The future

I wrote a post about a month ago entitled 'death of Football Manager'. Unfortunately the wording of the title was in hindsight very harsh and a little bit stupid. Whilst Football Manager continues to sell like it is it could possibly live forever. However this is how I felt at the time and the title should really have read Football Manager dead to the old skool? As I think it has now become too complicated for gamers who do not play games frequently. It has already been addressed by SI that they may be looking into the tactical side of the game for future releases, which is a huge step in the right direction. In my opinion here are a few things that I think need to be addressed in future releases:

1. Press conferances. Can these be removed or worked on as I am often petrified of saying the wrong thing incase I upset a player. I also don't really notice a difference in saying different things. Quite often I will say I will attack and this will elicit a positive response from my squad. Yet when I say I aim to defend I get the same response. Hence does it really matter what I say for most of the questions?

2. Tactics. The dreaded tactics! I have spent many hours reading different tactical advice from the likes of Crouchaldinho and WWfan but am still unable to get to grips with it. Although fair play lads these have been enjoyable reads and seemed to have helped a lot of people. A lot of people say these add realism but I argue the opposite. Would it not be easier to add instructions in such as 'cut in', 'play off the shoulder of the target man' and 'overlap' to name just 3 that could be used. I just think that in order to play a game you should not need to spend hours and hours readinf frameworks etc.

3. Team talks being revamped as with point 1 the team talks often leave me in fear of the half time whistle as there are circumstances when it seems impossible to say the right thing.

4. This is linked to tactics but the ability to play the game and understand where you are going right and wrong without the need to either trawl through the endless amounts of stats or watch the game in full to work out the match engine would be great. This is what a lot of people recommend and I played 2 games over 2 nights doing this and it took me about 45 minutes to play a game. Which unfortunately is too long.

There are some very good points in FM however. I like the transfer system, training seems to work OK, I enjoy the 3D highlights, the rating system has been improved and the hard work from the guys SI is admirable. I'm referring to 3 patches being released to enhance our gameplay and fix bugs. Whether it did enhance your gameplay or not is a different matter but at least they sorted as much as they could for us.

An idea that I have had to potentially keep everybody happy would be to port a version of Football Manager handheld onto the PC. So there would be 2 versions on the PC. 1 for the people who want to and enjoy spending hours and hours a week on the game and enjoy the depth. And another that is available for people who used to enjoy older less complicated versions.