Absolutely spot on with this post. These are those gameplay elements, or animations, that the game desperately needs. As much as I love PES 21's modding - I just can't look past the lack of realistic animations in these areas. I've tried within the formation screen to position players so that their runs into those positions are more measured, but it doesn't help the defender's reaction. From there it's an instant retreat or instant attack - hardly any middle ground or any sense of a proper transition within the game.
Exactly, there's no middle ground neither transition, and most important, is quite rare to see CPU stopping with the ball. This is due the fact they don't have to think as a human, or calculate a pass or a shot, neither have too much unprecission on their actions. So they are not forced to do a slow, careful approach, and they can ALWAYS play fast towards the front.
The other part is that pressure is always held quite wrong in football games. Because of the fact that they want to make defending more manual, the games end up not making the players that you control pressure properly. I hate to say but EA FC has some better ideas than PES in this sense, cause PES (won't cound eFootball since it completely trivializes game tactics) best of cases, divides this in 2 phases: with, and without the ball (since main formation is never used if you have fluid formation). While I think this is a great idea somehow, there's something that EA FC does better, that is making A WHOLE SET OF TACTICS for each level of attack, like superoffensive, offensive, balanced, defensive and superdefensive. Now, while PES also has 3 main tactics you can choose one being offensive, the other standard and the other a 3rd one... 1 the AI teams don't use this 3 tactics and 2, they are not tied to the attack/defense levels of the team (like super red, red, blue or hyperblue) like it does happen on EA FC. Now, don't get me wrong, I still think that PES has some cool ideas under the table, but it limits you and the AI a lot on how much the player should do when on the pitch. While base gp is way more realistic and it is easier medium decently results when modding it, is way more difficult to get a more refined level of gameplay, not to say impossible.
Let's face something. There's more under the table in EA FC, is just that EA wants a faster gameplay because of the audience that they point towards, but with this year change in simulation and tactic set of sliders, there's a step closer towards this kind of gameplay we want to get. And with the work of modders it can get much, MUCH better. It will be a slow progress, essentially because working on animation synchronization, sliding issues and natural movements while slowing down players max speed is quite difficult. If you add to this that game flow and speed has also a lot to do with errors and accuracy, and also defence pressure and automatization so that players actually defend without you doing everything, and all the values you need to touch for them having in count the vast amount of them there is and the fact that many are deprecated... well, you can guess that game is quite difficult to balance properly.
When dealing with all things, my first approach is to find and detect which values have to do with acceleration and actually work, and how you can slow down the whole spectre of accel/speed values in order to make game work better. Dribbling acceleration boost has to be nerfed if not completely (or almost) erased, which is the easiest thing to do. But still then you have to deal with skills effectivenes, that almost erase defenders ball track ability. This is another thing to be tackled, having defenders being able to track ball better when standing still or waiting for the defender, and have less tackling boost, so the defender is more tactical and less... rushed. Once you do this and managed to work on the main speed, and 1vs1 situations, another thing to work is ball passing speed. And lastly, but not least, tactical maneuvering from the team. As you can see, the work is from microactions (1vs1 dribbling, passing, etc.) to how teams deal with this actions. The fact of reducing micro efectiveness already makes the game feel more tactical, but still then, you have to boost even more correct positioning and how the game works.
Summing it up, it's a whole years work, and since EA is actually evolving their gameplay from one year to another, cause they effectively end systems they started building the previous year but couldn't finish, and deprecate old methods, the mods can't completely be ported from one year to the next.
This translates that for the user, is better to keep with previous year entry mods until december/january of the next year, and is also the reason of why we see PES modding gaining followers back again every summer. Simple reason, with FIFA/EA FC not being able to tweak to the base extent we really want by the end of the summer (yet being each year closer), and EA changing so many things from one year to the other (not for the base user but indeed for the modders), it's easier to find something stable and already known in PES every end of summer (due to EA FC modders fed up with EA updates and looking more already into the next entry) when you get bored of EA FC not getting the results you wanted.
It is a neverending cycle, yet each year, I feel FIFA/EA FC has got more terrain over PES, with exception of this last summer due to EA FC 24 being a flop due to being itself a bad base (and yes FIFA 23 was a better base than EA FC 24, that had a lot of unfinished systems), unlike this EA FC 25.
If you ask me, both as user and modder, even when I haven't tried EA FC 25, only from what I've saw when looking at some EBX with a friend and some bits I've seen of gameplay, this EA FC 25 has way more potential than EA FC 24. EA seems to have tackled skating a bit, and there's more options to tweak certain speed related things than previous year. Putting all things together I have quite much faith that something really good can be done this year. Not something that completely fullfills us hardcore simulation football fans, but something close to modded PES 2021 or FIFA 16, or maybe something even better. Time will tell though, if we are able to find out every small change in EA FC nature this year.
