PES Chronicles

It’s Other Football Game Sunday on PES Chronicles again. This past week I’ve hardly had the time to play PES. If it wasn’t for Football Manager Live, I wouldn’t have played any other football game.

I’m playing FM Live as a Beta tester, i.e. for free. The full game is due to go live in a ‘couple of months’, according to the latest from the developers. It’ll be on a subscription model. All new players should get some kind of free trial period—just 7 days, I predict.

I’ve written before about FM Live’s surprisingly fresh and addictive and immersive feel. After several years playing the regular, offline, single-player Football Manager series, I would never have expected that an online MMOG version could work this well. But it does.

But what happens when, for whatever reason, I can’t log on and play for a couple of days—or weeks?

I’ve played several MMOGs, but always drifted away from them for various reasons. The most common reason was that I just didn’t have enough time for them. I’d return after days or weeks away to find that the ‘buzz’ had gone.

This week I only had time to play FM Live for a couple of hours on Monday, and then for a solitary hour on Friday. During the days I didn’t play, some of my fixtures went past the time period allocated for them to be played in. When one or both human players are absent and a match has to be played, the AI takes over on behalf of one or both teams.

I had two matches played for me by the AI. I won one and I lost one. I received emails detailing the outcomes of the games. Everything seemed satisfactory. I had half-expected to receive a sulky email from the FM Live people, asking why I hadn’t logged in to play the game they were letting me play for free. But I didn’t.

This is the way it has to happen. Very few people will be able to get online to play all of their games live. One of my games during Friday’s session was against a fellow Beta tester who told me that he logged in and played for an incredible 12 hours a day, every day.

I believed him—and his team showed the results of his dedication. I was trounced 5-1, although I picked up some great formation and tactics tips from my opponent (FM Live players are, on the whole, the mature, approachable sort). But the greatest advantage he had over me was in the area of Manager Skills.

In FM Live you train yourself, the manager. Your players benefit from the manager’s acquired in-game skills. One of the beneficial side-effects of being logged-in to FM Live for a long time is being able to start a new skill training as soon as the previous one has finished. My casual logging-in means that I’m still plodding through the very early ones—Youth Training 1, and things like that.

This coming week will see me just as busy with other things as I was last week. Maybe even a touch busier. I might only get to play FM Live for one solitary hour all week. The great thing about the game is that I’d pay money to play it for real when the Beta test is over—as long as I never feel out of control or unjustly penalised for irregular logging-in habits. It all remains to be seen.