forameuss

None of any of these blogs is going to mean much until it's actually observed in practice. They could completely underwhelm with promotion but the game be a joy to play, and they could knock it out the park with hype and the game itself is a complete dud. What they've said sounds promising, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot just yet.

And also worth noting that "Unity" isn't really a marker for anything outside of the development team. It's like SI coming out and telling everyone that they got a new fleet of top-of-the-line development PCs, and people pondering what that would mean for the product. All that would be - and Unity too - is a different tool to produce the product. That tool can produce the most bland and vapid of asset flips that are the product of an afternoon of cynical "work", or it could produce the sort of products already mentioned like Cities Skylines or Subnautica. The presence of Unity alone really means nothing at this stage until we see what they're actually pulling out of it.

It is nowhere near as "pre-rendered" as the likes of FIFA/PES. With the latter, games are just poorly strung together sequences of animations triggered by button presses. Completely incomparable to the FM visual engine, even in its current state.

And also, it being visible is surely a good thing if you're that antsy about your liberties being infringed, as it makes the means of avoiding them much more obvious. Previously they'd just gather everything without your consent or even knowledge. Is that better?

I hate being forced to do things that have several clear opt-out options. Helpless.

I'm not saying it can happen, I'm saying it should be possible and it would be a decent improvement to make. But having dynamic PA isn't the solution, just a different journey towards that PA.

This is probably one of the wildest takes I've seen on this forum in a long time. We're not talking about the little things where "it's your tactics" is a valid retort, we're talking about the many, many holes and complete lack of context that most of the game suffers from. In fact I'd probably say that "the AI" (which is a pretty nebulous concept to start with and covers a lot of bases admittedly) is easily the part of the game most needing attention.

And still there is yet to be an argument that convinces me this is a decent idea, let alone "realistic". Potential ability is the absolute best that someone can be at something. There is no way for that to increase, but there is a way for that to decrease (hence why the game at least used to do that, if not still does) through a serious injury meaning they can never reach that mark. That ceiling increasing is a logical absurdity. Now take the main real-life example that people always bring up. Jamie Vardy. I'll preface this by saying that trying to draw parallels between real life and two numbers that are pretty much only there for functionality purposes is always going to lead to problems, but let's try anyway. The level which he could reach has never changed through his whole life. There was always a theoretical limit that could never be breached, but that was fairly high. When he was in the lower leagues, that potential was still high, but his current ability clearly wasn't close to that point. He got moves to bigger clubs, and he ended up playing seemingly outwith parameters. When really his perceived ability was just increasing at a far higher rate than before. He didn't breach his potential ability, his current ability just moved differently. So in summary, dynamic potential ability is a largely nonsensical idea, particularly when it's being brought in to somehow give realism. What definitely does need to be tweaked is how CA progresses towards PA. You could definitely create a number of unique scenarios purely by modifying that, and achieve a lot of what dynamic PA seems to want to be.

There's literally an entire forum specifically for future suggestions, which they review. You can trace the genesis of some of them from years back into the current product.

Would be similarly interesting if for FM24, SI purely managed to obfuscate and hide the raw PA value so that it was nigh on impossible to view. I imagine a lot of these complaints disappear.

Why didn't you tell us this before?! I was never convinced by dynamic PA and thought it was a terrible idea, but now that you've pointed out that there is absolutely no choice but to play in such an unimaginative and insipid manner, I'm totally convin... Nah, can't do it. It remains a terrible idea, and in all the years it gets brought up, no-one has put forward a reason you can't dispute as to why it's a good idea. Probably because it isn't.

It's a label, it only really matters if it makes sense to you. You could set them to have a sibling relationship if you wanted, it isn't going to change anything that they're not really siblings. Beyond that, nobody is likely to have an answer to what it really affects. My best guess would be that if there is an effect, it's going to be so incredibly negligible that there would be no way of picking out what the difference was anyway.

Scheduling is definitely an issue, particularly as you go deep into a season being "unrealistically" successful with some teams. But I don't think it's necessarily something you can just go in, spot a glaring bug and resolve. I imagine it's like a microcosm version of the match engine where you've got to balance this equation perfectly with a million variables. You'll likely get it for 95% of those variables, but it's the 5% that throws up the weird cases where the algorithms come out with something that doesn't fit.

But the fixtures are specifically realistic. The other stuff around it might need addressing, but they're not going to make one thing more unrealistic to try and make another component slightly less unrealistic. If you were going after an issue in fixture scheduling, there's far more glaring ones later in the season with clubs in all competitions, rather than something which is largely mirroring real life.

What, you mean like the fixture list for the English Championship in real life is like with the two two week breaks in October and November? Are you aware International football exists? There will be no games in October in the Championship between the 7th and 21st, then what looks like 6 matchdays before they stop again on the 11th of November until the 25th. Then they'll probably play even more because it leads into the festive season. Not really sure what there is to "sort out" if it's mirroring real life.

Pace probably isn't a good example of showing the ratings scale. There are likely "ordinary" people out there playing on parks up and down the country who could be rated in the upper echelons of FMs physical attributes, not just pace. It's the mental and technical attributes that are clearer cut, as they're the very specific things that footballers have over the rest of the general population.

It's more likely just acknowledgement that they're always looking at different options for the future of the game with the knowledge that most will end up on the cutting room floor. "We looked at it" can mean anything from many people spending many months doing prototype after prototype to determine whether it's a good way to go, or it could mean one person spent a couple of hours realising it was a terrible idea. I would've been more surprised had SI not looked at different models, but not as surprised as I'd be if they actually went through with it. For me it's not something I can ever see them proceeding with. I don't really see why it really benefits SI. It introduces an erratic income stream (as opposed to the guaranteed one you're getting now), it misaligns the yearly cycle nature of the data with having a single product you sell every Autumn, and - most crucially for me - it returns them to what they tried during FM Live. The subscription model that had was a huge part of why the project failed. Granted, this is a completely different product, but if you're SI, that's a massive risk to take on for a process that, let's face it, isn't really broken (to them).

A refreshing display of honesty there, and a rare insight into what's being worked on. They've alluded in the past about working on multiple versions and longer-term projects, but little more than that. Usually you just assume that's them working on a step forward in AI, but this is further than I ever thought we'd get. The stuff about 24...I've covered it elsewhere, but I can't help but feel they've put a bullet in one knee of 24 before it could even start running with this kind of article, but I expect it'll still sell incredibly well even if they don't nail their promises of various marketing buzzwords. It's hard to really imagine what kind of proper, meaty features they could put in to an "end of series" style game, so maybe this is the time to add those little ones in and properly polish what's there as a fitting send-off. The keeping old saves...I'm in the minority, but I'm largely unmoved by it. It's never really been a particular interest of mine, although granted that could just be simply because it's never been an option before (and never seemed like it would be). If I end up coming to the end of 23 and have something I want to keep going, then I'll probably be glad of it, but at the moment...shrug. As for 25...well, it all sounds very impressive. I'm not going to immediately buy a ticket to the hype train that others have already jumped on because from what we know of SI, they have a very particular view of what their product should be. Just because they're moving engine doesn't mean...well, anything really. We have no idea just yet what it means for the game, but it certainly is interesting. As for women's football, I'm a little disappointed it's being held off, but I know (and support) the reasons why they're doing that. Introducing it for 24 would have been a massive boon for that product, but leaving it for 25 and tying it into everything that's new probably gives them a nice clean break, and would likely mean development on the feature can be truly next-gen (rather than current-gen for 24, then updated). As always, it's a wait and see. SI haven't always got it right, but I think their approach is still noticeably better than a lot of more lauded developers. This sort of stuff is where you can start seeing problems potentially coming into the feature. I think though - I could be wrong of course - that whatever database changes you make are largely "baked into" your save once you've started it, so I guess technically there shouldn't be a problem with just carrying that save over. If you're still using the same database as you were before, then you're just really worrying about any of the new features interacting with old data correctly, and that's not a problem exclusive to edited databases. Probably one of the many interesting technical questions they've had to ask and work on. I doubt they'd just go down the route of simulating without them, as that could end up causing more issues than it solves. Just because you used their product to build it doesn't mean they should accept all responsibility for fixing it because of the monster you made. They could be a bit more forthcoming about supporting custom editor files, but where do you draw the line? You simply can't test every single outcome that the editor allows, and you'll burn incredible numbers of hours trying. They'll of course support the leagues they created because...well, they created them. They know exactly what went in, and they're relatively simple.

I agree it isn't that stark, but I don't think it's massively surprising for some people to see FM24 in a more negative light based on that announcement. They spend a few paragraphs talking about how they weren't happy with FM23, and that FM24 will be more feature-rich (the jukebox on repeat somewhat with the last part) but the lions-share of the article is how amazing the version after is going to be. Now I know the context probably doesn't match that, but as a piece of marketing, I'm not sure it's going to be quite as effective at purely shifting units of FM24. Obviously that's going to be incredibly hard to quantify, and I'm no marketeer, but I'm surprised they've been so bold in announcing so much about FM25 when they've still to properly announce 24. I would've expected them to maybe allude towards what they said, but get the release of 24 out of the way, then go ham on a proper long run up to getting 25 out. End of the day, 24 will still sell at the usual high levels. I'll probably buy it too. I just think it was an interesting choice.

Sorted then, no idea why they didn't think of that before. It's much, much easier said than done. The reason the current tactical system is so locked-down and on-rails is because it's easier for the AI to understand and react to. It still has its issues, absolutely, but there's even more work needed to get it up to the sort of standard that would be needed to allow true freedom like what's being asked.

The change to the system doesn't need anything fundamental or particularly ground-breaking, just needs tweaking to whatever is there. PA is an artificial construct that the game needs to function, but there's a parallel with real life, albeit not something you can measure with a number between 1 and 200. It represents the best someone can ever possibly be, and I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that absolutely everyone has that absolute ceiling (theoretically, again, it isn't measurable). That value should stay. The only change I would argue making to it would be to properly hide the value (as most of the issues come in looking at a value that no-one was ever really supposed to see anyway, but that's another issue). Now the improvements could be made not in the destination of the development process, but the journey. I expect there's a lot more variation than is immediately apparent, but there's no issues with there being more. Every single model or example that people like to bring up could be achieved through changing the progression to a fixed PA. There has never been a valid and sensible reason put forward for why dynamic PA needs to be a thing. And I doubt there ever will be.

That'll be why it's just as easy to create a league system in the editor for Japan as it is for any other nation... Different licensing agreements hold different requirements. I'd agree that it's probably unlikely anyone would go after this kind of stuff, but I'm not sure how you can unequivocally say that there's no way. Certain clubs have already tried to go after things I wouldn't have thought would be worthwhile. One party holds far more knowledge of this stuff, and it isn't any of us. As it is, the game gives a huge number of options for user customisation. A lot of which can circumvent a lot of the licensing rules SI themselves are held to. If there was absolutely no issue, like you claim, I expect there would, at the very least, be options in the editor for customisation. Yet there's nothing. I don't think that's a coincidence.

...because they're getting extra, external funding to do so that they wouldn't have got otherwise. Which again, was outlined in the linked thread.

Probably because for a lot of people, the first thing they do is turn them off. Even if they spent the entire year improving them, I'd still switch them off first thing. I expect there are people out there who would love them to be improved, but if nobody is mentioning them as something they'd like to improve, that probably speaks volumes, and it's unlikely to get a huge amount of attention in a relatively short development cycle. There's literally photos in that thread that was linked that shows they're specifically motion capturing female players. They go into detail about how they'll have to go back to the start in planning out how models will move and interact within the match engine. The matches will almost certainly look different, and if they're doing it properly - which given the time they're allocating to it, I expect they're at least attempting - then it will feel significantly different, as it should. If you're looking at that thread, and imagining there'll be very little changing, I'd suggest there's some ulterior motive in there. And as gets pointed out every single time this gets trotted out, this can be an incredible opportunity to improve the match engine across the board that wouldn't exist otherwise. Going back to basics allows them to ask the right questions, think of better ways to do things, and those lessons and findings will be brought over to improve the game generally.

Could you not just holiday your own save to that point? It's not exactly far.