themadsheep2001

I would love to think that would be true, but I'm not sure it would be tbh. I think we do need Dev diaries, but they are no good if your recipients are not willing to listen. You've been around longer than I have, and I've been here over a decade, the amount of direct Dev input over the years has dropped massively, and that's directly down to the amount of **** they used to get here. It's not part of their job to come here and get abused, so you've seen less and less. Which is a massive shame, I know Neil has tried to fill that void and a few come on when they can, but not quite the same anymore

Miles last week there'll be feature blogs a few weeks into October

They actively do. Which is why good, well thought out constructive feedback is encouraged and welcomed, and ranting/asking people to to step down/be removed is absolutely not

This. And should be said that ultimately the numbers (whichever way one stands) are a minority of the forum, which is a minority of the fanbase itself.

None of this will be new to SI though. They will have thought all this through before making decisions

Not sure anyone can talk about main target audience tbh. Only people with enough market research will be SI

Removed a couple of posts. Asking people to "move on" and lose their jobs is pretty unacceptable and certainly not something that's going to be entertained here. If that's the kind of forum user one wants to be, that's not really the kind of person we want here.

Er ok if that makes you feel better I guess?

I'd bet money on this build changing multiple times even now before it reaches public beta. Raising bugs on alpha footage is a waste of time really

I think the "brand new" approach misses that the ME has had so many changes its pretty much an entirely different beast. I wouldn't worry about whether it's called new or not, rather whether has that extra development, which they have said they aim to do (was mentioned when they did spoke in depth about womens football last year)

I think they made changes to accommodate physics modelling and improvements in the ME, which that has hugely benefitted from but don't think the graphics have then caught up as a result. Think Piperita has it right in that they took a calculated decision to prioritize gameplay over graphics, but it does look like they are focusing on graphics in the medium future judging by the number of art and animator roles they advertised for in the last 2+ years. Whether we see that in FM24...

I think FM23 will be stronger but more iterative, most changes under the hood. I think the next leaps are likely with women's football. For me I'm most interested in the AI match engine changes, and match engine changes overall.

I wouldn't be surprised to see major animations changes coincide with the release of women's football personally. They are remodelling player models, the ME is going to have to accommodate another different set of variations. Lots of elements you'd be able to draft into the men's football. Good time to kill multiple birds with one stone when it comes to improvements and variations

If you're simply going to take my views as defending SI, we're done here because you're doing my opinions a disservice and I have zero time or patience for that.

SI have actively been recruiting more artists designers and animators (among other staff) over the last few years so to say they don't want to is simply wrong.

QoL fixes like you'd see in a update patch list pretty much never feature in the blogs

Not really they did say blogs etc would following in October

You realise I don't work for SI. And secondly if you feel this discussion is meaningless then I won't waste my time talking to you further. Everyone has different opinions, happy to discuss with those who want to.

You'd be surprised what people play on. I know Neil stuck the metrics on here a couple of years back which was eye opening to say the least. But that doesn't even tell you half the story. Try running the game full detail on that spec with lots of leagues loaded and you'll set your machine on fire. Anyone who does lots of soak tests or simulations, or even many league with full detail saves will quickly tell you how much the demand ramps up. So if you up the base significantly, you'll actually impact far more than you think.

It's not really about whether specs should go up or not (they should), it's about how you do it while maintaining your player base, particularly when it's one that's necessarily typical of gamers across the board.

I'm not sure what point or question you're trying to make tbh?

The ME recalculates every time you or the AI make a change. Not only that, the more processing power, the greater the number of calculations, so building a more demanding AI system can take advantage of that with higher spec computers but making weaker machines (which a significant minority) wait even longer between tactical changes is not the best way forward, which is why they haven't gone that way. Hence optimising within the current specs, and widening the number of ways to play which hopefully gets people migrating away from older systems without having to lose a significant part of your player base.

Because there's more to it than graphical settings. We're talking process speeds, complex base interactions. Graphics are probably the least of the concerns when talking about low end machines

I've not played FM on gamepass but on the experience of every other game I have played on gamepass, the processing would be done on the machine. So it doesn't get round the spec demands

I'll try and see if @Neil Brock is not too crazy busy and around to elaborate, but a good chunk of the FM user base aren't your typical gamers, they often only play FM. And if anyone wants see how often this happens anecdotally, have a look at the laptop and PC thread, people constantly looking for the cheapest laptop good enough to play FM, often stating they don't need it for anything else apart from that and work. Now if they represented 1,2, 5%, you could make that gamble, when its significantly more, that's a problem, and that's where @gunner86is spot on with migrating people away to different platforms, organically moving people away, without necessarily losing a big market chunk