STACK #121 Nov 2015

GAMES

FEATURE

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You’re The Boss! Football Manager 2015 is almost here. Straight talking Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson tells us what’s new.

I t’s the game that will consume every spare minute you possess as you fret about how you can turn your team’s fortunes around before the chairman wields the axe. Late nights, in between meetings, before dinner dates; when the hooks are in, nothing will to save you from Football Manager. Delivering an annual franchise on time with enough new features to keep the regulars happy and tempt new players to sign up is not a job for the faint-hearted. However, after 15 years working on the franchise, studio director Miles Jacobson is used to the pressure. “I don’t know things to be different, to be honest,” he says. “So whilst it is a challenge every year, we have good processes in place now and enough experience for it to not be an issue.” According to Jacobson, the studio undertakes four weeks of feature meetings working through every suggestion that has been made internally, through the forums, from the Sports Interactive research teams, from the people directly involved in professional football, or even ideas overheard in the pub. “Everyone in the studio is invited to these meetings. We discuss everything (typically there are between 1,000 and 2,000 feature ideas to go through each year) and everyone gets a vote for their priority of the feature,” says Jacobson. “After all that is done, it’s over to me – I group features together to make things more cohesive.Then the relevant programmers and artists will estimate the time it will take. Some features might take more time, others less, compared to the estimates, so I’ve always got ‘back-up’ features that can be added and often have to take things away, too, during the process. But because of the annual iterations, I know they’ll always get done at some point – keeping the balance is essential.”

“But it’s not as cut and dried as that; every player has their own personality, so they will react differently according to that too.” Scouting options have also been overhauled with two major changes. “The first is that managers can now specify to their scouts the type of player they are looking for and why; are they looking for a striker who is a hot prospect, or someone to replace a player who they know they’re going to have to sell?”

explains Jacobson. “Are they looking for a back-up player, or someone who can slot straight into the first team? “The second is that managers can now scout players for a lot longer, and specify it in time. In the real world, scouts may just go and watch a player two or three times, but they might also watch them for a period of months, so it was important for us to give that option to the in-game scouts too.” Tunnel and training ground interviews, and tabloid journalists who, Jacobson says, “might have a different agenda”, are part of a significant change to the media aspect of FM15, and with the help of AFCWimbledon andThe Creative Assembly, motion capture will be used for the first time in the game’s history. As regular players of Football Manager, one of the ideas STACK has harboured for some time is the possible introduction of a mode where players are given the opportunity to coach a classic team from football

Some of the many changes this year include the ability to choose either a ‘suit’ manager, who leans more on their tactical prowess, or a ‘tracksuit manager’ to lead his team with football boots on his feet. Players will react independently to these management styles. “If you have a low motivation rating then the players are less likely to listen to positive comments,” Jacobson says. “And being a rubbish coach in areas you are looking after makes the players improve less.

history. We ask Miles Jacobson whether this is something the studio has ever considered? “Legally, it’s not possible, or rather, it is possible, but prohibitively expensive

and would need an army of a licensing team. So it’s not something that is likely to happen from us.”

Football Manager 2015 is out November 7

NOVEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au

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