One of the surprises at the show was the playable demo of the new massively multi player online version of the insanely addictive Football Manager, simply named Football Manager Live. The first question I had and I’m sure you have is how will the game actually work online? You don’t get take control of real teams as you decide your team name, team colours and every other little detail that you would normally see in a Football Manager title. At the start of a new game players will be given £500,000 to spend although all players start off at a free rating and will be decided in a draft like way. If you want Rooney then you can offer him a contract but if someone wants him they will offer a bigger one and then you have an auction for the player. Once you’ve picked your dream team you are free to play the game the way you wish against 1000 other real managers in your game world.

Each season roughly lasts a month and league matches aren’t really scheduled as much as they are deadlined. Meaning that you’ll be given a few games that have to be played by a certain date if you aren’t both online at any time the assistant manager will take control for that game though they will be using your tactics. Game speed will be decided between the two players, if you both want to speed through the match then that’s fine but otherwise there is a middle ground encase you both can’t make a decision.

The team working on this are a completely separate team. When asked if some of the new features and layout would make the jump back to Fm09 they said “possibly”. But the fact that it is a different team shows as they have really simplified the game to make it pure community based fun. There is no media, no training and no more team talks at half time. The new features are more community supported stuff like active chat rooms at any time and friendly match challenges on the fly.

Sports Interactive have built the game so they can make changes to game worlds as they please. If the majority want a change on their server then SI have the ability to implement it pretty quickly. James (the guy at the Sega booth) actually said that…

“There will be no new version of the game for about 8 years due to the small changes we can make every now and then”

So if your a Football Manager fan I guess your already hooked by the prospect of this game so here’s the details. It’s monthly subscribed and we were told that it will cost roughly £5-£6 per month although if recommend people to the game you will get money off that fee. Unfortunately they have no plans to have free trail versions unlike other MMO’s but this does sound wise as a big majority of people who play FM normally are already getting this.

Any worries that this game won’t work on your PC should be shot down as most of the data is actually kept on the server side and the fact that the engine is very scalable. We even got the word that..

“The only data that is stored at the user site amounts to only One Megabyte“

When we asked about custom databases he couldn’t answer, so there is a slim possibility this could still happen. Although I did ask about the chance of a Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 release later on and the response was simply ‘no’.

They are currently going through another 3 months of testing and the final game is due for release in June. So expect a lot less updates from me come June time.

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