Miles Jacobson, director of Sports Interactive, put out a statement yesterday regarding the future of the Football Manager series. FM24 is coming with some significant changes, but that pales compared to what FM25 will have.
FM24 will be the end of the game as we know it
FM23 has broken records being the most played football management sim of all time, hitting 5 million players. This is a sign of how dedicated the fanbase is, not how good the game was. Because, to be frank, this was not a great game like its predecessors. The difference between FM23 and FM24 was tiny and not worth the AAA price of $40. Miles acknowledged that Sports Interactive agreed with it not meeting usual standards. He explained how the studio had to drop many features before the release of the game. Sports Interactive couldn’t be sure to implement the features without issues in time for the beta. Though, FM24 will make up for that
Football Manager will be the 20th anniversary of the series. Miles explained how this will be the most complete game of FM, and the last of its kind. He said, “The FM24 feature set was confirmed and fully designed earlier than previous releases, thanks to additional resources joining the studio. We’re also due to be feature complete (when every featured design is implemented by the dev, art, and UI teams) earlier than before too. Crucially, this gives us more time to finesse the new features-”. After this, he announced the biggest feature ever coming to the FM series. Saves will now transfer from one version to the next. You will be able to continue your save from 23 to 24 and then 24 to 25. This is one of the most requested features from the fanbase over the years. But be careful with downloaded leagues. They may not be able to transfer that file correctly.
Project Dragonfly
So, by now, you’re wondering in what way FM24 is the end of an era. Well, Sports Interactive will be using the Unity engine to build Football Manager 25. This means completely new graphics and animations. The name of this for SI is Project Dragonfly, which started back in 2020. The one downside to these vast changes is that the minimum specs to run the game will change. Many of us that play FM has played it through thick and thin, likely starting out with laptops that struggled to play any games. Anyone thinking FM24 will be a stepping stone to FM25 could be wrong. In the blog post, Miles said some of the animation improvements would start with FM24. On top of that, he promised some tasty features to be announced in September.
If that wasn’t enough to get you hyped. Women’s football finally arrives in FM25. Sports Interactive announced Women’s Football coming to FM back in 2021. Many were confused about what happened because over the two years SI didn’t again bring up the topic. Here, it seems the issues were legal, and they were trying to figure out the match engine translation with their games playing out differently. So, now the wait begins for the feature announcements in September.
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