Six months after its disastrous debut, Konami's eFootball 2022 is ready to try again

pcgamer.com:

eFootball 2022 was in a very sorry state when it launched last year. Not as historically catastrophic as it's sometimes portrayed, but «slow and fiddly,» we said in our 30% review(opens in new tab), and more importantly nowhere near complete: «What we're playing right now is actually just a public beta with an accompanying PR disaster.»

The idea, you see, was to rebrand Pro Evolution Soccer to eFootball, make it free to play, and launch with a very limited feature set and team selection, and then add more as optional, paid DLC. It may sound reasonable on paper but the dearth of content, coupled with some serious technical issues, led to a massive backlash on Steam(opens in new tab), an apology from Konami(opens in new tab), and a delay of the 1.0 release, which had been planned for November 11, 2021, into spring 2022.

Today Konami finally announced when the 1.0 release is going to happen—April 14—and what it will include: Changes to defending controls, passing improvements, additional shooting trajectories, «strategic evolution through improved dribbling functionality»—that one feels worthy of a direct quote—and improved online stability. A number of smaller additional features and changes have been worked in, «to bring back some beloved functionalities and fix some issues,» and overall responsiveness should be better thanks to processing improvements.

The 1.0 version of eFootball 2022 will also add the team customization mode Creative Team, which has been renamed to Dream Team and changed considerably from Konami's original plan—although exactly how wasn't revealed.

«We will continue to work on game improvement and updates beyond v1.0.0 to bring the best soccer experience to more and more fans,» Konami said(opens in new