eFootball, the rebranded free-to-play successor to Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven series, launches late this fall with a new engine (Unreal 4) to power the game. Konami released a six-minute trailer on Thursday showing what the game will look like and what players can do with eFootball's reconfigured offensive and defensive controls.
Konami's developers are focusing on one-on-one matches in football and are opening up the ball handling system to allow attackers to smash a defender and make more moves. At the same time, defenders who can anticipate their opponents' passes and dribbling movements must have better control of the ball, making counter attacks on the opponent's side of the court more deadly.
Also on defense, players will use their bodies more to win the ball, and Konami says this reworked system for referee decisions will not penalize players for using this new ability. A new camera that zooms in on one-on-one duels will support this by zooming in on these tackles and shots to give the player a more complete idea of what's going on.
This game should be considered a work in progress as eFootball does not yet have a firm release date; some moves (such as high passes or cut shots) will not be available until a future update. eFootball is an online game with a development roadmap that shows many systems, modes and features (like cross-platform matches) will come after release.
A free-to-play game, eFootball will earn money through a battle pass system called Match Pass, which offers tiered rewards similar to what players saw in Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite, F1 2021, and the option to purchase them directly.
Big clubs that Konami has signed up to: Juventus, Manchester United, Barcelona and others will be available for free to all players at launch. “Certain game modes will be sold as optional DLC,” Konami said in July. eFootball will be available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, as well as Android and iOS devices.
