Playing PES 2013 Today Actually Works Better Than You'd Expect
I spent last weekend finally getting around to firing up Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 through the relive project, and honestly it just clicked into place on modern Windows without any of the usual headaches people warn about online. The interface looks exactly the same, the gameplay feels identical to what I remember from 2013, and there is something weirdly satisfying about seeing those old player faces rendered at full HD on a 27-inch monitor instead of some warped 4:3 stretch on a 17-inch TFT from back then. The project itself is straightforward once you understand what it does. It takes the original 2013 game files and wraps them in a compatibility layer that patches out the old DRM checks, fixes save file corruption on modern storage, and updates the netcode so you can actually connect to servers running in 2024 and beyond. You are not playing a remake or a fan re-creation. You are playing the actual executable from 2013 with a thin film of modern plumbing glued onto it. Here is the practical step-by-step if you want to do this yourself without running into the usual traps.
First, you need the original game. The relive project does not include the game files themselves, so you have to own a legitimate copy. I still had my original retail disc sitting in a drawer somewhere. If you bought the Steam version back when it was still available, that works too, though a few people reported needing to reinstall the base game fresh before the compatibility layer would recognize it properly. Download the relive pack from the official site, which at the time of writing is hosted under pes2013relive.com or the associated GitHub repo. Extract it to a folder you control, not somewhere deep inside Program Files where Windows permission issues love to bite you. Run the installer as administrator, point it at your existing PES 2013 directory, and let it patch. The whole process takes about three minutes on a typical machine. After that, launch the game through the new shortcut the installer creates. Do not launch the original shortcut, because it bypasses the compatibility layer entirely and you will get the old connection failures and save file errors. One thing the documentation does not stress enough: go into the options menu and change your display mode to Fullscreen Exclusive rather than Windowed Borderless. The old engine handles fullscreen mode much better on modern GPUs, and windowed mode introduces a subtle input delay that makes defending feel sluggish even though the frame counter looks fine. I did not notice this difference until I switched back and forth between the two modes during a training session, and the gap in responsiveness was noticeable immediately. It is not a huge amount, maybe 10 to 15 milliseconds of input latency, but in a game where timing a slide tackle matters, 15 milliseconds is the difference between winning the ball cleanly and missing completely and getting pulled down yourself.
Graphics settings beyond that first fullscreen toggle can stay at default unless your card is really old or really new. On an NVIDIA 30-series card I tested with, the game runs at a locked 60 frames per second with zero issues. On an AMD 7800 XT, I had to disable the motion blur option in the settings because it caused a stutter on match start that repeated every few minutes. It is a known issue with certain RDNA 3 drivers, and turning motion blur off completely fixes it with no visual downside for most people. For multiplayer, the relive project sets up its own server infrastructure. You do not need to configure port forwards or deal with the old GameSpy-style NAT problems that used to make online play a nightmare. Just log in with your relive account and pick a region. I played matches against people in Brazil and Japan with ping times in the 180 to 220 millisecond range, and the game handled the lag compensation reasonably well. It is not perfect, but it is a massive improvement over the dead servers situation we had for years. Here is a problem I ran into that took me about an hour to figure out: after installing the relive patch, my custom team data from the old PES Editor tool stopped loading. The game would start fine, but any squad I had manually edited would show generic player names and wrong ratings. The issue turned out to be that the relive project moves the save data location from the old Documents folder path to a new AppData directory structure. The fix is simple once you know it. Copy your old save files from C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\PES2013\ into the new location at C:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Roaming\PES2013Relive\Saves\. You may need to create the Saves folder if it does not exist already. After I did that, every custom team and career mode save loaded correctly without any data loss.
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The soundtrack is another thing worth mentioning because it will trigger something in anyone who played this game back in the day. Those opening tracks and menu themes have not been remastered or changed. They are the exact same audio files from 2013. I found myself pausing the game after about twenty minutes just to listen to the kickoff theme again because I had completely forgotten how thick and distorted that bass line was in the original mix. It sounds lo-fi compared to modern sports games, but that is part of the charm. You are not going to get Dolby Atmos audio here, and you are not supposed to. If you want to play with modern kits and squads, the relive project has an optional patch system you can download separately. It updates the player faces, transfers, and league structures to roughly the 2023-2024 season. The patches are large, around 800 megabytes, and they take about twenty minutes to apply depending on your drive speed. Some users report that applying the patch on a mechanical hard drive causes the game to freeze during the initial menu load for the first thirty seconds after installation. This appears to be a one-time thing, and it resolves itself after the first full boot. An SSD avoids the problem entirely. There are real limitations to this project that the community sometimes glosses over. The AI in PES 2013 is not great by modern standards. Defenders still clip through each other occasionally, goalkeeper positioning is predictable after a while, and the pressure AI on midfielders has blind spots that skilled players can exploit consistently. These are inherent flaws in the 2013 engine, not bugs introduced or fixed by the relive project. If you are looking for a competitive ranked experience that rivals EA FC or the newer PES titles, this is not it. It is a nostalgia project that happens to run well, not a competitive esports platform.
Another limitation is save file longevity. The relive patch improves things, but I have seen reports of career mode saves corrupting after about 18 months of continuous play. The game writes progress data in a format that was never designed for this kind of long-term use, and filesystem fragmentation on the save data can creep in over time. Back up your saves to a cloud service or external drive every few months. I keep mine in a simple folder on Google Drive that syncs automatically, and it has prevented any permanent data loss so far. Controller support is generally solid with Xbox and PlayStation controllers through the relive layer, but the project's built-in keybinding editor is still the old 2013 version. If you want to customize button mappings, you have to use the in-game options menu rather than any external tool. The default layout works fine for most people, but the passing and shooting buttons are swapped between L1 and R1 compared to what some modern gamepad layouts use, and it takes a few matches to retrain your muscle memory if you are coming from a newer title. For people who just want to play alone against the CPU, the difficulty options cover everything from very easy to world class. The world class difficulty is genuinely tough and requires you to use combo passes and timed tackles rather than just holding sprint and crossing every time. It is one of the better single-player experiences in the whole franchise, even by 2024 standards, and the relive project does not change any of the match engine logic so it plays exactly as intended.
Bottom line, the project works as advertised and it is worth the small amount of time it takes to set up. If you have the original game and you want to relive the iconic football experience like never before, the steps are basically install, point at your game folder, switch to fullscreen mode, copy over your old saves if you have them, and start playing. The community is active enough that help is available if you hit any snags, and the servers are stable. It is not a perfect modern football game, but it is the best way to play PES 2013 on a modern system, and that is what it sets out to be.
