The month of October is a month of transition, and for Football Manager players that means wrapping up their saves and turning toward the release of the next iteration of the game from Sports Interactive. That’s certainly true for me, but first I’ll give my thoughts on FM21
My Saves
I mentioned in my last post that I played less of FM21 than past years’ games, but I still managed to complete seven full seasons across two saves:
I enjoyed this year’s game, but ultimately found I needed a break in between releases. Now, with some time away to reflect, here are my thoughts on the headline features introduced in FM21. Those thoughts will inform the overall grade at the end of the article.
Improved Interactions
In my preview post last year, I felt that the improvements to the interactions would be the most important change introduced in FM21. This wasn’t quite accurate, but it was a nice quality of life improvement. Football Manager involves a lot of clicking and a lot of menus, so having a way to reduce that was pleasing. In addition, I thought the the “Quick Chat” screens were attractive and made what is essentially a text box entertaining to bring up and click through.
Where I think this feature failed was in how little it did to change the actual gameplay. Last year I wrote: “My one fear for the new system is that it becomes as rote and optimizable as in the past, just with a fancier UI.” Unfortunately, I believe my fears were realized. Still, the fancier UI counts for something.
Upping Immersion
The other feature(really collection of features) I previewed was the focus on increased immersion within the game UI. The updates to the match interface were nice, especially being able to sub from the main screen. I also really liked the change from numbers to icons to display fatigue and sharpness. It’s a subtle thing, but it added a dose of realism — no manager would know the exact percentage of how tired/sharp his players are — while simplifying things for the FM player. It’s less precise, but with so much information thrown at you while playing, it’s better to lose precision in places where it’s not necessary. It doesn’t really matter whether a player is at 64% versus 61%. What matters is if they are tired or not.
Another change that wasn’t officially announced was players being less willing to sign contracts with from smaller teams. This may have been part of the financial reworking they did to reflect the new COVID economy or maybe just part of general game balancing. Either way, while often frustrating, it made the game more challenging, and thereby more realistic. As nice as it was in past years for your Wonderkids to spurn PSG and re-sign for a fraction of their value, it does draw you out of the fantasy football world that FM should be creating.
Taken together I‘d say that SI was successful in their goal of deepening immersion through UI changes. The only negative here is that on the margin the change was minor, even when lumping several new “features” together.
Match Engine
While my feelings were mixed on the new features introduced in FM21, I have near unreserved praise for the match engine updates that game in this year’s edition. In their introduction of the match engine improvements for FM21, SI stated that they wanted to the midfield battles in the center of the pitch to matter more, and on that they completely succeeded. The amount and quality of passing, as well as interceptions and dribbles made the build-up action feel more realistic and more exciting. I put more thought into signing and developing central midfielders than ever before, and I felt that that effort was rewarded in game. And those games were good enough that I switched from Key Highlights to Extended Highlights just to watch more.
There were still the occasional quirks, but in my opinion FM21 has inarguably the best match engine in recent years.
Overall Score: 7.5/10
Taken together, I’d give the new features added in FM21 a 6, while the improved match engine I’d give a 9. Combined that leave us with a 7.5 or Good. This is a shade lower than the score I gave FM20 (8). The features in FM21 ended up being underwhelming, but given everything that happened in 2020, it’s amazing that they delivered a new game at all. I’ll have more in my next post, but I think the work they did for FM21 will pay off in a big way in FM22.
I’m curious to know how others felt about this year’s game. Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter at @FMBowser.
