The new Football Manager game will be available to try for free from Thursday. The preview version will be playable in every game mode, meaning players can check out all the new features before making a decision on a longer-term commitment to football's most immersive franchise.
FM27 has a ton of updates, many of them laser-focused on enabling the most detailed-orientated virtual gaffers to bring their tactical understanding from the real world into the game and get results by applying it.
Before the free preview launches, FourFourTwo spoke to Sports Interactive and Football Manager developer Antony Farley about the new tactical effectiveness and training features, and a streamlined 'tactical tweaks' suite that should appeal to masters of game management.
'There are some really fun options' in FM27's tactical tweaks features
"We've introduced something called tactical tweaks, which is the ability to set multiple team instructions at once, but from the touchline rather than having to go through those complex tactics, menus, and navigate those menus and make your kind of decisions individually," Farley tells FourFourTwo.
"What we've done is given an option – it's a dropdown on the screen – that just says to play with more urgency, for example. And you press that, and what it will do is under the hood, it will set two or three different team instructions that give you that outcome.
"The benefit of that is that you kind of feel a lot more active in the match and when you hover over those tweaks, it'll tell you explicitly what is happening when you press the button. That’s a really nice way of kind of almost translating the complex tactical instructions into something, maybe a little bit more digestible."
Football Manager has become the standard bearer for the video games industry's pursuit of realistic simulation, but the fact that making the game truly real is impossible does mean that it has to be fun to play.
Striking a balance between the two is a challenge. Giving players immediate access to tactical options that are born of the real world but equip them to experiment and take a gamble or two is the natural result.
"There are some really fun options there as well: we've just got a button now to send your goalkeeper up for set pieces," Farley continues. "Like, that is going to be a very tempting button for people to press: quite high risk, high reward, theoretically, but that's, that's one that I'm really excited about seeing.
"It's one of those things that feels like it's been there forever once you get used to it: you kind of get that muscle memory to go over there and make some tweaks."
That acknowledgement that there are different stripes of Football Manager player and that some want control in depth while others prefer to rattle through fixtures underpins several of the new game's updates.
It's also the reason behind the full free trial, which gives prospective purchasers of the game a meaningful chance to explore FM27 warts and all over several days before deciding whether they want to throw countless hours into it.
Farley told FourFourTwo that the team realises not everyone will be suited to the FM27 experience. The trial is designed to enable people to make an informed choice without any proof of purchase.
