How much onus has been put on the Online Master League as the game's unique selling point?

It's a big part, without question. It's different, it's very different. It's nothing like the [offline] system, so that's a risk, but the fact of the matter is we wanted to include an Master League and we had to find a way of doing it. But we couldn't just transpose the Master League into an online situation because you can't rely on everyone else coming and playing their matches. If your league falls apart in that way, you're going to get bloody frustrated, bloody quickly.

When you get into a session of Master League, you want to spend hours and hours and hours 'tinkering and playing, tinkering and playing,' moving it forward, progressing, and building your team. You need to keep the momentum going in Master League and online that's very difficult to do.

So what we've done with the online Master League is try to take key areas for what it means to be involved in the Master League and put that into an online situation. It's not about the season and playing set matches within that, it's about playing very important games in a quite simple way and building the team around that. There's also a whole new facet to it in the fact that the value of players is constantly changing and you're always looking for bargains in a way that you haven't in the past when the game's been online.

Yes, we're pinning a lot on it because it's Master League, and it might be slightly risky because we've had to do it in a different way, but I think if you go back to the gameplay, we're pinning an awful lot on this being a really, really playable version of PES.

Has the gameplay been improved to allow for more intelligent A.I. overlapping and getting wingers to continue their runs more consistently?

There's a certain amount of shifting you can do with teammates, and there's a certain amount you have to rely on the AI and spotting where the runs are. From what I've seen, yes, they do make more intelligent runs but, on the other hand, I've also been frustrated by exactly this and then switched teams and found that it improved.

For example, when I'm playing as Chelsea I'm always trying to get the players down the left and right wings to make those runs, but they still seem to stop. But when I go and choose a different team I notice that the wing players will often continue their runs. I think that will just change from team to team and also depend a great deal on how you set your team up - but I agree with you, I think that's been a problem.

To a certain extent we've fixed it by you having to encourage the runs yourself, but I think you also have to keep the ball seriously as a team as well.

Why did you drop the mighty Lawro from the commentary team?

Why did we drop Lawro... (long pause). I think Lawro delivers in an authentic way, a kind of feeling that does mean something to you in commentary and in emotional terms. But, unfortunately, what he's not good at is acting, and that's what we were suffering from. And that's what he was suffering from. His image was suffering because he couldn't deliver lines properly in our game.

As a natural commentator, he's a lot better, but he's got a lot of people that complain about him. If you look on 'who do you love and hate most' in [football game] commentary terms, people feel quite strongly about Lawro.

It was simply a case of, you know, we needed the lines delivered in a more convincing way.

Is this the most sim-like PES since fan-favourite PES 2005?

Yes, which is a bloody good thing. That's what I was trying to say earlier about the direction of the team etc., where we seemed to not know where we were heading. I think the belief was that we got to a certain level with PES that we could kick on and become, you know, not just a gamer's game but a game that encouraged younger users. And I think that was damaging. Dumbing down PES was a mistake. So yes, it's definitely more sim-based.

There seems to be a genuine belief surrounding PES 2011, from the fans, from and from you yourself. Is this Pro Evolution's year?

I've had faith in this version for quite a long time but, actually, if you went around and spoke to people within Konami nine months ago you wouldn't have had the same feeling. It's been something that's been developing because they've seen the way the product has been developing, they've seen there really are some fundamental changes to the way the game plays, and that we really can compete.

I don't want to sit here and say to you "this is the version of PES," I want to sit here and say to you "this is a really competitive version of PES." It's really different, it'll change the way you think about playing a football game in certain ways and it'll really develop a satisfying, hard game of football.

I'm not going to sit here and say this is the ultimate PES, because I hope there are bigger things we can aim for that enable us to improve. But, on the other hand, it's easy to say yes, these are the biggest improvements we've ever made to a game of PES in the space of one year, and yes, it's the most ambitious we've ever been with the series.

By Stevie Mostyn