How eFootball 2022 can turn its fortunes around after a disastrous start

Here are the chief tasks eFootball devs should focus on. 

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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eFootball 2022 update v1.0 review: is this PES’ true heir?

Let’s look at the changes and improvements eFootball 2022’s big v1.0 update brings.

With eFootball, Konami’s intent was to launch an ongoing platform that it would be shaping up over the years. Last year’s release was a failure, both technically, and content-wise. Gameplay was poor and unrefined, while club licenses and single-player limitations felt illogical. Overall, it was too little to keep players engaged for more than a week or so. Is the much anticipated v1.0 update enough to turn things around for eFootball 2022? Let’s find out.

Last September’s complicated debut definitely cast a shadow over the entire eFootball initiative, with the umpteenth PES rebranding that was immediately out to catch up with the bigger than ever FIFA 22. Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that, despite being quite late to the party, the first few patches helped the game improve a lot since release. At that point, the game only needed some final touches, and some of the promised features that were nowhere to be seen at launch.

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Despite all those issues, there’s one thing that has never stopped working properly – the online servers, something you’d really never expect from eFootball 2022, based on how it started, and on the series’ troubled past. The only downside is matchmaking, still putting together experienced players and newbies, which creates frustrating experiences for both sides.

Konami knew it needed to do something more to keep players engaged, and this is why update 1.0 comes with the so-called Dream Team mode. It’s basically a PES-style reinvention of FIFA Ultimate Team, this time without all those cerebral steps you used to see in myClub whenever you tried to purchase a new forward.

The result here is a much more straightforward and streamlined mode, which still feels a bit basic, as it often plays around license and playlist limitations, but is capable of succeeding where the original eFootball 2022 resoundingly failed – creating a compelling loop for players to come and return to the game every single day, which is a staple for a free-to-play title.

Don’t expect the depth of a FIFA game, or a $70 title, but some of the innovations here are promising. Players have to gauge a Chemistry-like mechanic when shaping up their team, which is not dictated by nationality nor league, but by their coach’s playing style – whether it’s Guardiola’s tiki-taka, where you constantly want to keep control over the ball, or fast counterattacks. The biggest difference with FUT is Dream Team’s RPG component: you’re not just buying a card and replacing it when you can buy a better one, but also leveling it up via experience points you accrue by playing. With cards not being single-use items anymore, this is an incentive to make your own team better and better, rather than just go and look into stronger cards on the market every time you have some spare coins. You’ll be surprised how much of a connection you find yourself building with your players, once you develop them into the next Cristiano Ronaldo or Leo Messi.

Compared to update 1.0’s day one, when you only had quick games that didn’t even deliver experience points nor coins, the situation is now much better, with offline and online events to choose among. This has especially fixed the ability of the game to distribute XP for your players, even though rewards are still a bit disappointing – once you complete an event, it only delivers 100 GP, no matter how many matches it takes you to complete it. Right now, it reminds me of Halo Ifinite’s early days, when 343 Industries’ battle pass was a frustrating grind. 

With this being a free-to-play title, it was easy to predict eFootball would’ve featured some kind of grinding. However, even Konami knows it needs to work on some structural adjustments for the future, and until then, it’s providing early adopters with login bonus, and more rewards for recurring and veteran players.

This content injection comes alongside gameplay refinements, and new gameplay mechanics that had been promised from the get-go. eFootball 2022’s biggest new feature is the Stunning Shot, which serves as a good answer to the original game’s weak shot. Players will be tasked with timely pressing the right trigger before kicking the ball, and this will grant them access to a much more powerful and precise shot. Differently from FIFA’s finesse shot, this doesn’t mean you’ll (almost) always kick it to the back of the net, though, and it also takes a bit of time before you’re actually able to execute it. So, there’s a strategic layer to it, deciding whether you have all the time to kick the ball at the best of your possibility, or just go for a standard kick, and hope it’s enough to score a goal. This will be something you’ll often find yourself thinking about when in front of the goalkeeper.

Passing is much more responsive now, too, and that allows the pleasure of taking possession and slowly finding the space for a goal opportunity to return from the last few PES games. There are still some uncertainties with both AI and player-controlled athletes, and players on the pitch have widely varying degrees of ability with the ball between their feet, to the point it often feels like an entirely different game when you’re playing a defender or a midfielder – which makes starting an action from the defense something quite risky all the time. 

With the new, more reliable pass, the pace of matches is now more sustained, and it feels like you really have the chance to change that pace. There are times when you see confusion across the pitch, due to long balls or furious FIFA-like constant counterattacks – and it’s in these times that you can just restore some order and get back to the basics, with a few passes to your defenders and midfielders, before jumping on the attack again.

With matches being faster now, for the most gifted players (not too much: we’re talking about 80-ish rated players) it’s possible to go for dribbling – both with the double tap on the right trigger, or simply using the left analog stick – thanks to animations that no longer seem to fight your efforts or put you against gravity.

When it comes to the defense, Konami decided to cut the L2 option, which allowed you to catch up with opponents and take the ball with any decent defender. While that was too powerful of a defending tool, eFootball 2022 has got back to a PES-style pressing prompted by the A button, and has introduced a new shoulder mechanic. This rewards your player’s right positioning, and makes for some tense 1v1 challenges as it’s not always capable of pushing back the opponent’s efforts. These fighting game-like unpredictable duels are something the Japanese developer has gone for since day one, and with v1.0.0 might have been finally able to achieve.

As for the defense, double-teaming is a very important dynamic, if mastered. Whether it works or not, it really depends on your positioning, this time not just as an individual, but as a unit. The closer defenders and midfielders are, the better you can use them in order not to force your defender to engage those 1v1 duels, and leave their position uncovered. At times, double-teaming doesn’t totally understand who you want to pick up as a second defender, and that feels a bit because of a cheap AI, a bit the outcome of Konami’s effort not to turn this into yet another overpowered mechanic.

Referees are still a weak point in eFootball 2022, despite getting improved since launch. If you happen to even slightly touch someone in your box, even if the action has moved on, rest assured it’ll be a penalty kick. Expect to take some missteps when it comes to judging slide tackles. Weirdly enough, there are seemingly inconsistencies between matches, and between different points in the same action, like they’re handled by different referees rather than the same AI.

Also, you’ll still notice missing animations, which is why certain movements or collisions don’t act out as you’d expect, if you’re a football fan or player. This happens way less than v0.9 now, partially thanks to a faster pace on the pitch, but you’ll keep watching players not caring about balls passing by or opponents coming their way, as if they’re rigidly connected to their scripts and/or how much you pressed your controller’s A button for that pass.

Overall, eFootball 2022’s update v1.0 is transformative, if you think about where Konami was eight months ago. Players can now master their defense, keeping the line together and asking for help from a nearby midfielder, or risk a 1v1 if they prefer so, and go for fast ball exchanges at a smooth pace that looked near impossible at launch.

There’s clearly still a lot of work to be done on modes, the in-game economy, and on the pitch, and it’s not 100% clear how Konami wants to approach that (one day they speak about free updates and playlists, the other Master League, edits, and more options are hinted at as paid DLC). Whatever happens in the future, though, eFootball is now a much more solid foundation. 

Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.

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‘eFootball 2022’ isn’t getting a major patch until next spring

The v1.0.0 update isn’t coming out this year anymore.

The bad vibes surrounding eFootball 2022  are as strong as ever, as the v1.0.0 update isn’t coming out until spring now.

eFootball 2022  came out a few weeks ago in such a disastrous state that it’s already  Steam’s worst user-reviewed game. Like, in history! After that, developer and publisher Konami  said it was sorry for how eFootball 2022  turned out  and was keen on fixing it with patch v1.0.0 later this month. Well, now that update isn’t coming out until spring.

“We would like to inform you that the v1.0.0 update for eFootball 2022, scheduled to be released on Nov. 11, 2021, has been postponed until Spring 2022,” Konami said  on eFootball 2022’s  website. “Also, we would like to announce the cancellation and automatic refunds of eFootball 2022  Premium Player Pack, which includes items that can only be used in-game after the v1.0.0 update.”

You can read an abbreviated version of the statement from Konami below.

The v1.0.0 patch would bring loads of much-needed bug fixes and a mode where players can create an original team — which is what eFootball 2022  desperately needs right now. However, Konami insists that the development team needs more time to improve the now-infamous soccer game. 

Who knows if eFootball 2022 will ever get to a decent state at this rate. It sure  doesn’t stack up well against FIFA 22, that’s for sure. Or the  brilliant Football Manager 2022, for that matter. 

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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‘eFootball 2022’ continues to be a disaster as Konami delays patch

eFootball 2022’s big patch got hit with a delay.

eFootball 2022’s launch woes will continue for a bit, as publisher Konami announced on Friday that the game’s first big patch won’t release until November. 

There’s no shortage of problems with eFootball 2022, from nightmarish animations to invisible player models, its reputation as the worst-reviewed game on Steam is well earned. An apology from Konami  didn’t quell the fires from fans, either. Patch 0.9.1 is supposed to fix many of the game’s problems, but guess what: it got delayed from Oct. 28 to sometime in early November. 

“We would like to inform all users that we have decided to delay the release of version 0.9.1 to early November,” Konami said on Twitter. “We sincerely apologize for the delay and the inconvenience caused. Our hope is that the additional time taken will allow us to ensure the experience is improved for all of our users.”

While it’s good that Konami isn’t rushing the patch, going from having a release date to an unspecified time is a little disconcerting. 

“We will announce the date and details of the fixes as soon as they are confirmed,” Konami said later on Twitter. “In the meantime, we will continue to work on improving the game and look forward to working with you on eFootball 2022.

Not sure how Konami expects the community to help, but we’ll see how it goes, I guess!

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF

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‘FIFA 22’ vs ‘eFootball 2022’: Which one’s better? The (not so close) virtual soccer race

There’s a clear winner here.

Every year soccer fans have only one question: FIFA or PES? Which game’s the best? In 2021, this question is just slightly different, as Konami thought it’s a good idea to change the franchise’s name – a move EA is apparently mulling over, too. But the core question stays the same: is FIFA 22 better than eFootball 2022, or vice versa? Virtual soccer has always been a tough challenge to pull off, but this time the answer might be a little easier, though.

To be honest, soccer fans can’t say they’re 100% satisfied with either FIFA 22 and eFootball 2022. EA’s game has an unrealistic pace that makes it feel more like a flipper sim than a soccer simulation, and its Premier League inspiration doesn’t really serve as a good excuse. Konami’s eFootball, on the other hand, is way too slow and suffers from a number of technical issues, ranging from its cheap AI to some often incomprehensible referee decisions.

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So, FIFA has tried and offered an improvement upon its usual weaknesses with its first true next-gen chapter, but the new game’s DNA is still the same. With a comparable stubbornness eFootball 2022 is pretty close to how soccer is played in the Italian Serie A, but has so many and longstanding flaws, it gets annoying before you can get any fun out of it.

Konami issues apology for the disastrous launch of ‘eFootball 2022’

Is it too late to say sorry?

eFootball 2022 only came out on Wednesday, but it’s already the worst reviewed game on Steam. Like, ever. Mainly because, well, it’s  incredibly glitchy. In an attempt to make good with fans who are rightly disappointed, developer Konami Digital Entertainment released a statement acknowledging all of eFootball 2022’s  faults.

“After the release of eFootball 2022, we have received lots of feedback and requests regarding game balance that includes pass speed and defense operation,” Konami said on Twitter. “We should also like to acknowledge that there have been reports of problems users have experienced with cutscenes, facial expressions, movements of players, and the behavior of the ball.” 

Konami continued: “We are very sorry for the problems, and want to assure everyone we will take all concerns seriously and strive to improve the current situation.”

Check out the complete statement from Konami for yourself below

Glitchy video game releases happen. Even Halo Infinite became a bit of a meme  during its recent beta. Similarly, Call Of Duty: Vanguard looked terrible on Xbox  during its first beta. Those were games still in the testing phase, though, while this is supposed to be eFootball 2022’s release state, and the common consensus is that it came out unfinished. It’s a sentiment that’s hard to argue with when you see some of the worst glitches in action too.

Hopefully, Konami fixes eFootball 2022 so that soccer fans can enjoy it.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF

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‘Una porquería’ No paran las críticas al eFootball 2022

Los fanáticos de la zaga Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) siguen siendo decepcionados, el nuevo eFootball 2022 está recibiendo pésimas críticas

Los fanáticos de la zaga Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) siguen siendo decepcionados, primero por el cambio de nombre a eFootball y luego por la calidad de juego que entregó Konami en su edición estrenada el día de hoy.

La principal crítica de los usuarios vino al motor gráfico del juego pues a circulan en redes las animaciones de los futbolistas, muy distorsionadas de la realidad, lo que ha generado una gran cantidad de burlas y memes.

Le siguió la jugabilidad, los usuarios criticaron a Konami por hacer que los jugadores patinen sobre el césped, además que los movimientos no parecen reales e incorporaron nuevas funciones más parecidas a lo que ya ofrece FIFA.

El peor rankeado de la historia

Tan malas críticas está recibiendo el eFootball 2022 que en Steam, el sitio dedicado a rankear lo peor de lo peor, los usuarios ya colocaron el nuevo videojuego como el peor de la historia.

La valoración catalogada como ‘extremadamente negativa’ es letal para una franquicia que Konami terminó por matar como ya lo hizo con otras de las favoritas de los gamers como Silent Hill, Metal Gear o Castlevania.

Si bien es un demo gratuito y el juego completo será estrenado el próximo 11 de noviembre, Konami se puede ir despidiendo de grandes ventas del eFootball 2022.

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