HighFlyingDwarf

The whole premise of this change is for political (ie. Čeferin getting smaller teams in whilst protecting the interests and entrance of the elite clubs whilst combating the Super League) and financial reasons. As a competitive competition it feels dire. One only needs to look at what Wenger said back in the 90's to know where it was all going.

I made a comment in here before about the squad planner but wanted to do a proper comment on the other "headline" features and just some other random points. Every year these all seem to be less substantiative than the last. Arguably the biggest recent feature hasn't even appeared yet and was done out of season for some bizarre reason (Women's Football). Just going through the features in turn: 1. Recruitment Revamp - NEW Squad Planner & Updated Recruitment Meetings As I mentioned in my last comment in this thread. The squad planner is so difficult to use with any degree of convenience that it's frankly a waste, and it's also resulted in the removal of the squad depth page, which has regularly been touted as "FM's best hidden feature". The best way to handle this would have been to take the squad depth page, make it the "Squad Planner" and add this to the sidebar. That would have been less galling than what's actually resulted. For the category of people who use notes and stuff to manage and track their team, I can see why this could appeal, but I don't see how anybody in this bracket would want to do this when it's far less convenient than just, well, using a pen and paper! Recruitment Meetings? Done once and never again. They're just not relevant enough to matter, especially for experienced players. Add that to the pile that started with press conferences. 2. Match AI & Animations This match engine is very good, both behaviour and animation wise. There's no need for me to repeat this ad nauseum when others have already pointed it out already, but it is good, barring some minor slip ups that have been aluded to by smarter people than I. AI manager behaviour is just something that can be touted with no real evidence to back it up. This used to be something that came under the "1000's of minor fixes" moniker. You made the core of your game better. Bravo. 3. Official UEFA Club Competition Licenses I've had more exposure to the Football League branding which has had some nice touches, but the Champions League stuff all looks very nice. I don't blame SI for touting this as more licenses and recognition is a good thing. 4. Supporter Confidence A good idea, poorly executed (again). Anybody with a long enough memory will remember the supporter profiles from FM Live. There they worked because it was relevant to your financial income and min maxing corporate fans felt faintly ironic given the soullessness of such an endeavour when considering the real life game. Here, it seems to be completely irrelevant. It's definitely something to build on for sure, but the only time I've ever had any real engagement with it so far was when the fans arbitrarily decided we needed to get promoted when the board were simply hoping we'd stay up (I'm doing Dafuge, so naturally, we're not a powerhouse, and it made no sense, and the fans adored me for even getting them to where they were in any case. Immersion breaking.). Other problems with this are present, namely that I first I realised that this was the case was in the competitions screen, but there's only one expectation shown there and it doesn't seem to be consistently the supporter expectation or the board. The lack of communication or clarity on this is a real problem, and echos around the implementation of this in general. Summed up, this is something which has been added and has the bones of a good idea and can be built on, but it's been added without any consideration as to the other areas where the board/fan expectations are relevant, and it simply isn't dynamic enough to really care about at this stage. 5. Dynamic Manager Timeline. Spoon feeding people who don't have an imagination. FM is all about "internal narrative" in the same way as another very good game series described here. We don't need stuff like this, and it's certainly insulting to tout it as being some sort of headline feature. The biography page is sufficient, and far better! 6. International Management Just another voice to the chorus. Even forgoing an overhaul, at the very least, basic features implemented at a club level need to be introduced to the national game. This was a major miss in a World Cup year. 7. Graphics I feel the need to defend the in game graphics on principle, in that FM has never been a work of art and most people have never given that much thought. That being said, I do have to highlight the alarming backslide in both match graphics, environmental diversity of stadiums and face gen even from iterations in the distant past. There's a comparison on reddit between both the match engine and facegens over the past ten years. In both cases they either look the same or look to have gotten worse over time. This simply can't be acceptable in an age where we're increasingly blurring the line between real and fake graphics. We literally have space age technology that allows for generated portraits of people who look indistinguishable from the real deal, yet there seems to be an insistence to continue down the path of horrible looking 3D graphics, which have barely improved (or arguably gotten worse) over the past half a decade. Even worse, on a yearly basis this is touted by senior SI staff as being some sort of technological marvel. It's nothing short of bemusing. (Side note, the in match interface originating in FM21 is still a horrible anti PC gamer monstrosity, but that's one of the many sacrifices at the altar of the tablet and console market. Small hint, there's a reason why Windows 8's touch start menu was a failure) And that leads me nicely onto... 8. Manager Creator Accessories Something so stupid and ultimately irrelevant that sends me into a complete red faced rage. I defy any SI employee to try and claim that this is intuitive or good to use. I actually had to go back and check it was as bad as it was when I first spun up the game, and it is. Let me try to explain the thinking of someone who's never used this before. - My new manager has a ring on. I want to remove this. - I press the ring button. This takes me to a screen with two hands, one with no rings, one with a ring and "Applied" above it. What does this represent? Presumably, because humans have two hands, one represents the hand without and the other the hand with the ring. So I press the hand with "Applied" and the ring on. - This page takes me to a page with a hand selection and rings on all the fingers. Okay, a bit finicky, making it a bit difficult here but I shall persevere. I choose the hand with the ring on and press the finger that the ring is on. There is no applied header above this option. Nothing happens when I press it. - I press cancel, because that doesn't seem to do anything. This takes me back to the main manager creation page. I go back into the ring page. I select the other hand button - Again I get a hand selection and no rings on any fingers. I select the hand and finger that I don't want a ring on. FINALLY IT'S REMOVED. Even worse, this is duplicated with the other accessories like watches. So someone actually thought "Yes, this system works so well, that we actually want to replicate it for multiple different elements". We literally have an entire galaxy of games that do character creation REALLY WELL. They're called RPG's, and Football Manager, arguably, falls into this category. What is wrong with just having a single button that applies the accessory and removes it if you press it again. It is absolutely baffling, and it's seriously ironic given that the attire section seems to work perfectly fine on the principle of a single press to apply a uniform. More seriously, this is so unintuitive, that it makes people think "If you can't even do this right, how are we going to trust you on the other more important stuff" which leads to stuff like the Squad Planner and Supporter Confidence features being incomplete, or inoperable. I'm not naive enough to think that the team on the manager creator is necessarily responsible for other areas like this, but it makes you think. Summary SI doesn't have to worry about my money. I have a good amount of disposable income and time to make FM and gaming my hobby, and to play it yearly as I have done since I first started properly playing in 2001. Reviews and ratings in FM's case, a virtual monopoly of the market, is irrelevant. The expectation, amongst a hardcore and dedicated fan base, is based on what has been built up over the years within the progression of the game and its development, much in the same way as a football club itself funnily enough! The people that you need to worry about are the people who are looking at this game and saying "This is the same thing as last year, with some irrelevant additions, I'm just going to continue my long save from last years game". This has run through my mind more than once, and it's entirely valid in the middle of a cost of living crisis in the UK, (probably) FM's biggest market, for people to be questioning the choice to buy this years game. Overall, FM23 is average to fairly good, with some alarming signs of further downwards trends in certain features. That's a real shame, because the match engine is probably nailed on as one of the best of recent times.

I cannot scream this to the heavens enough. Squad depth had so much info aside from just the ability and potential depths. Removing it and replacing it with the squad planner, which is a good idea but an absolute aberration usability wise, has really hampered my game this season.

I've already started my game and am a bit of a way in. Got fed up of reloading for H astings and went with Lewes instead. I played as them in FM12 so it's a throwback!