I'm loving this game. I suck at it, but I'm loving it.
Played 4 online matches, and they were simply flawless, performance-wise. Christ, that was unexpected. All of them felt like offline matches.
Played a friendly and 3 Division ones.
I'm playing FC Porto, and I first had a tie with Bayern. Then I lost against Barcelona. And then finally a win against Real Madrid.
And what a fucking match that was. I was winning 2-1 at 89', conceded from a corner and managed to get a winner in injury time.
I like that there's so many options to play online. You can play friendlies and quick non-ranked matches, which is amazing.
Mind you, I come from 400 matches of FIFA 15 Online Seasons (equivalente to PES Online Divisions). FIFA doesn't let me play unranked online matches. Even if you play with your friends the game it's still a Friendly Season, so you never feel you can just play for the heck of it.
However I do like playing competitively (although I don't think I'm competitive just yet).
A few more differences:
I must say that I think I prefer FIFA's approach to the game plan in Seasons. You set your team AND game plan before you search for an opponent, and when you're ready, there's the search and the match begins. Also, the game saves your last plan. In PES, I edited FC Porto's formation and line up etc on the edit mode and it still resets to default, what gives? I did save it though, so I can quickly go to data management and load it up. The point is, between your preparations and your opponent's, there's a whole lot of sweet fucking time wasted before you're on the pitch. The advantage being that you can setup your team accordingly to your opponent's team.
Speaking of your opponent's team, I found it odd that (in Divisions) the game doesn't really try to match yours, clearly, as I, with Porto, got Bayern, Barça and Real. You can restrict the division of your opponent, its control type, but not his team's quality.
Now, on one hand, that's okay because the game rewards you with more points the more shittier team you choose. And on the same hand still, this game is tremendously more fair than FIFA. In FIFA you rely mainly on super players abusing pace, I could never hold a Real Madrid side with FC Porto. And I did it in PES. PES seems to rely a whole lot more on your passing game. Sometimes I miss a bit shining with a star player (it was only fair, as your opponent could do the same to you) but goals in this game feel more rewarding and less cheap. Anyway, on the other hand though, better teams still have an advantage, and I feel sorry I can't choose to play fully even matches with similarly starred teams, FIFA would throw at me the likes of Valencia, Spartak Moscow, Zenit, Fiorentina etc, and that was cool. It will become boring fast to play only against 5-star teams and the worst of it is that it can push me to the same, if I find myself losing consistently because my team can't keep up as I rise in the divisions.
Anyway, besides the Divisions talk.
The game feels really good to play. First couple of matches felt weird (again, coming from FIFA), but then it started to click. Still have to calibrate the passes and especially through balls but it's getting there. Oh and shooting. I missed a couple of stupidly easy goals already, gotta work on that.
For some reason I feel compelled to give a go to all kinds of modes. Somehow I hope to Platinum this game. I just think it deserves that.
I wonder how it will feel to pick FIFA up again...
