Konami has confirmed Master League will live on through eFootball following backlash from fans who were worried about its absence from Pro Evo's rebranded roadmap.
Konami decided it was going to shake up the football video game world this week by announcing long-running series Pro Evolution Soccer will be undergoing a rebrand. Starting this autumn, it will be known as eFootball instead. Not only that, but the newly-named soccer sim will be free-to-play and forgo annual releases in favor of regular updates.
Quite the shakeup indeed. However, the roadmap for eFootball is somewhat sparse. It only really speaks of what will be available at launch. An exhibition mode boasting just nine licensed clubs to choose from. In defense of Konami, the current roadmap only shows where the game will be by the end of 2021. More information will be revealed at the end of August, possibly during Gamescom 2021.
That hasn't stop hardened Pro Evo fans from letting their worries be known, and Konami has attempted to ease those worries via adding a little more information to eFootball's relatively bare-bones. “Offline modes such as 'Master League' will be sold in the future as optional DLC on all compatible devices,” Konami revealed via the official eFootball Twitter account. It did not reveal when Master League will be introduced to the game, or how much it will cost, if anything.
Mentioning Pro Evo's Master League by name was no accident on Konami's part. As Ultimate Team is to FIFA, Master League is arguably the main reason people have continued to go back to Pro Evo each year. The offline mode allows you to take control of an exisiting team, or create your own, and use them to win as much as possible. News that it will live on, even if its date and price are yet to be announced, is a big win for eFootball (almost) right off the bat.
Despite the official rebrand already taking place, how exactly eFootball is going to work remains somewhat unclear. What is clear at this moment in time is that the base game will be free to play across pretty much every console imaginable, from PS5 to mobile and almost everything in between. Konami also revealed via the same tweet containing the Master League news that “cross-platform online matches will be further improved with a new engine and adjusted to take *full* advantage of each platform.”