Football Manager Live Preview59

Luckily for me over the past few weeks I have been been beta testing the next version of Football Manager which is Football Manager Live (FML). I have to say that while it’s still buggy (it’s beta after all) I have been pretty impressed with it so far and am slightly scared at how much of my freetime I expect it will eat up.

FML is basically a huge multiplayer football management game, using the Football Manager match engine. Try to picture a cross between Football Manager, fantasy sports and an auction room and you get the basic idea. Up to 1,000 managers can play against each other to try and be the No 1 manager in their particular gameworld.

Gone are the days of managing Liverpool or Tranmere Rovers. In FML you have to create your own team team, design your kits, pick your pitch size and name your ground. Everybody starts the game with the same budget and around about the same level (Championship/League 1).

Once you have your team named and shamed you are in position to join a league. These are set up by player admins, and cater for a range of abilities, so it’s a bit like searching the lobby of an online FPS and looking for similarly ranked gamers. Furthermore, there are leagues catering for both FM fanatics who want to play for two hours a day, and for those of us who can only spare a few hours a week, or even a month. Interestingly, the fixture list for each league uses a ‘resolve by’ system – so instead of trying to commit players to specific match time slots, they’re given a deadline of up to three weeks to play each game. Consequently, you can hop online whenever you fancy and the chances are at least one of your scheduled opponents will be around. Failing that, control can be handed over to your computerised assistant manager, who’ll do a competent job in your absence.

The transfer market works like a little like eBay – managers identify the players they want, then put in the highest bids they can before the deadline arrives. The game uses the full FM database which means hundreds of thousands of players to purchase oh and a player can only player for one team so there is one Stevie G or Ronaldo between the thousands of managers. There are also be wages auctions, allowing managers to tempt the best players with the promise of a juicier pay packet.

The thing that I found hardest about the change in the live version of the game is how the finance works. Gone are the days of reading about the best wonder kids on fab sites like http://www.thefootymanager.com and grabbing them at below market value. Now you really have to get down and dirty with the bare bones of a squad, grind out results and then once your ranking improves you can sign the bigger stars.

The game has tons of other features such as chat rooms and players can submit replay footage of their best moments to a goal of the month-style competition, voted on by all the participants in their league. There is good banter between the different managers in the leagues.

FML will be available for free download from SI and players will be charged a monthly subscription to play the game much like World of Warcraft etc. That said for your money you won’t just get one version of the game SI will be pursuing a constant development process with the game, continually adding new features and tweaking gameplay, providing these changes to gamers in the form of regular downloads – a bit like the patching process we all know and love from the CM and FM series’.

Like I said at the start of this little ramble, while it’s pretty buggy still while it testing it has the potential to change the way we play football management games forever which can’t be a bad thing…. I’ll keep you posted!

Join thefootymanager.com Fantasy Football league – It’s FREE and there are prizes to be won!

[ratings]

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1. Free Month of Football Manager Live