"The football engine is evolving every year," he says, "and we can feel the changes every year." While he won't outright say that it still feels like the FOX Engine PES games fans are familiar with, he makes very clear that the gameplay itself is being made using Konami's custom tools, not Unreal's standard ones. It's also using Unreal Motion Graphics to create new menus (long a bugbear of PES players) and hopefully improve players' flow through menus and into the game itself.Īnd if you're worrying about the game itself, Kimura tells us this is where the custom-built football engine comes into play. Kimura tells us that the team has used Unreal's Blueprint visual scripting tool to speed up early development and fix performance issues more quickly – which will presumably help the team to make speedy changes to the live service project. The engine shift has been about more than making a multi-platform game, though. "Unreal Engine's development speed is one of the fastest among game engines, and its scalability includes both high-end and low-end – perfect for mobile and next-gen platforms."ĮFootball will be built for consoles first, and use that scalability to tailor it to other devices, something Kimura assures us will mean it will look and play like a new-generation game on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but still work fluidly with mobile players. "That's why we chose Unreal Engine," Kimura says. It's that dual approach that's helped along Konami's wildly ambitious plan to release a version of eFootball across new-gen consoles, last-gen consoles, PC, and mobile – and to eventually allow cross-play across every version. Using an engine built only for one company's games (as PES has done with Konami's FOX Engine previously) means building new tools only as you can spare the manpower to get to them – with Unreal already so fully featured, and open to so many people, Kimura says his team reduced "waste" while making what it needed.Īll of that work has seemingly been to create a best-of-both-worlds situation – using Unreal as a base allows the team to work with one of the most popular, and more importantly well-supported, game engines in the world, but customising it allows Konami to control the creation and refinement of eFootball more closely, with purpose-built tools. They expect to start testing PES 2022 in mid-year and having the first PES game for PS5 and Xbox Series X ready on the second have of 2021.That ability to learn from others has seemingly been key for the eFootball team. Once this year is over, Konami plans to be back on track with the regular schedule next year. In terms of content and game modes, there will be "large updates" on m圜lub and Master League. Expect more realistic player models and animations, enhanced physics, photorealistic visuals, and much much more", Konami said in a statement. Bad timing, as PES turns 25 in Summer and doesn't seem the best of the celebrations.īecause Konami is focusing its resources on making a great transition to the next-gen, the core team is already working on PES 2022 and tweaking Epic's Unreal Engine, a set of tools "that will enable us to dazzle you with staggering improvements to all areas of the game. It means that what people will find in stores labelled as eFootball PES 2021 will be an updated version of PES 2020, with the same gameplay and some extra features. This year, the football simulator will be basically a "season update". Konami made official what has been more than a rumour for weeks. This is how Leo Messi will look like in the future. eFootball PES 2021 will be almost sacrificed on the altar of next-gen in favour of a totally new PES 2022, developed with Unreal Engine instead of the old, internal Fox Engine.
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