Come this Christmas Sports Interactive’s latest game in its successful Football Manager series will be hanging out at your local games emporium and demanding your hard earned cash.
Pulling out several stops, SI has introduced over 100 new features into Football Manager 2008 and the game’s fully updated for the new football season. Over 5,000 playable teams are present from around the globe that can be taken through more football tournaments than you can shake a winner’s trophy at.
Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, tells us more…
So what’s the secret of your success?
Miles Jacobson: Have we been successful? As far as we’re concerned, we’ve only just begun, but we’re not doing badly so far I suppose.
We’ve managed to get this far by listening closely to the people who play our games, and mainly employing people who play our games, so that we can make sure that we keep making them better each year. It’s nice to be no.1 in our “market”, but we’re far from complacent about it.
So no real secrets, just making games that we want to play, and having a passion to keep on raising the bar.
What would you say is the Football Manager series’ defining feature?
Jacobson: The “one more game” factor. It’s a very hard game to put down once you get going.
Each new iteration of Football Manager must throw up its own unique set of challenges. What’s been the biggest challenge with 2008 and how hard is it to better what you’ve done before?
Jacobson: There are always hundreds of ideas floating around the studio, along with the ideas from the community as well, so the biggest challenge “bettering” the game is adding in features that do add to the game, rather than detract from it.
The biggest challenge this year has been improving the match engine even more than last year, which Paul and Ray [Houghton] have succeeded in pretty damn well. The skin has also been a challenge, as there have been quite a few changes based on us watching people playing the game and usability studies, from which we learnt a lot.
There’s so much new stuff in the game, or stuff that’s been re-written, so testing is a challenge too!
So how about the new features in Football Manager 2008 that you’re most proud of? What are they and why pick them out?
Jacobson: My favourite is a real simple one, to the point that we don’t understand why it wasn’t in there sooner, but it’s the ability to play around with your transfer and wage budgets so that if you’re not spending a lot on wages, but have reached the top of your transfer budget, you can swap some wages for transfer money and vice versa. Very simple, but very clever.
Confidence is also one to be proud of, as you can, at any time, see exactly what the board and supporters think of your progress, which helps you keep on top of how you’re doing, and what you can do in some areas to help the team improve.
There are, once again, over 100 new features though, so it’s pretty difficult picking things out, and my answers would probably be different if you asked me tomorrow.
Can you tell us about the refinements you’ve made to the match engine and how important those enhancements are to the game experience?
Jacobson: The style of football played is ever changing, and we have to adapt to that each year. It’s difficult to put into words where the changes have gone into the match engine, but it’s a lot more open to certain types of tactics and styles of play now.
Ray Houghton has been involved, as always, alongside various tools that we use to help analyse real matches, all of which add to the experience. We’ve also revamped the commentary a bit, so there’ll be lots of new “lines” in there that you won’t have seen before, which is due.
What’s the most controversial decision you’ve made in Football Manager 2008?
Jacobson: Getting rid of “Face in the game”, which was a competition we have run for the last few years to let fans of the game be generated players.
Last year we had 11,000 entries, and less than 1,000 made it into the game, with the other photo’s being rejected for not following the instructions for entry, not being photos of humans, not being the person who entered, and because some people out there are ill and need help, which is a service we do not provide.
We’ve replaced it well, using Facegen technology to generate faces for these generated players.
What’s the funniest request you’ve had from fans for content to include in Football Manager?
Jacobson: The thing is, what one person deems funny, another one would deem a waste of time. I don’t find many of the stupid ones that funny, although for some reason it always makes me laugh when someone asks about building their own stadium and a vision of Arsene Wenger with a trowel and some bricks comes into my head.
How seriously do you take your competition in the market?
Jacobson: We are self motivated enough in our desire to make our games better each year to not really look too hard at others making games in the genre. Whether there is competition or not doesn’t bother us, or change anything with how we’d work.
Are there any features you’d like to include in the Football Manager series but can’t due to current limitations of technology?
Jacobson: A holographic football pitch beemed into people’s living rooms where they can watch the matches being played out in front of them, with all the real players playing.
Could football management sim and arcade football ever be married together successfully, or are they beasts that are just too different?
Jacobson: The match engine is the real different thing – action games tend to be based around five to10 minutes of play, whereas simulations are based on the full 90 minutes if they want to be really accurate. It can be done by compromising both sides of things, and we’re not prepared to do that.
You’re leading on PC (and Mac) with Football Manager 2008. What’s your opinion on the current state of PC gaming in general, and what do you reckon of Microsoft’s Games for Windows initiative?
Jacobson: GfW is a good thing for making sure that PC games will work on as many machines as possible.
The PC games market seems to be pretty solid really – lots of big titles coming out before the end of the year, and a great casual game market, which are the type I normally play on my PC. My machine can’t handle quite a few of the current PC big titles despite not being very old, which is a problem and one I think devs need to pay more attention to if they are going to get huge sales.
Football Manager 2008 was recently confirmed for Xbox 360 [story here - Ed]. Is it a game that could be successful on PS3 and/or Wii? Do you have any plans for those consoles with the series?
Jacobson: Is it confirmed for 360? I don’t remember making that announcement, but as the others have been released on the console, we’d be stupid to not be looking at it again, although there are no firm release plans as yet.
As for other consoles, there are no plans for FM2008 to appear on them.
Finally, what’s the news on Football Manager Live – how is that progressing?
Jacobson: Really well – we’re in the full throws of beta at the moment, and the plan is still to release it onto the world in March 2008. We’ve learnt a lot from the beta world and have made tweaks and changes along the way, which will continue into the other phases of beta.
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