Football Manager Thanksgiving
5 Things I Love About This Game
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Football Manager Thanksgiving
Football Manager can get on my nerves from time to time. Sometimes the game feels too hard, and sometimes it feels to easy. There’s always something to complain about, from the punishing nature of the squad morale system to interpersonal interactions that feel completely fake and wrong.
However, sometimes we let those little inconveniences get in the way of what a great game this really is. It’s important for us to reflect on the things that Sports Interactive does well, not just the things that it could use some help with.
In that spirit, here are five things that I absolutely love about Football Manager – five things that keep me coming back for more.
Role Playing
They lied to you when they told you that this is a sports sim.
The truth is that Football Manager is a role playing game designed as a sports management game. And it really should be obvious, by the way.
Football Manager comes with its own built-in difficulty system. At the beginning of your save, you can determine your own level of experience, and move sliders to change around your own attributes. You can instantly become an influential, experienced expert, or turn yourself into a bumbling fool who barely knows the basic rules – and you have the freedom to do whatever you like without any threat of in-game penalty.
And guess what? Your attributes develop naturally as time goes on. So do the attributes of your staff members, your players, your competing managers, and every other character in the game.
It’s a role playing game, pure and simple. Thankfully, Sports Interactive recognize this fact, and make innovations from time to time to play up those role playing elements.
In my mind, the thing that sets Football Manager apart from other sims are its clear role playing elements. That’s what makes the game feel so immersive – and what causes you to become emotionally attached to your squad.
Freedom
Football Manager has better tactical customization than any sports game I’ve ever seen.
Want to create a bizarre formation? Want to go with all strikers, or with all defenders? Want to create some sort of modern art inspired asymmetrical atrocity? Go for it!
In fact, your choices extend beyond just your tactics. Want to be crazy like me and go with an all-youth squad? You can do so to your heart’s content. Want to make a squad completely out of players from a certain country, or players born in a certain region? You can do so as well – quite easily, in fact.
Football Manager isn’t necessarily a complete sandbox – you do have to please your board, after all. However, it’s much closer to that complete sandbox experience than any other sports game out there.
Interactions
Now, I should note that Football Manager’s player interaction system is often maligned. It’s actually pretty common to get into an intractable situation, where there is simply no good answer and no way to solve the problem.
Having said that, the fact that people complain about Football Manager’s player interaction system is itself a sign of how good the system actually is.
Player interaction is mostly unheard of in other sports games. OOTP, a game that some of its fans consider the baseball equivalent of Football Manager, simply has no option for direct player interaction. You can’t chew out your closer for blowing a lead late in the game, nor can you give a pep talk to your young slugger who is in a slump.
No other game I can think of comes even close to Football Manager in terms of meaningful interaction with non-playable characters. We might be frustrated by their antics – but the real truth is that we care about helping them solve their own problems. That level of connection and depth is difficult to achieve in any gaming genre.
Stability
Football Manager is remarkable because of how stable the game is.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you’ll never lose a save to file corruption. It does happen from time to time, and it is still important to make backups.
However, I’ve never had Football Manager quit on me suddenly. I’ve never had cryptic database errors pop up, nor have I experienced significant slowing down as the save grew older.
Though there are occasional hiccups, Football Manager is actually one of the most stable games I’ve ever played. And it’s not odd to see saves last 30, 40, or 50 in-game years (though I presume those managers are able to actually win games, unlike me). That’s something that we should commend.
Community
Football Manager’s community is simply legendary.
The number of free mods is simply amazing. There seems to be a never-ending supply of new tactical ideas, of new and creative skins, and of people who just can’t wait to show you their new and creative take on the in-game world.
The community is simply superb, from the blog world to Twitter to YouTube and beyond. It’s a big community, but it really feels like a small town – even though it stretches through national and linguistic barriers.
I don’t think any other game has a community quite like this one.