You could argue that EA Sports' FIFA series has a stranglehold on the simulation soccer game genre. The publisher
locked up the FIFA license
for many years to come, making it the only company with access to a
number of real-life teams that other publishers such as Konami can't get
its hands on.
If you care only about the number of teams that are in your sports games, then sure, FIFA is king. Until I played
Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 at E3, I was still convinced that I am a "FIFA guy." That might be changing, now that Konami has
introduced the Fox Engine to the series, which is being used to generate facial textures and animations in a more lifelike manner.
Sports game developers traditionally don't have the resources to commit
to rendering lifelike emotion for in-game athlete's faces. In the case
of games such as FIFA or Madden, expressions on athletes waver between
lifeless and lifeless-with-an-open-mouth. Truly, one of the biggest
tangible ways to convey the excitement of scoring goals or making
crucial mistakes lies in generating that emotion through the athletes
that players interact with, not unlike viewing sports broadcasts in real
life.
In my time with
Pro Evo 2014 at E3, I managed to cross a ball
into the box and finish the play off with a beautifully executed header
to score a goal. I was rewarded with a morale-boosting moment where my
team collectively showed more passion on their faces than I've seen in a
soccer game before, even if a few faces were only marginally different
than in the past. Likewise, after mistakenly tripping a player and
yielding a penalty kick to the other team, my defender scowled at the
referee for his decision to reward him with a yellow card. He displayed a
noticeable glare that forced me to pause and consider how ludicrous it
was that a sports game on Xbox 360 hasn't offered visible individual
emotion on that level before.
Sure, my
Pro Evo 2014 demo had other bells and whistles. The
ball physics were more refined, yet appropriately unpredictable. A clear
developmental focus on physical contact between opponents strengthened
the one-on-one struggles you'd see on the field, where the ball might
randomly bounce away while two players with locked arms tussle. The
on-field play wasn't perfect, as one pass was called offsides because
the game targeted a player downfield when two teammates waited in
between, but general on-field play is better than ever. While these are
all great improvements, they're also exactly what we've come to expect
from annual sports games.
Delivering more emotive faces through the use of tech such as the Fox
Engine isn't something other developers have spent nearly enough time
on. It jumped out as the secret ingredient in pushing the genre forward
in a different way that brings us closer to our love for the sport of
soccer. This might all be aided by the returning PES ID feature, in
which Konami has faithfully recreated 100 (up from 50) different
individual athlete's faces and movements in the game. Still, it's the
Fox Engine that might set
Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 apart from FIFA, not a lack of playable clubs.
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Out of nowhere, there appeared a few new screenshots of the user interface of the PlayStation 4. These are four new screenshots and we also have two new screenshots of the Android / iOS app, that will work together with the PlayStation Network.
