peteranthony01

Hello, and welcome to the first of the Football Manager 2008 new feature blogs. Following on from our announcement of some of the key new features in FM 2008 a couple of months back, and with us at Sports Interactive getting ever closer to finishing the game and going into manufacture so that you get to buy and play the game, the time has come to talk about a few of the new features in the game.

Some of these you might have read about before in our announcements, or in the various previews that have been done of the game across Europe. Some will be brand new to you. There will be blogs every week day up until the release of the game, some dealing with new features, some more indepth looks at some of the features, and some dealing with other surprises that we have been keeping quiet on…


We won't be giving everything away in these blogs - as always, we want the people who play our games, like you, to be able to discover things whilst playing the game. As always, we've crammed a lot in!


What's new then? Today, I'm going to look at some of the new gameplay features before moving onto other areas over the coming days and weeks.


Some areas that we've already announced will have their own indepth guides later on in the cycle before release. These include the awards revamp, board confidence, fan days, the international management revamp, match flow and a look at what's new in the match engine, so I'm going to be avoiding discussing those in this blog, or on the forums. Patience is a virtue and all that.


So, what should I write about today? There's a lot to go through, with lots of previous features improved, as you'd expect, as well as all the new stuff.


Let's start with pitch sizes. As those of you who are into your footy know, there is no one set size for a pitch in football, just rules for each competition and league for minimum and maximum dimensions. You now get the chance to set your pitch size at the start of the season, adapting the pitch size to your tactics or vice versa, within the boundaries of the competition your club is playing in.


Your team captains now also get set pre-season, along with a vice-captain too. You have to be careful who you choose for these roles though, as it can affect any player in your squad - choose someone unpopular, and a dressing room revolt could be on the cards.


Other teams managers now come and watch other teams fixtures, whether these be international managers looking for the next star for the national team, or whether it be a rival manager scouting for their next match, or checking out your players. If it's a big name, the match commentator might even notice them in the stand and mention it during the game, and you may get a news item after the match too.


We've improved how the game handles rules about "foreign" players. More foreign players are allowed at clubs, with squad selection rules used to set who will be eligible for matches, as well as enforcing rules regarding "foreign" players and naturalisation. Most useful in this area of changes is that you can now see in a players personal panel how long he has until he gets dual nationality, which is very useful for those with feeder clubs where they send players who haven't been able to get work permits.


Some other improvements to our previous games include better team selection routines for AI, which now take into account even more importance of matches, injuries and the like. Player progression is also improved, as are the regenerated players and the injury module, of course.


A big new feature is coach reports, which are perfect for novice managers, or those who want the challenge of managing at a club where they don't know the players. The coaching staff will give you detailed feedback on every player in the squad, similar to the scout reports that became part of the game last year, making it very easy to get to know your strong and weak areas, and who your best players and best prospects are for each position on the pitch.


Another nice new feature is the ability to create a filter from a selected player which is kind of hard to explain, so I'll leave it to Keith, one of the dev team members at SI. "Imagine your star striker is getting a bit long in the tooth. He's been a loyal servant to you and has banged in the goals consistently over the years, but now it's time to find a replacement. Ideally you want the same style of forward but a younger version.


In past versions of the game you would have had to manually note down the key attributes for that player and set up a filter. Fm2008 now allows you to create a player search filter based around the main strength of the player chosen. Once selecting this option a filter is created using the players position and will pick out at least 3 key attributes and then you will be taken to the player search screen where you can view the matches and then hopefully open talks with a view to signing your next superstar striker." Clear enough for you? Good, good.


Something that people in the community have been asking for for ages is an extra option on the squad status screen to be able to specify for a player in the first team squad to be declared available for any reserve team games in the next 7 days, rather than having to move them to the reserve squad and risk their morale dropping. So that's in FM08 too.


Have I mentioned that saving and loading are faster than ever before for one of our games? Which is pretty good considering that there is so much more information in the game this year, and therefore more for it to save.


But you'll have to wait to find out what more is there. Not long though - I'll be back tomorrow with a blog about some of the changes to do with the transfer system.

Miles

Email/MSN: peteranthony001@gmail.com