Sports Interactive’s studio director, Miles Jacobson, hopes that one day you’ll think you’re watching an actual football game when you play Football Manager. Match simulations haven’t always been the best-looking feature of the series, but Football Manager 2017 makes some great strides toward this goal. Jacobson is confident that this year’s instalment of the leading management sim will be the most detailed and visually impressive yet.
Thanks to Mr Jacobson, we can add a little more to our roundup of everything we know about Football Manager 2017.
“Our dream for the matches is for you to not be able to tell the difference between a match on TV and those in our game,” says Jacobson. “We’re a few years away from that, but we’ve got a long-term plan in that area and some of the work that will be seen in future games has already been done this year.”
This isn’t a new, cosmetics-obsessed Sports Interactive, though, and Jacobson made clear his team have lost none of their meticulous attention to detail. While presentation has been improved, “it’s not anymore of a priority than the transfer AI or adding new fields to the data that can help improve the AI and the game in every area… but when you’re putting pre-release videos together you want things to be pretty, right?”
Indeed. But long-time fans of the series can be confident that there’s plenty going on behind the scenes. “When we released our 30 minute video of new features there were about 250 new features shown, but there are 1388 features in the game – so there’s a shed load that we haven’t spoken about at all.”
One of those features whichhasbeen spoken about is the simulation of Brexit, which has major implications for the transfer market, as we discovered in the second part of our interview.
Football Manager 2017 releases on November 4.