In September the revolution begins: Pro Evolution Soccer will be called eFootball and will become free to continue challenging FIFA.
Pro Evolution Soccer, aka PES, is one of the video games that (together with its FIFA competitor) in twenty years of honorable career has entered the hearts of gamers all over the world. Not a year goes by, in fact, in which the PES-FIF A “ derby ” does not repeat itself and these two football simulation titles are among the most anticipated season after season. Now it’s time to change: goodbye PES, welcome eFootball.
Konami, the historic developer of this video game, has in fact announced that starting from this autumn PES will be called eFootball and will be profoundly different, both technically and ” economically “: no longer a game to buy every season, but a free title, with the formula of “Free-to-Play” (F2P). Although, to be precise, it would be more correct to define eFootball as a ” freemium ” title. A revolution, therefore, that will cause discussion and is destined to split fans of PES. But also to bring new players to the eFootball team, since casual gamers hardly want to spend tens of euros for a football game, which must be updated every season by spending more money.
From PES to eFootball: what changes
First of all the name: until today ” eFootball ” was the name used by Konami (starting from 2019) always together with the historic PES brand. Now, however, the game is called eFootball and that’s it, to underline the change.
Change that will also be technical: eFootball will be developed starting from the Unreal Engine, the same used for dozens of other titles, from 2001 onwards, by many other developers, including Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Borderlands 3, Star Wars Jedi : Fallen Order, Street Fighter 5 and even Fortnite.
The “Motion Matching” technology will then be implemented which, according to Konami, will allow you to simultaneously show many more animations (up to four times more, compared to what is possible with the old game engine). EFootball will be available on virtually all devices, except the Nintendo Switch :
PS4
PS5
Xbox One
Xbox Series X | S
PC – Steam
Android
iOS
eFootball will be completely “cross-platform”, for example we will be able to play it on PS5 to challenge a player who uses it from PC.
eFootball will be Free-to-Play
The second huge change in the transition from PES to eFootball is that the latter will be “Free-to-Play“, ie free. Or almost: the player will have the opportunity to play for free only with some game modes and with some large and small clubs (among the big ones are FC Barcelona, Juventus, FC Bayern and Manchester United), but will have to pay for everything else.
That is to use other teams or the most interesting and competitive game modes which, however, have not yet been formalized. DLCs, additional downloadable content, will also be paid.
In essence, therefore, casual players will not have to pay anything to play eFootball but the most avid ones will end up paying something, perhaps even more than in the past.
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