What was once and for a long time a genuine rival to EA’s mighty FIFA has become eFootball, a perplexing free-to-play release with one of the worst critical and user receptions ever recorded. Such a fall from grace just doesn’t happen in the modern, risk-averse, franchise-focused games industry. And yet here we are.
eFootball 2022’s Season 1 update just arrived, which adds substantially more meat to the bones first offered up last October, bringing with it Leagues and Dream Team modes that offer much needed long-term appeal, alongside several fully licensed leagues from which you can pick a side and turn it into your Dream Team, a la FIFA’s FUT or PES’s Master League.
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But it’s far from a comprehensive fix. In fact, its very arrival so many months after release is quite disheartening, and reveals just how much more its developer needs to do to right the ship. Here are the chief tasks it should focus on.
Save the AI from itself
Improved AI is a focus for both FIFA and eFootball this year, both franchises keen to make use of new-gen hardware’s extra processing power and play a smarter game of soccer with it. To that end, the AI routines are completely revamped now in Konami’s game.
Revamped doesnt necessarily mean improved though, and at the current time players exhibit some very unusual decision-making, at times pairing up to cover a position, leaving massive gaps in defensive lines like a back four of Ali Dias, and going completely passive when the ball’s rattling around after collisions, tackles and misplaced passes. Which happens a lot.
We just want the players to behave like faintly believable humans. They don’t have to make brilliant, curved runs for us, sort out the entire defensive tasks or take away our agency. They just need to not be a liability.
Bring Become a Legend back
Along with Master League, which has an analog now with Dream Team in eFootball 2022’s Season 1 content, Become A Legend was one of the big long-term draws of PES. You’d build a player from scratch, chose their position and animations, deliberated over which extravagant hairstyle defined them as a player, and then let them loose on the footballing world.
Playing as just one player in a closeup zoom lent a new dimension to the game, letting you focus on dribbling finesse and picking out passes in realistic fashion. Scoring a goal felt amazing. Running around without possession for minutes at a time, then a quick flurry of activity, a burst of adrenaline, and you’ve changed the game. Amazing feeling.
eFootball 2022’s hyper-detailed dribbling controls lend themselves perfectly to such a mode. Even if you were squarely focused on ascending the online leagues in competitive play, at the very least a BAL mode would give you somewhere to refine your ball control, shooting and feints. For everyone else, it may prove the main event.
Fix the PC connection issues
Trying to play multiplayer matches on PC in the game’s present state is a torturous experience. The matchmaking radar blip sound effect chirps up endlessly while you stare at a menu and wait for an opponent. When you find one, their team’s either way better or totally inferior to yours, so the result is all but a foregone conclusion. And then you get into the match, play for a few minutes, and one of you’s disconnected.
Console versions don’t seem to be suffering as badly, in fairness to the game as a whole. But given the staunch multiplayer focus of this new free-to-play vision, it’s essential that online play functions smoothly on all platforms.
More offline play options
Part of eFootball 2022’s structure is the participation in limited time challenges, which bestow GP and various other baffling currencies on you for meeting objectives, typical of a free-to-play model. These are fine in and of themselves, but they’re usually split between PvP and AI challenges, which doesn’t give you many options if you want to play offline with some kind of reward. It’s not 1999 and exhibition matches for their own sake don’t cut it anymore.
PES Team can easily win some favor by expanding eFootball 2022’s offline footprint and giving us meaty challenges to get stuck into. Challenges with substantial rewards which then incentivize going online with our newly bolstered teams full of star players whom we spent all that GP on.
Challenges that teach specific controls
This game does have strengths, and the subtlety of control is one of them. However, once you clear the opening tutorial match (which, bizarrely, features international teams which are never seen again in the game) it’s up to you to discover all the subtlety and variety for yourself. More often than not, in an online PvP match setting, which isn’t the ideal playground for stress-free experimentation.
Two birds, one stone: offline challenges that task you with mastering a particular maneuver and give you currency rewards for passing the objectives. There’s so much to be examined in the dribbling alone, from quick direction changes by holding sprint and letting go of the analog stick to shielding the ball, right stick feints and tricks, using body position to pull of certain moves…
And with Stunning Kick, the new control type that offers a new weighting of passes and shots, there’s more variety in how you spray the ball around the pitch. We just need somewhere to focus on mastering each piece of the puzzle.
Don’t ask us to spend our money yet
Although the basic building blocks of the game are still being put together, the store is very much open for business. On one hand you can understand this, being a free-to-play title. Making money from microtransactions is central to the business model. On the other, it feels very pre-emptive to be directed to the store at this early stage and hand over real-world money for items within a construction site of a game. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
eFootball 2022’s making an effort to counteract this effect by dispensing fairly substantial daily login bonuses, but it’s still not enough to build a full XI of online-ready players in the short-to-medium term. 10,000GP is given out when you log in. Challenges might give you 5,000GP. The most expensive players cost 1.2 million GP.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
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