Here's what I want from ML and gameplay in general after giving them hundreds of pounds over the years:
*The ability to build a club up from the bottom. Give it a gimmicky name. You start at the bottom tier with a bunch of rag tag default misfits.
*You can either create a manager or select one. There can be perks to selecting a certain manager if they want to stick with that. For example, if you start with Maradona youth players get an X percent increase in how quickly their dribbling improves.
*If you create a manager, you get to select one starting buff. For example, you want to play park the bus football, your team gets an increase in defending. As you progress as a manager, you get more buffs, you get known for playing a certain style and players get ability increases in that category.
*The option to switch regens on or off. I know some of you don't mind it, I didn't for a bit and now I'm sick to death of it. Get a work experience lad in and get him to piss about in the player editor for a few weeks and create a couple thousand youth players to appear in the game as the years go on. Young lad gets to put ''worked at Konami'' on his CV, they don't have to pay him. Fuck, I'd even do it.
*I don't remember which PES it was, it was during my lost years but I played it at a mates house. There used to be a stadium builder, or something. Bring that back! Let us develop our stadium over time. Give us a bit more options of what to do with the money.
*A greater 'hall of records'. Again, diving into the past. On one of the previous PES games there was an all time top scorer/assist list in ML that you could view. More detailed stats like that, we are football fans, we like stats, we like records.
*More intricate training/youth development. Again, this goes hand in hand with your progression as a manager. Let us mould players how we want, let us turn our lanky young forward into Ibrahimovic.
*I appreciate this might not be possible with existing players... But players appearance changes. Youth players grow, players get haircuts, grow beards, get tattoos, older players put on weight. Even if this can't happen with existing players, let it happen with the defaults. I want to hear stories about how your hot shot CF shaved his beard off now he can't score for shit.
*Interactive commentary. I'm on a losing run, in a relegation battle, I want to hear the commentators mention it. It's the last day of the season and a win will win the title. I want to hear about it. I want to know what's happening in other games towards the end of the season when results count. Just scrap the big name commentators and bring in some voice actors for an 'interactive ML commentary' or something if the budget won't stretch to getting Jim Beglin to real off a few more lines.
*Add mentality as a stat and changing morale as the game goes on. A player with a bad mentality might misplace a pass or miss a sitter and their morale will change, effecting their ability. Some younger players might buckle under the pressure of playing away from home. It can work the other way around, a player might go into a game feeling a bit shit but as they grow more confident, the team scores etc it improves.
*If I'm playing a 3pm kick off on a Saturday in November, it should start off light but gradually get darker.
*Add the league cup to ML so we can have more of an opportunity to play youngsters.
*The dev's to go away to a log cabin for a week with a PS2 and play against the AI. They need to try and figure out how to get that feeling from the older games back. The best way I can describe how it used to be (and after playing a few of them again within the last year, this isn't just nostalgia) is you could pick the shittest team, go up against the best team and scrape a 1-0 win. Your fingers would be fucking sore aching at the end of it and if you thought about what you wanted for dinner, the AI would score because you let your guard down, not because it's programmed to do so at that point. It played like a real game of football. You could focus on winning set pieces, playing on the counter, playing a high line and dominating teams and keeping clean sheets.
I really went off on a tangent here. I'm going to have to make this into it's own post. Cheers for inspiring my rant.