PES team: Weve made mistakes

Having once again promised a radical overhaul for its series when it first revealed PES 2011 last month, Konami’s famed designer Shingo ‘Seabass’ Takatsuka has admitted that his team weren’t prepared” for the arrival of the next generation of machines five years ago.

Konami recently flew several members of the specialist press over to Tokyo for some hands-on time with the game – an unusual move for a development team that normally keep their cards close to their chest.

And speaking frankly of the series’ recent struggles both critically and commercially, Seabass confessed to Eurogamer: As the leader of the team, I really wanted to create PES 2011 at the start of the current generation of consoles, but from the PS2 to PS3 that timing was very difficult for us.

Looking back our team spirit needed a change as well at that time.

We’ve been developing PES for over 10 years since PlayStation 1. Every time we release a new version we’ve found that the freedom of the game has gradually disappeared. We maybe made it too complicated.

In order to make the game feel like PES, this perhaps became an excuse for not making enough changes. We were running in many different directions; today I think we’re pretty much stable on which direction we should go.

We’re not shy of saying we made our mistakes in the past, but we want to use that to give back double, even triple the expectations of our users today. I think we can do that with PES 2011.”