"Your Personal Football Manager" idea - what do You think?

[tts0]

Hi everyone!

I would like to share with you a couple of thougths and ideas about future incarnations of Football Manager.

I've been devoted FM player for at least 10 years, so I could experience "killer-tactic" game, fake god-a-like players(reserchers) in the database, pathetic looking 3d animations, repetetive, boring as f**** press conferences and team talks, unrealistic training sliders and new simplified to the maximum training module, funny transfer negotiations with enormous demands and many many more and one thing I've noticed over the years is that SI simply forgot Football Manager is just a COMPUTER GAME.

The players' and creators' in-depth desire to make FM as realistic as possible seems to be missunderstood and not proceed properly. To me football managing is about tactics, training, transfers, team balance, scouting, youth development, morale and (most important) analising the oponents - all features that really sucks in Football Manager's incarnations - not about press conferences, team talks, 3d animations or pretty interface etc.

What we have now is game oversaturated with tones of features that we don't really need as a players. Who needs repetetive team talks or press conferences? Who needs conversation-look-alike interaction tools, which essentialy doesn't make any sense at all? Who needs that?

Of course, the real football manager has to deal with these things, but it's reality - not a computer game! No matter what we all do, we won't avoid the repetitiveness in those aerias, because of the limited nature of the computer game, so it's time to admit that implementation of those features was a mistake and abandon it immediately!

I think, SI has understood that this year and came up with FM Classic which(for me) is an unsuccesful atempt to "back to the basics" tipe of thing. Why unsuccesful? Because it's so "minimalised" that it lacks of many general features for football managing. Anyway, it's a good idea itself!

This has inspired me to think over the whole Football Manager concept again and I found it interesting to be able to personalise the game yourself. As we have now two "cores" of the game - FM Classic one and FM one - why not being able to mix them together? I would be chuffed to bits, if I could choose whether to have a FM Classic "team talks core" or the FM one; the same with press conferences, training or whatever. Then everyone could play his own game! isn't that all about?

[forameuss]

This has inspired me to think over the whole Football Manager concept again and I found it interesting to be able to personalise the game yourself. As we have now two "cores" of the game - FM Classic one and FM one - why not being able to mix them together? I would be chuffed to bits, if I could choose whether to have a FM Classic "team talks core" or the FM one; the same with press conferences, training or whatever. Then everyone could play his own game! isn't that all about?

tl;only skim read, but the bolded point...

FM Classic is a subset of FM, so what good would "merging" the two be.

And another point, since the whole crux seems to be "It's a computer game, not real life", I think you'll find plenty who'll disagree and say the game isn't realistic enough.

[Sikker]

Hi everyone!

I would like to share with you a couple of thougths and ideas about future incarnations of Football Manager.

I've been devoted FM player for at least 10 years, so I could experience "killer-tactic" game, fake god-a-like players(reserchers) in the database, pathetic looking 3d animations, repetetive, boring as f**** press conferences and team talks, unrealistic training sliders and new simplified to the maximum training module, funny transfer negotiations with enormous demands and many many more and one thing I've noticed over the years is that SI simply forgot Football Manager is just a COMPUTER GAME.

The players' and creators' in-depth desire to make FM as realistic as possible seems to be missunderstood and not proceed properly. To me football managing is about tactics, training, transfers, team balance, scouting, youth development, morale and (most important) analising the oponents - all features that really sucks in Football Manager's incarnations - not about press conferences, team talks, 3d animations or pretty interface etc.

Ha ha, sounds like you have had great fun with the fm series

[tts0]

And another point, since the whole crux seems to be "It's a computer game, not real life", I think you'll find plenty who'll disagree and say the game isn't realistic enough.

Of course, it's not realistic enough; especially training, tactics, scouting, transfers, match engine etc. but it's not the point. The point is that some features such as press confereces, team talks or even interactions just can't be imitate properly by the computer game; it's just impossible, that's why SI should give up those features and finally start working on things that are important for football managing, things that can be imitate in the computer game!

[esanahka]

All analising aside, I do think that too much realism can be a bad thing, but in the examples you have it's more a question of making these things such as press conferences more or less pointless, just like they are in real life. Put the ass man there and that's it. I think man management should be some kind of feature in a football manager game.

But, what I do think that SHOULD change in the future is that SI get the hell out of the one game for every season pace. Ever since FM 09 or so the trend has been that new features get added every year while the previously new features from last year still barely work. It has got to stop, the game has to be finished, and not released until finished. (I know this is impossible, but it should be the mentality.)

I'm a huge strategy game buff. Name me one other series of strategy games that releases one game per year. Exactly, there are none. Worth taking a leaf out of the Civ book here, to name a popular example.

[forameuss]

All analising aside, I do think that too much realism can be a bad thing, but in the examples you have it's more a question of making these things such as press conferences more or less pointless, just like they are in real life. Put the ass man there and that's it. I think man management should be some kind of feature in a football manager game.

But, what I do think that SHOULD change in the future is that SI get the hell out of the one game for every season pace. Ever since FM 09 or so the trend has been that new features get added every year while the previously new features from last year still barely work. It has got to stop, the game has to be finished, and not released until finished. (I know this is impossible, but it should be the mentality.)

I'm a huge strategy game buff. Name me one other series of strategy games that releases one game per year. Exactly, there are none. Worth taking a leaf out of the Civ book here, to name a popular example.

I imagine the yearly strategy is probably contracted by Sega in some way, so it won't be as simple as saying "screw it, we'll skip a year". It's also not as easy as that with the way that I imagine the dev teams are structured. At the moment there's the routine of the windows of working on the current game, then gradually moving onto the new one. Not saying that would be a reason for them not to do it, but it would be difficult to move onto a "when-it's-ready" approach after being on a yearly cycle for so long.

Plus, IMO, the way they work it now is actually beneficial to the series. They have always tried to innovate with new features. Some aren't quite ready, but make it into the game anyway. On the face of it, I can understand that this seems bad to most. But then what's the alternative? Do they spend a very long period of time squirreling away on a feature, neglecting all others, not releasing a game until it's ready? We'd be moving rapidly away from having any kind of innovation in the game.

Another important thing to note is that this game has no equal or parallel. There are other football management games (or are there? Does CM still exist?) but none come close. It's useless comparing the development cycle of Civilisation to this as they're completely different games.