narrative-driven Volta mode and the great FUT, among others. Foregoing all that diversity and presentational brilliance is the trade-off you make for better football on the turf, and the math doesn’t change a jot with this update.
Where things started to become truly intriguing for PES 2020 were in its data pack releases. Yes, it was good to stay up-to-date with Neymar’s hair but more significantly these data packs modified the ideals driving its football, and they fine-tuned them to near-perfection. Then further updates absolutely destroyed it again, to the degree that superstars earning a squillion pounds an hour seemed incapable of taking a first touch. Then they fixed it again.
The needle has swung both ways with data packs, then, and in many respects you can regard eFootball PES 2021 Season Update as a complete stop on that continuous narrative, a type of bells and whistles edition of Data Pack 9.
Sadly it’s not the absolute finest football this specific game has played, but improvements to first touches and to control at sprinting pace do a lot for it. Through balls, chipped or ground passes, and crosses can all be pinged in with a level of granularity that turns a game on a dime when a perfectly weighted one connects, while your ability to gently steer a player’s run off the shoulder of their marker while they anticipate the ball reaps big rewards when it’s timed just right.
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There’s still too much ball-watching from the AI though, both from the opposition and the players of your own team that you don’t have highlighted. It’s especially obvious after passes are deflected and have no clear recipient; 21 AI players seem to fall to sleep until the one highlighted player finds himself with the ball. It interrupts the immersion and it can cost you what would otherwise have been clear chances.
While I’m on the subject of AI, I hope to see a transformative move forwards next year because the old routines are truly showing their age today. Have you ever in your life observed a left-back dribble around in two complete circles before firing off a pass? It’s as ubiquitous here as the potato-headed athletes without adequate facial scans.
Devotees will find some new material buried in those PS2 era menus nonetheless. Master League is bolstered with some new manager avatar options, including softly spoken silverware-hoarder Pep Guardiola, and the Euro 2020 tournament that hasn’t happened yet is available in PES form, licensed uniforms and all. If that sounds meagre, consider that football games got away with releasing only these tournaments as full-priced games for years.
So we know what eFootball PES 2021 is, and we also know pretty plainly what it isn’t. The hardest question to answer is that pesky one of whether it’s worth buying, even at a discounted price.
On paper, season upgrades feel like the answer to every annualised sports franchise’s problem: there’s just not enough capacity to innovate between titles when you’re held to a yearly release schedule. Not really. Not the kind of innovation that transforms the way you play. What we’re confronted with as football game viewers this year is postponing gratification, trading a good game to obtain a terrific one later. In a perfect world we’d assess this year’s game next year, when we’d know how Konami employed that extra time and resources.
Without the luxury of that foresight, eFootball PES 2021 feels like a realistic response to a dilemma Konami can’t be blamed for - working from home, making an annualised game, alongside the arrival of a new console generation. That’s not to say it isn’t frustrating, but the pricing plan and the fundamental excellence on the pitch do offset that dissatisfaction.
Verdict
Aside from a handful of tweaks, PES 2021 is ultimately the same as last year's version. So if you already have it, it's not worth the upgrading. But this release begs an essential question of us, as gamers and as consumers: are we prepared to tide ourselves over in off-years with packages like this as developers seek for significant breakthroughs between major releases? Even in normal life, and without new console hardware on the horizon? It certainly seems a more honest business strategy to properly separate season updates from actual new main releases. Ultimately, an appraisal of - deep breath - eFootball PES 2021 Season Update is a review of the IP's economic plan as much as the football itself. And for the potential of larger leaps forward to come, I’m tentatively in favour.
Super League: FIFA, PES, Football Manager Fans Question What It Means for Games
The world of top-level football (or soccer, depending on where you are) is in chaos today after the unveiling of The Super League. The proposed breakaway body has sparked major divisions within the sport's leagues and regulating bodies – and the knock-on for video games based on football might be seismic if it went forward. Fans of the games are already making themselves heard on the matter.
The Super League was launched on Sunday, April 18 in a joint statement from 12 of the world's biggest clubs, and seeks to bring together 15 permanent members and 5 yearly qualifying teams to make up a 20-strong group that plays games alongside the regular local leagues. However, criticism to the concept — which would reward the richest clubs in the globe, possibly at the cost of the rest of the football pyramid – has been widespread. At time of writing, FIFA and UEFA (the world and European governing organisations for football respectively) have rejected the ideas, and consequences could include any participating clubs and players being barred from existing national and international championships.
While the news is still very recent, with negotiations and preparations for legal action underway, it's evident that those punishments – if they did come to fruition – could fundamentally disrupt video games based on the sport, both in terms of game structure and licensing. Many fans are already contacting the makers of FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, and Football Manager, even asking for the teams involved to be removed from the games in protest at the revelation.
Across fan forums on Twitter and Reddit, questions regarding the future of the games are coming in. Wawan Su questioned EA Sports, "What [does] the future hold for FIFA game franchise? I mean, 50% of FIFA players might be fan of one of those 12 teams", whereas Karl Roberts was more downbeat, stating, "now that's ultimate team killed off with the European super league not being endorsed by fifa." On the other side, several PES fans are actively pushing Konami to pick up the license to the hypothetical new league to insult FIFA, with C.K. tweeting "you guys should obtain the rights to the clubs in the Super League. I need a cause to leave @EASPORTSFIFA behind."
Others are asking the developers to protest the news, with theJackal on Twitter writing to the FIFA team to say, "can you please immediately remove all the ‘Super’ league teams from your game", and Lloyd Woods contacting Sports Interactive to say, "if this super league happens, please please please do not include it any future games!!?"
While the Super League is by no means a done deal – with many observers seeing it as more of a bargaining chip for the clubs involved than a realistic possibility, the very fact that an announcement has been made will be a cause of interest and concern for the creators of the world's biggest football games. IGN has contacted the creators of FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, and Football Manager for comment.
With nothing fixed in stone, the ramifications of such a move going ahead are totally hypothetical, but the possible knock-on effects to the games are quite interesting. EA Sports' FIFA, one of the world's top game series, might be fundamentally harmed by the shift. With its license tied directly to the football governing body, EA Sports' series is bound by the competitions established by FIFA and its partners — the proposed Super League may not be acknowledged by FIFA and, as such, would almost probably not appear in the game.
If players and teams in the new league were to be excluded from existing national and international football contests, FIFA could potentially lose some of the most-used clubs in the game, as well as its top personalities. That's to say nothing of the effect on the game's contentious Ultimate Team mode, which has essentially monetised users craving for the world's top footballers — with superstars of the sport gone, Ultimate Team would lose one of primary attractions. EA has not yet commented on the incident.
Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer is significantly less attached to football's real-world institutions, but does still license leagues, clubs, and player likenesses, all of which might be affected by the Super League's split, particularly if disagreements occur between individual parties. On the other hand, developer Konami has gained unique licenses in PES that FIFA could then not utilise — most famously, Juventus (one of the Super League clubs, incidentally) is fully exclusive to PES. There's a hypothetical future in which Konami sees this as an opportunity to gain the Super League license that EA's affiliation with FIFA precludes it from holding — a potential big component in the competing games' popularities. Konami told IGN it had no comment on the subject.
Sports Interactive' Football Manager is expected to be least affected by the Super League, with its rather holistic perspective of world football bound less to specific players and licenses. However, the repercussions of the Super League and any potential fines meted out to those engaged, might very much impact how future iterations of the game will play. Sports Interactive has not yet commented on the subject, with Football Manager director Miles Jacobson tweeting to indicate he won't be tweeting more about it today, bur that there's "a long way to go" on such a contract.
