It feels very "bandwagon"-ny in here all of a sudden, considering Football Manager is widely regarded as the best football simulator ever made...
It's obviously not perfect (boy am I sick of saying that about every game ever), but if you can stay away from downloading cheat tactics, then it's great as far as I'm concerned - and I've not been able to find easy success by focusing on a couple of attributes because they're highly valued (in reality, too) and players aren't interested in signing for you if your manager attributes are low and your team is low-reputation.
Also, difficulty can be increased thanks to
Daveincid's files - including AI transfer behaviour. It's not perfect (there's that bloody phrase again) but it provably results in clubs bringing in younger players and being less reliant on older ones than the default game.
Again, it's obvious there are issues - the biggest ones in my opinion being...
- AI transfer behaviour (the above plus e.g. the AI refusing to pay the market value for players, while you have to pay significantly over the odds)
- Tactical importance (sticking with one system is too successful, I want to be forced into tactical switches more often - especially when you have data analysts giving you some good info to work with, but you simply don't need to most of the time)
- Press / player interaction (as basic as "select positive answer for morale boost, select negative answer to needlessly piss your players off" with no benefit to picking the answers closest to your actual thoughts/feelings)
But come on... It's a pretty fantastic game, really.
My fear with FM26 is that they appear to be focusing on graphics and porting the "full" experience to more systems right now, rather than making major improvements to the above points.
They could argue that, with the switch to Unity out of the way, there will be more evolution next year... but I still need a reason to play this year's game over a fully-modded FM24, beyond the "incredible graphics upgrade" (if your players are all the same height, that argument is null and void IMO).
EDIT 1: The challenge of representing real-life in a UI is also interesting to me - Miles is right that football managers don't use emails with their staff to communicate, and that it's a bit silly to pretend they do, but it seems they found it impossible to implement an intuitive replacement for that setup.
I find that a really interesting thought experiment, and they're between a rock and a hard place with stuff like this. Change it from an "email" to a "word with your staff" that's just words in a box, and it's identical to what it was before - change it to 3D talking heads and it's going to take an age to play the game.
Plus, change it too little and everyone will say "it's the same as before, rip-off", change it entirely and "it doesn't feel like Football Manager any more", with the latter being crucial. I don't envy Miles. (Well, I do - he gets to play Football Manager for a living.
)
We all know what that "Football Manager feel" is, and if it strays from that and becomes more like one of its crappy clones... It'd bomb. It must be hard.
EDIT 2: Just realised that applies to player attributes as well.
Really, it's a silly system - managers don't buy players by looking at what their "tackling attribute" is.
But how do you swap to something else without ruining the game and the "Football Manager feel", really?
There are
skins like this that replace attributes with much more barebones "dots" or bars - which are probably more realistic (certainly more challenging):
...but it requires so much extra work to compare players (i.e. you can judge "tackling 15 vs 18" at a glance, whereas "green dot vs green dot" requires you to then look at the player's match statistics, which is more difficult to interpret fairly).
It's rare for me to think realism ruins a game, but in this instance, I think it really does ruin the FM "feel". So then, does the game have to be the same forever?
