Sports Interactive shared a blog post on the development of this year’s Football Manager game, Football Manager 25. The next entry to the annual football management strategy game will see “the biggest tech change in more than 20 years”, wrote Sports Interactive sturio manager Miles Jacobson.
FM25 will be using the Unity game engine, a decision made that allows higher graphical fidelity as well as a more efficient development pipeline, moreso as the devs get a good grasp of one of the more popular game engines (though not without some recent controversies).
This “new era” of Football Manager isn’t limited to just behind-the-scenes changes. Players will be greeted with an overhauled UI with loads of changes. The inbox, the in-game email which players taking the roles of football managers usually interact with, is now replaced with the Portal.
Instead of emulating an email inbox (which modern football managers don’t use as often- they have phones now as the blog post say), the Portal has more tools to for players to see their story unfold and get insights. Agenda, Messages, News and Matches are categories you can see at a glance from the Portal screen.
There’s also a fundamental change to how the UI works in the form of Tiles and Cards. Tiles are all the different boxes on one screen, each can be clicked to open a card, giving more detail.
A Player Form screen can display various tiles including the Last 5 Matches. The tile itself is informative without being too dry, with a graph going up and down as well as a list of the said 5 matches. When the Last 5 Matches tile is clicked, it opens a card, providing a deeper look of the results of the last 5 matches, what role the player was when played and more.
The Tiles and Cards system also translates into a whole new look for match highlights.
The UI screenshots are works-in-progress, clearly marked as such. And also, we get to see some of the new Premier League branding now that the series has that license.
With Football Manager 25 bringing some fundamental changes, the blog post also gave a heads-up on what features that do not make the cut. The reasons for these features being depreciated ranges from the development team doesn’t feel it’s good at what it should do to unpopular/underutilised features. This includes the following:
- Touchline shouts (not happy with the current implementation)
- Social Media screen (rolled into the new UI in another form)
- Data Chalkboard (Data Hub replaces its use and low usage by players)
- Create-A-Club (coming back in Football Manager 26 with more improvements)
- Versus Mode (low usage, may be redesigned or replaced with another mode)
- Challenge Mode (coming back in Football Manager 26 or 27. Low usage after the release of FM Mobile series)
- Fantasy Draft (arriving post-launch alongside main data update
Football Manager 25 hasn’t have a proper reveal yet, but it’s expected to be released later this year.
Source: Sports Interactive