forameuss

I honestly hope it's not. And that's not because I don't want to play it, complete opposite. The leak was almost certainly BS, but the thought of them adding it piecemeal is a bit meh. Give it the detail it deserves and release it when it's at its best. Of course if they've busied themselves away and are ready to give us a proper full-featured version, then that'd be great, but from their previous tone I don't think that'd be the case.

It's not really a bug, it's a physical limitation of the technology used. Whether 64 bit OS versions existed back then is irrelevant if no 64 bit FM versions existed. EDIT: Stand corrected based on what EdL says below

It works quite well on my work's M1 Macbook Pro, certainly better than most of my experiences I've had with previous Windows laptops. And to save anymore questions, it's grey, I've got a 30" inside leg measurement, favourite ice cream flavour is raspberry ripple and I'm afraid of spiders.

Ideally you'd have them be a hybrid member of both Africa (like they currently are) and Europe. If you remove Africa you lose the ability to qualify for the African continental competitions, which would make the early period of the game really, really tedious. It would take a long time to build up to being able to win the French Cup, and in those seasons you'd probably be destroying everyone domestically, so you'd have pretty much nothing to do. As it is, you can play in the African Confederations Cup and the Champions League, then have to make do with PSG being the final boss in the Cup.

As an update to this, I started a new save as a club from Reunion Islands and have had a fair bit of success. Decided one season to essentially cheat my way to the French Cup to see if we qualified for the Europa League. Didn't look like we did, but then on checking the French Cup rules in-game, it's specifically stated that Overseas clubs are excluded from qualifying for the UEFA competitions. Which is a bit baws.

And that comes under the same impossible banner to be honest, as there's no way career mode ever gets much attention when FUT makes an eye-watering amount of money for them. Even if that funding source dries up, they'll probably move to cosmetics in pro clubs before they ever turn their eyes towards Career Mode. And remember, SI have already handed them a sound beating in the genre in making them discontinue FIFA Manager.

But even then, it's the trifecta that any competitor would need. It needs the Match Engine, the Database, and the rest of the back-end work. You can have all the data, but if you don't have an interesting and functional way of presenting it, you're stuck. A great match engine in isolation might struggle without the data behind it. A great match engine with the data probably has a limited lifespan if the rest of the game doesn't work well. That's not to say that FM always nails those three, but it's a long, arduous, borderline impossible road for anyone else to approach the flawed point they're at now.

I think there's a number of pretty sizeable challenges any entrant into the industry would face. I agree graphics is pretty far down the list, but licenses are far from the only obstacle. I'd almost say that would be trivial, as presumably if someone wanted to chuck enough money at the problem they could probably hoover up a lot of the licenses (I have no insight into whether there's any exclusives or anything, just speaking hypothetically with it being a purely financial problem). So say you've got the money and you've got the artists, you're still waaaaaaaay behind where you would need to be. Like you say you'd need to build the research network. Given it's all voluntary, you could maybe turn most of those volunteers over to working for your product if it's better, but that's a bit of a stretch for a completely new entrant. But say you manage to get past that too, you're still going to be way behind. I think people often underestimate just how much work needs to go in to getting the product to where it is today. It's far from perfect, absolutely (and they'll likely be the first to admit that), but the match engine in particular is the product of decades of continuous development, expertise and domain knowledge. Let's say you find someone who absolutely knows their stuff in the area but lacks the domain knowledge. You could maybe spend a few years with them locked in.a room and come up with something that comes close, but that doesn't eliminate the gap, it just eats into it, as SI have spent those years adjusting their own efforts too. Or even made greater strides. Put it this way. EA have FIFA, which is not a great product by any means, but still sits fairly clear at the top of the pile with Konami's only response seemingly violent seppuku. Even the strung together series of janky animations they call a match engine is way ahead of where a new entrant would be, and that's in a genre that if someone could do it right, an alternative would be worth a fortune. And no-one of note has really tried. FM by comparison is a far more niche product in a far more niche genre. No-one is going to take on the considerable risk to try and become the top dog. No chance.

I'd be willing to bet a sizeable amount of money that this will never happen, and any vanishingly small chance of it gets smaller by the day.

Yeah, got to say looking at this and saying "well it should've been earlier" is more than a bit unfair, particularly when one of the points mentioned is EA putting in one of the most half-arsed implementations around. SI have clearly been slowly building the resources to be able to do this justice, rather than just chase a quick win. Just because the sport has hit new peaks now doesn't change any of that.

The difference between youth football and men's football is in no way as stark as it is between men's and women's football. Particularly not at the sort of levels FM has to model.

With the best will in the world, have you watched a game of women's football compared to men's? There's a completely different approach to the two that would be better modelled with different engines. You don't need to have a different one, but again it comes down to how accurately you want to portray the game. You could just chuck some new leagues in and put something hard-coded in the core of the game to ensure they don't mix, but that would be a poor approximation. Better to take the time and do it properly, which they seem to be doing. It would also be a great opportunity for SI themselves. It's probably very unlikely that they would normally get to carve out the time to have a proper rethink of the Match Engine given the cycle. If they start out with the intention of solving this problem, they get more eyes on the engine and its processes. It could well bring significant benefits across the engine as a whole.

It wouldn't be a mammoth task to do the bare minimum, no. What will be a massive task is doing it properly. If all they did was add some leagues, create some players and flick the gender button, that's the sort of half-arsed approach you'd get from some other developers of football games. But to do it properly, it's likely you're going to need at least another variant of the ME (if not something close to a new ME), a rethink of how the gameworld and the AI operates, and much more.

You're allowed to have more than one save. Easily possible to run one save like this in great detail whilst having another for faster play.