We are back to PES6 – this is really the unescapable game, isn’t it? – to present another intriguing, creative mod. From the same duo of creators of AMADOR – in which I also was included -, Project Odyssey is not exactly the nomenclature of a mod or patch but rather a concept.
Football games primarily on the biggest, most popular football leagues in the world – naturally. But this too, is tiresome; we play with the same old players, the same old teams, the same old leagues. The world of football is enormous, yet because we tend to limit ourselves exclusively on a tiny fraction of it, most of that world is completely unknown to even the most hardcore of fans of the sport. Taking advantage of the phenomenal modern editing tools developed for PES6 by its tireless and skilled community, especially one (revolutionary) tool that makes it possible to export and import players from the Football Manager games, we decided to provide the obscure football league experience whose data is provided by the modern FM iteration in one of the greatest football games of all time, PES6.
Since the database of PES6 is much more limited than that of your typical FM title, we just couldn’t import everything we wanted from the simulator onto the actual football game. Even if we did, because of the idiosyncrasies of PES6 itself, when playing a Master League save, our obscure leagues would inevitably be “poisoned” by unrealistic transfers, newgen/regens and player evolution – we exclusively wanted to recreate what each of these leagues looked like in 2019. So what was our move? We decide to import a single league onto the PES6 database and…leave the rest of it unchanged. We ignored the Master League and established that our file was specifically meant for Exhibition, League and Cup modes, in order for the player to experience each season of each league in a fully life-like manner. Therefore, each Project Odyssey “mod” is, consequentially, one league.
As soon as one actually begins playing the football provided by this mod, its uniqueness and innovation become obvious. Because we established that each league would come on separate databases, this allowed us to portray each of them as its own footballing world. Let’s say the best striker of the Georgian League has a 12 Finishing attribute in FM. This would in theory translate to a 70-something Shot Accuracy PES6 attribute; but then we thought: if each league comes separately, we only need to make sure that that player has to be the ultimate best finisher of that particular division, regardless of whatever his PES6 Shot Accuracy is. So, in order to improve the quality of the virtual football produced by this mod in PES6, that specific individual ended up being awarded about 90-something Shot Accuracy, which is a world-class level on the default game, surely recreating a ferocious striker – this was exactly what we wanted, for we needed him to be totally dominant…as he is dominant in his own league in real life.
The innovations do not stop there. PES6 is a game heavily influenced by the player stats, but the players’ “form arrows” are also quite impactful. If before a match you find out about an individual with a “down” arrow, his attributes will be temporarily downgraded substantially – on the other hand, if one is on top form, his stats will be improved massively during that specific match. This is meant to recreate the “good” and “bad days” footballers typically have; but should it make sense for us to know about each player’s form before the match? It doesn’t; we should only perceive whether a player is “inspired” or not while we are playing the actual match, just as everyone perceives that in real life during the game So we edited the game’s form arrows to make them…invisible. It is impossible, therefore, to know the player’s form: one will have to figure it out by studying the actual match. It is another layer of difficulty, realistic nevertheless, that adds to the special charm of Project Odyssey.
Currently, you can enjoy the Danish 2nd Division, Georgia’s first tier and a special release of the quarterfinals of the 2019 UEFA Youth League, containing the first-ever playable Under-19 football teams in the history of football gaming. Who knows if this list won’t be updated soon; for this is a concept worth exploring, both regarding the unique way it approached modding the actual game and considering how it opened out eyes to a (very small) part of the footballing world we knew nothing about beforehand.
The ideal Christmas gift for…: the adventurer, the explorer, the globetrotter in spirit or in matter – or both! -; the man looking to increase his footballing knowledge.
Libero Magazine 