The only meaningful other football game action this week has seen me starting out as a Beta tester on the forthcoming Football Manager Live.
I’ve done a little bit of Beta testing before, a year or so ago, on a game that never made it to full release and lost its makers tens of thousands of pounds. I hope that isn’t an omen…
But I think FM Live is a vastly safer prospect. Here’s a fansite. There’s a ton of screenshots here for the curious to look over. There’s also an FAQ in case there’s any doubt about it….
Yes, this is an MMOG based upon football management. I’ve played plenty of browser-based football manager games, and none of them come close to FM Live. A dedicated, fully-featured game for this kind of thing has been long overdue.
I’ve only had time to play FM live for an hour or so per day so far. Before installation, the game asks you what kind of FM Live player you think you’ll be—Casual, or Intensive? Casual players are those who would play for 1-5 hours per week. Intensive players are all those who’d play for 6+ hours per week. (I know, that seems a little low for ‘Intensive’; they’ll probably need to introduce an Intermediate level.)
You’re then placed in a game world with other players of a similar disposition. I selected Casual. I doubt I’d ever be able to play FM Live for more than a couple of hours per week. This is an important element of the game for its makers to get right. When you’re not logged into the game and your team has to play a match, an AI takes over for you and controls everything that happens within the game (while respecting your formation, selection, and tactics choices, naturally). Putting casual and intensive players together would favour the intensive ones to a massive degree, as they’d be more likely to be logged on and able to make the kinds of changes during games that an AI never would.
I’ve only had time to play five friendlies so far. The main competitive season doesn’t get underway until Wednesday 5th March. That’s when I’ll see what FM Live is really made of—although the friendlies alone have whetted my appetite to a massive degree. It’s peculiarly exciting to play a Football Manager match on that famous 2D pitch against a human player in realtime. You wouldn’t think so, but it is.
One thing I have noted so far is that there don’t seem to have been any compromises made with the core Football Manager gameplay. It’s still as formidably deep as ever—you could spend your entire logged-in session just perusing your own players’ stats and analysing who should play where. It might have been tempting to dumb down the franchise for its MMOG version, but no—it certainly hasn’t been dumbed down.
Example: in my last friendly I was losing 2-1 and then I had a player sent off. It was still early in the first half and I quite reasonably, I thought, decided I needed to try for an equaliser before half time, then play ultra-defensively in the second half and try to hold on for the draw or snatch a winner myself.
So I immediately switched formation from my starting 4-3-1-2 (a solid FM formation) to a ridiculous 2-4-1-2, with both full backs pushed up into midfield. That’s the kind of thing that people might be tempted to try in a computer game (I was), but FM is more than a computer game, as its many addicts will testify.
I conceded another 5 goals and lost 7-1. I only stopped conceding goals late in the second half when I switched back to a sensible formation—a sturdy 4-3-2 that I should have gone with from the moment I went down to ten men. The lesson here is that FM Live, like its single-player predecessors, is not a game that can be taken liberties with.
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