Pro Evolution Lives On Despite The eFootball Calamity

It does not really matter what kind of football player you are, or even whether or not you are actually any good with a ball at your feet, but few fans of the game will have managed to get through their formative teenage years without owning at least one version of the greatest football computer game ever produced Pro Evolution Soccer or at the very worst, having played the game against one of your friends.

The series of games, first produced by Japanese developer Konami back in the mid 90s, has gone on to sell well over 100 million copies world wide, and in terms of video game rivalries, there can be few as passionate and as intense as the Pro Evo vs FIFA debate.

Many gamers will have played both and appreciated their individual quirks, but there are certainly those amongst us who have a firm favourite and simply would not consider the rival version, and for those who side with Pro Evo and have a penchant for threading killer through balls the middle of a tightly packed defence, there is not really even a question to answer when it comes to which game you prefer.

The latest and fully rebranded instalment of the franchise, eFootball, released back at the end of September 2021 and built for the first time ever with the Unreal Engine 4, was not well received within the Pro Evo community - despite being a free to play endeavour.  The game required too many updates and patches to be properly playable, and the time it took for them to come to fruition, with additional months of delay, ultimately became another issue for players and even for those who like a flutter, few would have gambled with Novibet Sports on the reaction that was to follow.

Critics were certainly quick and vocal in their complaints as they made it the worst rated game on the Steam platform within 48 hours of its launch, and it became the lowest rated game of 2021 on the review aggregator Metacritic - but for those longstanding PES lovers, they would have simply dusted off their favourite historic version of the game and carried on enjoying that with their preferred single player or multi player set up.

Reacting to the criticism the game received, a Konami representative explained.

"It’s hard to point to one deciding aspect. The incompletion of the game came as a result of multiple factors including the transition to a new football game engine, the support of next-generation consoles such as PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, the change of play style to free-to-play and furthermore, we tried to deliver new eFootball 2022 for players as soon as possible."

Whether or not the next version of eFootball manages to rebuild some recently burnt bridges with the fan base and Konami remains to be seen, but we certainly should not expect a fresh release until at least 2023 at the earliest, as the full version 1.0.0 only actually came out this month.  You would imagine further updates will be provided to further improve the game given its choppy start to life, simply in order to encourage newer fans to give it a second chance to boost the online audience - but nostalgia does dictate that many will now just stick to their favourite year version and continue enjoying that for their football gaming fix.

Noticia enviada por: Cop

Noticia publicada: 16-04-2022

Noticia En PES vista: 649 veces