Football Manager Live: First Impressions

You have probably already heard about Football Manager Live, this new Massive Multiplayer Online Football Game (MMOFG) which will be available for everyone sometime around the first half of 2008. Perhaps you've even read Mike's guides to FML. This game has already been it beta for a while, and I have been lucky enough to be able to test it. That's right, I am the chosen one. Together with 1000 other people, that is.

The first thing I noticed about this game was its size, the version I have been given is only 50 MB big, 10 MB when zipped down. That means that you only really need seven 3,5'' floppy disks to play get it on a machine without CD-ROM. Fantastic! SI should seriously consider releasing this on floppy disks. The main reason to the small size is that there's no singleplayer-mode, everything is on the net, in a so-called "gameworld". The current ones have 500 players on each, but this will probably increase when the game is released.

Players
Although there's only 500 players in each gameworld, there is some hard competition in getting the best players. The wonderkids from games such as CM 03/04 and FM07 get snapped up before you can say "Pineapples.", however some well-known players are really expensive so that you can't get them at once.  Cause you only start with a small budget, the current one is at £500,000, so naturally you can't buy Steven Gerrard at once, even though you can go down to -£2M before bankruptcy (he costs £3,5M). If you are interested in how you make money in FMLive, read the article about federations.

The most expensive players in the game. None of these have any club to play for yet, but the richest clubs will probably get them soon. The players who are greyed out are not available in the game yet, these will be available when more players signed up. This way, new people will be able to sign good players too.

Although the more famous players are hard to get, that doesn't mean that you have to buy crap players. You can actually get fairly decent ones with a small budget, and with many players to choose from, SIGames haven't removed the fun in looking for hours and hours after good players. The search filters are the same as in FM-games; so you could easily try to find a Jamaican sweeper with 20 in finishing and 20 in creativity if you want. Not that it's likely that there is one.

Meet Alberto, the 30 years old spanish hunk who plays in a team full of South-Americans and scores goals. Gracias.

No waiting
One thing that I was worried about before I tested the game, was the waiting time. For those of you who've played FM 2007 (or previous versions) online, you know that you waste a lot of time on waiting for other players; there's always a slow player who needs to reorganize is staff and training schedule every month. Think about having to wait for 1000 players like that, all the time. Now that's hell for you. Luckily, FMLive is not like this at all. You play the game in your own tempo, and play matches whenever you want. If you use the "Auto-Match Maker", you can find teams to play against within seconds, and you can join competitions and federations to win trophies and climb the rankings. Before you start a match, you've got five minutes to set up the squad and prepare for utter humiliation, and during the game you can request time-outs if you really need to (you can substitute players during the match though). It is a system that works quite well, but perhaps two minutes is enough, even for the beginners. It usually takes only about 10 seconds for both teams to get ready anyways.

"ffs that was never an offisde"
Football Manager Live use the same match-engine as FM 2008, with some minor changes. The players are smaller, and you've got a chat-box to the right of the Live Match-screen. You've also got a timeline and some buttons like "Request Time Out" and "Abandon Match". You can also place bets, but that might be a feature that will be removed in the final version, it's not often used. Besides, you rarely see Alex Ferguson and Benitez waving around with money on the stands saying things like "Wanna bet on this game? I bet Ronaldo's salary this week on a 1-0 win." You can change the pitch-size in this game, just like in the new FM08, with has some influence on the playing style. As you can see in the screenie below, I'm trying out a massive pitch-size at the moment.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING KEEPEEER???" FMLive would probably be a lot of fun with a voice-chat feature. But the chat works well, although not everyone talks much. Sometimes however, you end up chatting about things going on in the match minutes after it actually happened.

Like in other FM-games, you have ups and downs in this game too. Each game is a new challenge, and since every opposition is a team managed by a human being, you never now what will happen. Maybe the guy or girl on the other side of the internet is trying out a very offensive 6-0-4 tactic with his reserve sides for the next match, while you are using your top 11 players and your favourite tactic. If you do trash them in that match, that's great :-), but you don't really know if your squad and your tactic is any good. The only way to figure that out is to play more games, and eventually you will see what works and what doesn't work against which type of tactics and styles with your team. You see, if you have a squad full of South-Americans you will play in a different style than if you just have Germans in your team, and this is something you should take in consideration while you are playing. No match is a guaranteed win even if you are 1st on the world ranking and are playing against the 122nd place, because people are smarter than the AI and can change tactics and players more rapidly and suddenly.

Not everyone takes loosing a match easily.

Neat stuff
There isn't anything which is really annoying in FMLive, even in the test-phase. The game goes automatically over to "Away"-mode when you aren't there or when you minimize the window to visit the CMFrenzy forum. In "Away"-mode people can't challenge you, so you don't end up suddenly being in a match that way. You get pop-ups when you get mail or news, but only when you are playing the game, so they are rarely annoying. As mentioned, you've got a ranking list, and there's also a records list, so there's always something to do in the game, something to achieve. However, they should and probably will include some more awards and such to make the game even more interesting. A world cup would be a cool addition for example.

Three teams starting over again within an hour, and 15 teams bidding for one player. Life ain't easy sometimes, even in this gameworld.

Summa summarum
From what I've seen so far, I think the game can become a success. But only if it doesn't cost too much per month, the ideal solution would be a one-time fee as with the mmorpg Guild Wars. I don't see why this shouldn't be possible with this game. CM Online was a massive failure, not only because the game was "meh", but also because of the monthly fees. This game is more than just "meh" though, it is a well made game, although you still have the match-bugs from FM and some other, new bugs too. These need to be fixed before the release, especially considering that people can't wait for patches for several months when they are paying a monthly fee to play it. It just doesn't work that way. All in all Football Manager Live is a really promising game, it seems like the developers have listened to the gamers when they made the game, 'cause there's very little I can put my finger on that is "bad" or "annoying" in this game. It is as good as stripped for unnecsessary features, you don't have silly team-talks, staff and complicated agreements and farmer clubs to worry about. A good old thumbs up from me.