Soccer Gaming

The following interview was conducted on behalf of PES Gaming, and has addressed issues raised by members of the PES Gaming community. I would like to publicly thank Jon for his time, and hopefully the Soccer Gaming community will find the interview informative!

Question from community member MagicaRoma – PES has always been developed in the Asian market, which is obviously a very different culture to the Western markets, in particular Europe.  In your opinion do you feel PES is limited by the way Konami operate centred in this location, and do you feel that a European developer would do things differently? (in particular relating to the game’s development stages)

I think you can look at it both ways. Obviously for years we had a big advantage in terms of gameplay, which has only recently taken a knock. That’s down the skills of a first rate team of Japanese developers. On the other hand it’s taken them longer to get to grips with online play because fiber optics are common and they tend to use it in different ways. One way we were suffering was listening to feedback from fans and I hope that situation has got much better. You can certainly seen the results in the product this year.

Question from Emmanuel Ekem – Is PES 2011 going to see the return of snow on the PS3 and X Box 360 versions, along with accompanying animations (visible breathe, patches on pitch etc.) Further, will the weather effect the way the game actually plays (players slipping, ball moving in the wind etc)

Sorry, but no. At the start of the dev process we had to pick vital areas to improve and put as much effort as possible into those. Gameplay and animation were essential. Master League Online, Stadium Edit and Tactics all out ranked weather. The other issue is that we wanted to get gameplay spot on before altering it with dynamic weather. It’s something we’ll consider again next year.

Question from Kevin Scott – Is PES2011 really new code with brand new animations and passing system or is it an update to the current game engine with new animations and the R2 + “x” passing mapped to the straight “x” button (PS3)?.

PES2011 is based on the last version, we aren’t hiding that. However, the animation system really has been ripped out and almost entirely replaced. Actually 100% manual passing is still in the game, but mapped onto L2 at the moment I believe. I hope when people get a chance to test the demo you’ll experience all the big changes we’ve made but also feel it’s PES at the core. That’s no bad thing.

Question from Kubilay Canalty – Will Konami create a system to encourage players to choose a variety of teams online? I have asked the PESGaming community if they would like such a feature, and more than 91% of them have replied with “yes”. (Poll Results available on request)

We certainly need to do more in this direction. It’s an online and offline issue. In football these days there are real super powers of the modern game which have a clear advantage in almost every game they play. How we reflect those qualities without spoiling the balance of the game is becoming more and more important. The same goes for super star players. Send the feedback and I’d be very happy to pass it onto Seabass and co.

Question adapted from Stormrider – Did Konami change player development in the master league to be more realistic this year and if not is this something Konami would be willing to have a look at in the future?

As I said before we had to pick key areas to work on. With Master League we went for the online element. We also made improvements to Become A Legend, as those were needed. We made more improvements with PES2010 with offline ML and we’ll certainly look at improving the mode in the future. At this stage it’s too early to say exactly what.

Question asked by over 50 people on both PES Gaming and Soccer Gaming. Goal nets have always been a talking point amongst our community members. Many gamers feel that they style of the goal nets on PES are both unrealistic and do not offer enough differentiation between stadiums. With the addition of the stadium editor, why have the goal nets been overlooked once again? Why do we not have the option to edit the goal nets (both in colour and style) along with other parts of the stadium, and why do the goals on PES not reflect the goals used at the real life grounds (Old Trafford, Anfield etc.) Images Attached To Highlight Different Styles

I don’t think the team were really aware of how seriously some people took this issue until it was too late to have an effect on PES2011. Having said that we also honestly feel that it’s more important to fix areas such as gameplay and animation first.

Konami is seemingly famous for removing popular features from one game to the next. This includes the ability to mix and match shirts and shorts on the strip selection screen, random select mode from PES 6 and even the PES Shop (Returning this year!) Could you give us some insight into the reason why popular aspects from previous games are removed on an annual basis?

Because they haven’t had feedback on if such items were well received. I’m trying to put an end to that.

Goalkeepers get a lot of stick on PES due to being accident prone. How are Konami looking to address this? Many fans would like to see them treated as individual entities with their own set of stats, is this something Konami have or will look at for the future?

From what I’ve seen goal keepers have been fixed. Certain errors crept into the game, such as the way they were beaten so easily at the near post, general positioning, leaving their goal line etc. These have now been fixed. They’ll still make errors according to their stats, because they do in real life. They already have some key stats, but I can’t say if we’ll be extending these next year.

On a similar note, the refereeing has come in for a great deal of criticism on PES 2010, especially when it comes to penalty kicks. Has this been addressed in the 2011 version of the game, as would offering a database of referees all with different characteristics be an option for future series?

This is another area I’ve discussed with the team and passed on feedback from forums. Last year you felt that cheating wasn’t punished. We’ve improved the ref AI this year, but I do think we’d also benefit from a selection of refs.

Online has been done to death on many message boards and forums. Along with the current Beta taking place, what other (if any) procedures are in place to make PES 2011 the strongest offering online?

In addition to the current Beta which is specifically for the ML we ran online tests earlier in the summer. Improvements have actually been made since the ML Beta. The games I’ve tested online seem much better when you suffer from a squeeze in bandwidth. Play slows down, but the response times don’t, which means the game remains playable. I haven’t seen any warping at all. It goes without saying that the big test will be on release.

Konami have shown a commitment to downloadable content in the past two instalments of PES. Will this continue into the future and will we begin to receive more frequent updates?

DLC remains and it’s still free. It’ll be similar to last year in terms of frequency.

Just a couple of quick fire personal questions to end up.

Your favourite ever player? Zola

Your favourite team on PES? Classic Holland

Your favourite video game away from football? On the current gen, Oblivion

Your favourite instalment of PES? The first one I worked on, ISS Pro 98

Your one dream feature in a football game? To get everything right.

Funniest question ever about PES? I still get people asking why we don’t have correct player names.