[Ultimate_Red_Devil]

linkage

Originally Posted by Miles Jacobson

We are very happy to announce today, via the UK’s News of the World paper, that the demo of Football Manager 2008 will be released next Sunday morning, the 30th September.

There will be 2 different versions of the demo for each PC and Mac, with all demo’s providing half a season of unrestricted gameplay,

The “strawberry” version of the demo includes all player pictures and logo’s, with quickstarts from the world’s biggest leagues, giving people a chance to try out their skills in multiple countries. This will also include multiple language translations (insert list here). This demo will be available from our website at www.sigames.com

The “vanilla” version of the demo is just English language, and features the English and Scottish leagues, with no player photo’s or logo’s to try and keep the size of the download down. This version will be available from the News of the World website.

There is still no firm release date for the game, but we hope to be able to have this in the next week or so, and will let everyone know as soon as it’s set.

There will also be demos for Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008 (the US release of the game) and a brand new version, Futbol Manager 2008, a South American version of the game. Release details for both of these will follow at the same time as we provide release dates, as they are still to be confirmed.

Whilst we’re on the subject of Football Manager 2008, now is also the time to reveal new licenses for this years game.

We are very proud to announce the procurement of a license for the French Ligue de Football Professionnel, with both the 1st & 2nd divisions covered by the license that provides player photo’s, logo’s and kits for all the clubs in those leagues.

We also welcome back the Dutch national team to the game, which was missing from last years game.

On top of this, we have new licenses in Italy from Sampdoria and Fiorentina.

We’ve been pretty quiet so far this year on the game apart from the press release revealing some of the new features which can be found here along with some screenshots. As of next week, we’re going to start revealing a lot more, with blogs coming daily throughout the week up until the release of the game, with lots more feature information, some indepth looks at some of the key areas of the game, and a few surprises along the way.

For now, we’ll leave you with 2 other things (THIS IS COMING AT SOME POINT ON OUR WEBSITE LATER TODAY) First off is the packshot for the UK version of Football Manager 2008, which you can find below and also the minimum and recommended specs for the game which you can also find below.

Thank you for your continued support of Sports Interactive and our games. We hope you enjoy Football Manager 2008 as much as we enjoyed making it.

Miles

Football Manager 2008 PC specs:

Minimum:

Windows XP/Vista
1.2Ghz Processor
256MB Ram
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
4x CD Rom drive
1024x768 32Bit display
750MB HD space
MS compatible mouse & keyboard.

Recommended:

Windows XP/Vista
AMD or Intel Dual Core 2.2Ghz processor
1GB Ram
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
4xCD Rom drive
1024x768 32Bit display
750MB HD space
MS compatible mouse & keyboard.

Football Manager 2008 Mac specs:


Minimum:

PowerMac/PowerBook:

Power PC - G4 1.2Ghz
256MB Ram
Mac OS10.3.9
4xCD Rom drive
1024x768 32bit display
750MB HD Space

Mac Pro/MacBook

Intel Core Duo 1.8Ghz
Mac OS 10.4.4
256MB Ram
4xCD Rom drive
1024x768 32bit display
750MB HD Space

Recommended:

PowerMac/PowerBook:
Power PC – G5 2Ghz
Mac OS 10.4.9
1GB Ram
4xCD Rom drive
1024x768 32bit display
750MB HD Space

Mac Pro/MacBook

Intel Core Duo: 2Ghz
Mac OS 10.4.9
1GB Ram
4xCD Rom drive
1024x768 32bit display
750MB HD Space

Fuck yes!

Gameplay features

linkage

Originally Posted by Miles Jacobson

FM 2008 Features: Gameplay
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

SI Games talks contracts/transfers!!!

Originally Posted by Miles Jacobson

FM 2008: Transfers / Bonuses/ Contracts
Hello again, and thank you for coming back for the third in the series of blogs about Football Manager 2008.


Now, a few people have pointed out that I haven't actually introduced myself, which is very rude of me. My mother brought me up better than this, so I can only apologise. My name is Miles, and I'm studio director at Sports Interactive, who are the development team responsible for the Football Manager series, which makes me the Football Manager Manager or something. So if you think our games are no good, blame me, and if you think they're great, thank the whole team! I can say that fortunate enough to know that they're great….


Anyway, enough prattling on though, and back to the game.


Today I'm going to go through some of the new features to do with transfers and contracts.


Just after we released FM2007 last year, I had a phonecall from a well known and highly respected football agent who I'd had the pleasure of dealing with a few times before inviting me to go over and visit him at his office. So, me and Paul Collyer traipsed off there, and despite having grown a third ear to be able to deal with all the phone calls he was getting whilst we were sitting there, he looked over and told me how much he and his players were enjoying the game, but there was one area where we were getting some things wrong, and that was certain areas of players contracts, and spent ages going through how it all worked at different levels of the game.


So, having checked with a couple of chief execs at clubs, we've followed his advice. After all, they negotiate them for part of their living, so they should know.

Player win bonuses are now done collectively rather than individually, with you deciding in pre-season what kind of bonus to allocate to the squad for each competition, with these monies then given to the players at the end of the season based on how the team have done in the respective competitions.

Wages and appearance fees are now tweaked to be more realistic too. Individual goal and clean sheet bonuses are still there, of course.


Now, the conversations with the chief execs brought up some other interesting little facts. Such as "you know that many managers now just get a pot of money, and can allocate to wages and transfers whichever way they want to?". Now, we didn't want to overcomplicate anything and make people require a chief executive sitting there with them whilst playing the game, as that would have pushed the price of the game up way beyond anyone's budget for gaming so what we've done is thus (and I'm starting this on a new paragraph even though it's frowned upon grammar wise, but it's important, because sometimes the smallest features are the best).


You now have more control of your transfer and wage budgets by going to the "boardroom" screen, and asking to adjust your budgets. If you have excessive transfer funds, you can plough them into your wage budget, and vice versa. Great player becomes available on a free transfer, but you don't have enough wage budget? No problem - just move some money from your transfer budget to cover it. Lots of spare wages, but no money left in your transfer budget? Again, no problem, just transfer some over. The extra control is particularly useful if you're a smaller club, but just as useful for the big clubs too. It really makes a difference to the way you play the game…


Something else we decided to change a bit was adding in specific exchange requests in transfer bids, which appear when you are putting in bids for players. Rather than just saying "they are looking for a left back", if the club concerned are interested in your left back, he'll get named in the transfer offer screen.


A bug bear of mine from previous games which is now sorted is what happens after you offer a player to clubs, and some of them aren't interested. Instead of getting a pile of news items, you now just get one that lists all the clubs that aren't interested, and their reasons why.


Which brings us neatly onto the transfer center, of which there were some screenshots when we made the initial new features announcement about the game (http://www.sigames.com/news.php?type...rticle_id=1275).

This is a great new way of sorting out all your transfer bids, with lists of all bids in by you for players, or for your players, making it nice and easy to manage all of your transfer bids, including the status of each bid or contract negotiation.


Finally for today, another small but beautiful new feature. For those who've played the game for a while, you'll know that when you're playing many leagues, you can't sign players from some countries, such as Brazil, until they're 18. And by the time you can, they've signed somewhere else. Yet, in real life, players sign pre-contracts to join clubs (a bit like Alexandre Pato's recent deal). And now they can in FM2008 too. Hurrah.


Tune in again tomorrow for a blog about some of the changes to the news system


Miles

Originally Posted by Miles Jacobson

FM 2008 Features: News
Still reading these? Excellent. Although I suppose with the demo out on Sunday, it's next weeks blogs that will get missed.


Oh well - I'll worry about that then. Today's blog is about some of the changes to the news system inside Football Manager 2008.


Now, this is quite a strange blog to write, as there is so much crossover into other areas. So some of this might get repeated over the next few weeks in other blogs, but I'll do my best not to.


Every year we add more news items to the game and more variation too, to try and immerse the player, you, in the virtual world of football management. Sorry to shatter the illusions like that, but whilst FM is a way of life, it's not actually real. The news system is therefore imperitive for ensuring that you know what is going on not just at your own team, but throughout the football universe.


A few years ago we stopped the "one line" news items to go for more descriptive news items to get them to act more like short, informational, newspaper articles, and we've taken that a few steps further this year with the work of our "media corner".


This expansion includes non-player bio's, which provide a load of information about non-players for news items, referee bio's for, wait for it, yes, you've guessed it, a load of information about referee's for news items.


There's season ticket news, telling you how many season tickets have been sold so far, and how many are expected to be sold throughout the season, improved news items specific to records which your club or players might break, reworked media manager functions, effectively a tidying up of the triggers inside the game for news and lots more, even going as far as analysis of cup rounds, including news about shocks and progress for that round.


Then I could also talk about the new media items, such as when an ex-player returns to his old club, or the new transfer offer news items. But that would be giving too much away, and I'd rather you found some of those for yourselves when playing if that's OK. And if it's not, well, my lips are sealed, so it'll have to be.


If I was feeling really daring, I'd start talking about the increased inter-continental club competition media expansion, with things like pre-match odds and postmatch questions for those competitions. Or maybe I'd start going on about the past meetings button in pre-match news that makes it easy for you to see lots of information about past meetings, and even more info than you get in the "match flow" feature that will be blogged about much closer to release.


Maybe if you'd bought me a couple of drinks, I'd talk about the changes to the tickerbar and informational display, which shows competition news for the current manager and some competition statistics, but there'll be more about that in the next few days when I start talking about the interface changes. Or I might go on about the updated news system which means a highly likelihood of personal news that is more relevant to you in your inbox. Or even


But no. What I want to talk about here are 2 things.


One is more statiscal based news, such as "Marlon King breaks the 20 goal mark for Watford in their 7-1 demolition of (insert your own least favourite Coca Cola Championship team here)." which adds loads more personality to the news items.


The second. Well, the second is a whole new way of looking at news. Not only do you now get your own club news, you also get a special news section for the competition you are playing in, which shows and keeps all the major news that is going around in your division or competition, which can be invaluable in keeping you informed with what's going on at other clubs around you.


There's so much more I could talk about here, but I don't want to ruin the game for you by saying too much. So I'm going to shut up for now, and return tomorrow to start going through some of the new interface and usability changes inside the game, which is going to end up being a multi-day blog.