This whole wall of text is unlikely to be read by anyone other than you, me, Jabba and maybe Waste but screw it, I’m going to listen to the inner child that wants to rant.
The biggest issue with SI is that they have become completely complacent in all facets of game development and marketing due to well, the lack of competition for one and possibly their bosses not leading them on the right direction. There is a paradox (remember the name for I shall repeat this studio’s name again in other contexts
) in their game design now where they’re unsure as to just what they want the game to be. Too much effort is being put into things that have been minimally asked for and too little into things that everyone has asked for in contrast. This all stems down to them having no pulse on what the buyers and fans are seeking from FM, which is to be a fairly realistic game simulation of the football world where they can build their narratives and entertain themselves with their fantasies. Even the ones who only play for 50-100 hours (the equivalent of one season or two) just want immersion for the most part.
Except this immersion has come at the cost of tedium in areas that many did not want to be expanded upon. Press conferences are the main bugbear here but there are a lot more. More clicks are required to do the same things that were possible in a simpler way in earlier iterations. This isn’t complexity or depth added for the sake of gameplay challenge or immersion but it is just SI cramming pointless additional screens that look shiny but only serve 10% more utility than before under the guise of new features. To me this is most prevalent by their game design that has sought out to make the tedious tasks of the manager life true to reality whilst game-fying the systems that actually matter and are fun in the game instead of padding them out to add the required gameplay depth. Examples of the latter include the tactics creator right now that is neither accurately replicative of modern football nor as complex as it once was with micromanagement to at least create complex systems in the game world that were fun. The set piece creator is another in an era where clubs are hiring specialist coaches for it, it’s rudimentary, terrible and not realistic at all.
I haven’t even brought up the graphics yet which is the single biggest issue with the game and the one that everyone is raising their pitchforks over. The game looks worse now than it was ten years ago, I don’t think there is a single game by a well known developer that has gone backwards like this. Mobile games have better details and attention to them than what SI is providing which is shocking. And whilst the switch to the new match engine has brought forward better representation of a football game with newer animations compared to the past, they still look like a joke. No player can perform feints for instance, technical volleys that are Puskas worthy in real life lose out to standard long range shots in the goal of the month awards and often there are no differences between two players in terms of playing style other than their attributes if they differ widely when that is not true of real life at all.
Coming to your points I do agree that optimisation is much better now in certain aspects of the game, I love how quickly the game saves in 22 for instance. However it still isn’t applied everywhere. More importantly though an optimisation pass or the smaller changes that they bring every year marketed as a new feature are often patch notes in other games. I do not think they’ve added anything on the scale of what Paradox does with their games with each patch (they do have accompanying DLC that helps offset the costs of the free patch but they are optional and often the patch is the real value product offered whilst the DLC is just something that fans buy to thank the devs for their work) such as a new small feature that many suggest would make sense and would not even require much effort comparatively. Instead the standard response if at all one is got will be ‘we’re looking at this for the next year‘ and you’ll be lucky if it ever features there. This is also what I refer to as complacency in marketing, they know that they can get away with announcing these minor changes as headline features because people will still pre-order it and buy it in troves. A better led developer or one who needs to respond to active competition will put more effort into working on and also showing off many of the changes or at the least present it in a way that is understood.
I don’t think management games are inherently impossible to develop beyond a point, OOTP is adding interesting features every year and is arguably more feature rich than FM with also lesser tedium. F1 Manager‘s representation of the sport gameplay and realism wise is a joke at the moment but this is the first attempt by their dev studio in this genre and in just two years they’ve developed a game that has incredibly good graphics blowing away any notions of graphics being an impossible thing to focus on for a complex management game. The FM team certainly lacks vision at the least and this is why they cannot communicate any roadmap of any sort to their fanbase. Look at Paradox for instance, they have over a hundred dev diaries for every game of theirs I play that happen almost every week detailing what the team’s plan is for the game at the moment and in the near future and they’re always open and realistic about what they can do in a game whilst catering to their fans. Their games are arguably more complex than FM IMO. Each DLC plus patch of theirs also introduces more than every yearly iteration of FM does these days, Stellaris for instance is nothing like the game it was at release.
Women’s football is a much needed feature in FM indeed but I genuinely have very less hope in the devs to bring about a revolution with it like many believe just because of how lacklustre they’ve been with the other half of football. I also think they would have been a lot more upfront with what changes it would be bringing if it was truly that groundbreaking to at least appease some of the angry noises that have arisen recently. I agree that the yearly release is doing them no good and a shift to any other alternative would be much appreciated but I doubt it will be better for the customer which is ironic given how poor it already is in terms of new features.
/rantover
