MATCH ENGINE

Actually taking to the pitch and playing football matches has never been what FM is about, though as fans, we do still look forward to improvements to the match engine each year. There’s a handful of those to speak of this year as well, ranging across things like players’ decision making, animations and physics, visuals and lighting, and more. Obviously, it’s still not the main attraction of the FM experience in the slightest, but Sports Interactive says there are notable improvements over last year’s game nonetheless.

MOTION MATCHING

One of the bigger changes FM 24 has made to its animations is with the introduction of motion matching, a technique used by several games that, in layman’s terms, stitches together animation clips for character models contextually, making for smoother, more realistic animations. What that means for FM 24 is that during matches, the way players move about with or without the ball should be much more fluid and authentic than the jerky on-pitch movements FM games have generally been known for.

BALL PHYSICS

Another area where Sports Interactive is touting some considerable changes is the physics and movement of the actual football itself. As opposed to its predecessors, the developer says FM 24 is putting much greater emphasis on factors such as wind resistance, drag, friction against the pitch, and even the temperature and altitude of the stadium you’re playing in, all of which will affect the ball’s motion much more realistically. On paper, that means you’ll see much better dribbling, finishing, volleys, deflections, and the like.

VISUALS

Other obvious improvements made to the match engine that are worth shedding light on can be seen on the visuals side of things. For starters, FM 24 is touting better and sharper pitch textures, while the game has also introduced what look like significant upgrades to the lighting model. It’s still not going to be a visual stunner, obviously, but the jump from Football Manager 2023 is quite apparent in this department nonetheless.

GAME MODES

Football Manager 2024 is also offering new options in how you want to begin a new save. At the outset of every save, you’ll be able to choose between three different modes. Original mode will see your save starting with every player in the database playing for the club they play for in real-life at that point in time. Then there’s Real World, which will see players starting the save at the clubs they were at when the season began, and then making moves later on in the save aligned with their real-world transfers. Finally, Your World mode will let you customize all of your future transfers after your save begins however you see fit.

SET PIECE COACHES

Though Set Piece coaching has obviously been a thing in FM for a long time, in FM 24, Set Piece Coach is now going to be a specialized role. Each coach will have an individual Set Piece attribute, while Set Piece coaches will also have their own unique preferences and styles, from delivery methods for attacking set pieces to how to set up a team when defending one.

SET PIECE CREATOR

The implementation of Set Piece coaches in Football Manager 2024 is also going hand in hand with the addition of a new and enhanced Set Piece creator, which will give you much greater control over attacking and defending free kicks and corners, primarily thanks to an increased focus on players’ Attributes and their assigned responsibilities rather than their positions. You’ll also be working with your Set Piece coach to nail down several other things, like whether you want to defend zonally, go with man marking, or adopt a hybrid approach, or which post you want your players to focus on while defending, or what area you want the ball delivered in, or how many players you want to leave forward, and more.

TRANSFER BATTLES

Transfers are a major part of the world of football, and always tend to be one of the most exciting parts of the Football Manager experience. In FM 24, it’s looking like that’ll be truer than ever, thanks to a number of improvements- chief among them being AI managers now taking a much more nuanced view to what players they want to target. Rather than simply going after the best and most valuable players, your rival managers will now have a keener sense of how to develop their own team by going after players that have Attributes that’ll fill gaps in their squads. Meanwhile, managers will now also place a greater emphasis on the potential ability of a player rather than their current ability, which means signing a promising wonderkid could be even more competitive than it has been in previous games.

MATCHDAY SQUADS

Speaking of manager prioritizing a player’s potential ability over their current ability, that will also come into play when your rivals are actually picking their matchday squads. Youth players with high ceilings who may not be the finished article didn’t always have the best shot at being involved in matches in past years’ games, but Sports Interactive has said that that’ll no longer be the case in FM 24. 

TRANSFER BUDGETS

One of the biggest changes Football Manager 2024 has made – and one that has caught the eye of many – is the introduction of negative transfer budgets. You read that right- if you overspend and don’t manage your funds carefully, your budget will drop into the red, at which point your board will give you a certain amount of time within which you’ll need to get back to a positive budget. That, in turn, can be done in several ways, like offloading high-value players to generate funds (like a much, much tamer version of what FC Barcelona is doing right now). If you’re unable to do that within that timeframe, the board will seize all control of transfers from you, make the sales it wants to make without any input from you, and relinquish control back to you only after you’ve got a positive budget again.

FFP

Financial Fair Play breaches sadly continue to be a part of the sport, and Football Manager 24 will incorporate that into its experience in more authentic fashion as well. How exactly? Well, by placing new and stricter sanctions on clubs that breach FFP, like smaller squad sizes, restricted transfer spending, locked wage budgets, competition incomes being withheld, fines, and more.

INCOME STREAMS

Football Manager 2024 will also present players with additional opportunities for making money beyond just selling players, and other familiar avenues, like matchday ticket sales, shirt sales, and the like. One of the biggest new additions is fixed-length TV deals, something that holds immense weight in real-life football, and will have a greater role to play in FM 24 as well. Among other things, TV deals will also impact the prize money you receive from competitions.

INTERMEDIARIES

Pretty much every single Football Manager player has at one point or another struggled to move on a player from their club that is reluctant to leave. In FM 24, if that’s the situation you find yourself in and if the player’s agent isn’t being helpful, you can now also seek out the help of Intermediaries, who are third parties recruited by your Director of Football. For a percentage of the final transfer fee, intermediaries will generate new interest in the player you want to sell, though factors like that intermediary’s reach and ability will also come into play here.

INDIVIDUAL PLAYER TARGETS

Something else that FM 24 is introducing is the ability to set individual targets for players. During individual feedback interactions, when sending out a player on loan, or when negotiating a contract, you’ll be able to propose and set targets for players as pathway for them to get to a stage where they are getting more playing time. That, in turn, will finally give you a much more direct and tangible method of incentivizing players to perform better (and perhaps to stick around even when they’re not getting too much playing time), though their individual personalities and relationships with you will, of course, be a factor.

PLAYER INTERACTIONS

If you’ve played FM in the past, you’re probably all too familiar with players’ tendency to overreact to your dialogue choices during individual interactions in the most hilarious way possible, though FM 24 is making some changes on that fronts to make things a little less… extreme. There are over 2,000 new AI responses in the game, ranging across different levels of severity, while players will now also provide much better reasoning for their unhappiness, while requirements for the promises that you make to your players will also be much clearer than in past years’ games.

The difference in approaches between the two companies recently surfaced in a very public way when, during the Microsoft vs FTC trial, in his testimony, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan called Game Pass “value-destructive”, saying that the service is viewed by publishers in that light “unanimously”.

One developer that has supported Game Pass consistently that does not agree, however, is Football Manager studio Sports Interactive. Speaking in a recent interview with Eurogamer, studio head Miles Jacobson touched on the issue and said that Sports Interactive would not have agreed to a Game Pass deal if it wasn’t profitable from a business viewpoint.

“We run quite a tight ship, and I like our studio to be profitable – Sega took a big gamble on us all those years ago, and their shareholders – however weird it might sound – should be rewarded for that,” Jacobson said. “So we don’t tend to do deals that are bad for any parts of the business.”

Jacobson went on to explain that Football Manager’s success on Game Pass has allowed Sports Interactive to keep expanding the franchise in other ways as well, including attracting players that had never played it before, as well as helping the studio get a better grip on the demands of the live service space.

“The simple fact is Game Pass and Apple Arcade have brought new people to the franchise that never played it before,” he said. “I’m confident enough in our games to believe we will now have those consumers for a long time, whatever platforms we’re on. Fiscally, it makes sense. Creatively, it makes sense.

“Learnings-wise, it makes sense as well. We were looking at games as a service… Game Pass and Apple Arcade are games as a service platforms that we’re in. So you’re learning a lot more about that audience as well as you’re going along. And there’s no way we would have reached five million players on FM23 without the audiences on those platforms – with PlayStation being an added bonus on top, because we’ve done much better on PlayStation than we were expecting.”

Speaking specifically about Ryan’s aforementioned comments on Game Pass, Jacobson voiced his disagreement, saying that though every studio and company will have a different outlook, Sports Interactive’s doesn’t necessarily align with Ryan’s comments.

“Every studio has to make decisions themselves, but I don’t recognise some of the quotes that I see from other studios, and depositions,” he said. “I don’t recognise that in our business. It’s all very sunny for us.”

For a number of years in a row, Football Manager’s yearly instalments have been available via Game Pass, and presumably, the same will be true for this year’s title as well. Though concrete details are yet to be confirmed, Football Manager 2024 is expected to launch sometime in November.

Though it’s often against the very point of the medium of video games, more and more we look for realism in video games- realism in visuals, in the way they tell their stories, in their mechanics, in the world. And there’s a very good reason for that- that greater sense of realism lends more believability to the virtual world we find ourselves in, making it more immersive and easier to invest in. Sure, realism isn’t something that’s required in every game – in fact in many kinds of games it actively works against them – but where it fits, and is done well, it can be a powerful tool. It can be something that’s found throughout the game, or something that defines singular moments in games that might not otherwise be too realistic.

In this feature, we’re going to take a look at fifteen games that fit the bill- games that were either almost too realistic or times, or had maybe a few choice moments of realism, but made it all work surprisingly well. Do keep that last bit in mind- we’re not suggesting that a game with dinosaurs in it or another where you can slow down time to gun down your enemies in a single flurry are realistic- only that they offer moments of realism.

With that out of the way, let’s jump right in.

SURVIVAL MECHANICS IN RUST

 By definition, survival games are built around some degree of realism, where your character is much more vulnerable, and there’s a lot of things you need to be mindful of to make sure of your, well, survival. But Rust often take is one step further. From diseases to weather, from health to severely limited resources, from the game itself to the hostile environment it creates for all players (who’re all constantly turning on one another), Rust is a game that can actively stress you out. That, of course, means, that it isn’t for everyone, but for those who get into it, there’s a lot to lose yourself in.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/15-times-your-favorite-video-games-were-too-realistic/feed 0 380776 https://gamingbolt.com/alien-isolation-sales-cross-2-1-million-units https://gamingbolt.com/alien-isolation-sales-cross-2-1-million-units#comments Mon, 11 May 2015 15:19:47 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=231525

The Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation, a first person sci-fi horror game in the tone of Ridley Scott’s original film, has managed to sell more than 2.1 million units worldwide. This is according to its publisher Sega which announced sales for a number of titles in quarter ending on March 31st.

Other game sales include Football Manager which managed to sell 810,000 units on PC – a notable milestone when you consider that Alien: Isolation released on current and previous gen systems to reach its sales mark. Most surprisingly, however, are the sales for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal for the Wii U and 3DS respectively. Both games sold a collective 620,000 units worldwide which is shocking considering the abysmal quality of both titles.

Yakuza 0 has meanwhile managed to sell 380,000 units in Japan on PS3 and PS4 while Persona 4: The Ultimate Ultra Suplex Hold only sold 280,000 units worldwide on previous gen consoles.

Thoughts on the success of Alien: Isolation? Let us know in the comments.

Sega has reported a 48 percent increase in profits thanks to Phantasy Star Online 2 and mobile games Chain Chronicle and Puyopuyo Quest. In contrast, packaged games sold at retail like Sonic Lost World didn’t fare so well.

“In the consumer business, although the group launched multiple titles including Football Manager 2014 and Sonic Lost World in the packaged game software field, sales were low due to the harsh market environment.”

Puyopuyo Quest and Chain Chronicle averaged 6 million and 2 million downloads respectively, and Sega reported with total sales for the past 9 months up to December 31st 2013 being 303.9 billion yen ($2.9 billion). This made for profits 44.3 billion yen or $434.5 million.

Given the dismal success of Sonic Lost World, does it make sense to reboot the hedgehog and his friends in new avatars for the upcoming Sonic Boom game? We’ll have to wait and see but for now, the response from fans is anything but positive.

Sega recently announced the next installment in their much beloved, hardcore soccer fan’s wet dream soccer sim and management series, Football Manager. Football Manager 14 is slated to be the most technically advanced game in the series, and the deepest football (soccer for those of you on the other side of the pond) experience on the market. The developer took the opportunity to show off many new features of the game, including the one that they highlight above, the new 3D match engine, that, they state, “we are very proud of.”

It looks impressive, although obviously nothing like EA’s FIFA Soccer in game, or even Konami’s PES in game; nonetheless, that is never the point of Football Manager anyway, and the 3D games are just the icing on the cake. And in any case, as we are reminded throughout the video, this is just a work in progress, and the final game is bound to look better.

Football Manager 14 will be releasing exclusively on PC. Stay tuned.

This means Watford, also known as the Hornets, will have both Football Manager and Football Manager Handheld trademarks and logos across their home and away kits for the 12/13 season.

Watford’s Chief Executive Officer Scott Duxbury said: “I’m very pleased with the partnership we’ve agreed with SEGA and Sports Interactive. It really is a perfect fit in many ways.

“Football Manager and SEGA’s success in its field is unparalleled. Their global success is in no small part down to their attention to detail and expertise in their area – and that’s something the club is delighted to be partnering with.”

Managing Director of Sports Interactive, Miles Jacobson, added: “The Pozzo family have shown at Granada and Udinese that success can be achieved by strong financial management and a dedication to talent development – a strategy which, coincidentally, also pays dividends in Football Manager. We’re very much looking forward to achieving great things together.”

Sports Interactive are also sponsors of League 2 side AFC Wimbledon, and have been since 2002.