[Football Manager 2022 Headline Features - In The Studio Part 2]

Maybe if the AI teambuilding was competitive, deadline day would matter. I've literally never used that feature.

[FM21-When to throw water bottles?]

Never. It's unprofessional and abusive.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

6 hours ago, ImDaWeasel said:

Ah before the dark times. Don't know what you've got till it's gone I suppose.

Here's to the next 4 years of rubbish match UI and broken stats. All hail the xG! 

xG is good! The problem is treating it like a Big New Feature instead of just quietly slipping it into a robust, customizable Match Stats panel that the user can resize and rearrange.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

Every. Single. Time. I'm in a replay, I spend a heartbeat trying to remember how to get out of it or skip it, and then I remember that the "Skip" button sits on top of the enforced Match Stats panel?! instead of just to the right of the scoreboard where other view-related prompts sit (e.g., "Waiting for Next Highlight...").

Can I get this one tiny thing? Just move it to where it's easily viewable and consistent with other in-game messaging?

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

22 minutes ago, McClane29 said:

Find them baffling to be honest.

Either have the club short name or a 2/3 letter abbreviation. Seems like we just have complete randomness without any look of consistency.

I believe there's a mod for this: 

 

I haven't tried it yet myself.

By the way, SI, I'd pay five, maybe ten quid to remove all 3D "backdrops" from the game and replace them with plain black, if you're in the mood to do some cosmetic microtransactions.

[Advice for making my Palermo save more difficult?]

2 minutes ago, Polski97 said:

I see you manage Venezia - how is that for you ?

Also pretty easy because they're also a fallen team that has good investment and staffing behind them. The big difference is they weren't of Palermo's stature to begin with, and their stadium is about 1/4 the size.

[Advice for making my Palermo save more difficult?]

Palermo is going to be an easy save to start out with because they've got massive structural and financial advantages over the other Serie C teams. It should toughen up when you're back in Serie A.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

6 minutes ago, Tonton_Zola said:

I sense it's this arrival of graphical 'spaces' that - poorly integrated with the textual world of the game - contributes to these moments of what I would call cognitive dissonance. 
This is a posh way of saying, "hold on, where am I?" "where am i looking? "is this 'my' perspective?" "are the boxes where the journalists are?" "is this my eye-view, or a camera view?"

From a design and user-experience point of view, this is highly, highly problematic.

Strongly agree.

FM21's interface changes make it harder for me to find the information I need, more laborious to take the actions I want to take, and actively work against my immersion at every turn. There are ways to add color, visual interest, and immerse the player in their (highly specific!) football manager universe without imposing stale, repetitive, ugly, full-screen 3D scenes that actively detract from what I'm trying to understand and accomplish.

I know people have joked about the game being "spreadsheet simulator" in the past, but spreadsheets are incredibly efficient and user-friendly ways of presenting information. Lists are readable. User interface that works from left to right and top to bottom with clear headings respects how humans process information, at least in the West. Tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, and consistent visual cues (and sounds, which the game completely neglects) help users learn your interface. Having a consistent visual and iconographic language, consistent prompts, and consistent layout helps users navigate new and unfamiliar screens faster and with less frustration. Providing more options for users to tailor and customize what information they see and how it's presented helps overcome any impediments they may have. The best screen in the game is the Squad screen because it provides a ton of customization options and filters and is, at heart, a fancy spreadsheet. (Although, after years of bug reports and user complaints, SI still has not addressed the many bugs and quirks of custom columns...)

It honestly feels like someone high up at SI is forcing this direction on the larger team. It's such a wild misstep for a series that's always had pretty decent and unobtrusive UI/UX.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

Thanks for the quick fix to newgens!

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

3 hours ago, Footix said:

All the UI issues ... do SI still support 1024 x 768 or whatever low-res they used to showcase the new games in? If they do I suspect it's a matter of not having time or resource to create proper layouts for all the various monitors out there. More like "make it look good on the lowest one and then scale up accordingly". Result: lots of empty space on higher res panels. 

I just checked the latest Steam survey, and it appears 2.26% of users are using a primary display resolution below 1366x768, which is still used by some cheaper-end laptops, I think.

Regardless, while some of the problems definitely stem from not paying attention to the 80%+ of users who use 1080p or higher, many of the principal UI problems are about layout, placement, design, etc. Most of my issues with the match engine UI would be a problem at 1024x768, too.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

More fun with UI/UX, this time in a match:

There are four ways to meaningfully affect how the match engine screen displays. They are in ... four different corners of the screen. So I've pointed them out with arrows!

In the top left, we can hide or unhide the Match Stats and Notable Events panel. This wasn't clear to me initially, because the blue icon is a little hard to parse at 1440p and uses no familiar interactable iconography. You cannot customize this Match Stats panel as you could in the past (more on that in a second!), and you cannot shrink or adjust the size of the Notable Events section, even though it takes up a huge chunk of dead space. Clicking on the team names or clock also controls this panel, rather than, say, taking you to a team screen or pausing the clock.

In the bottom left, there's a (hugely important) expand button for Tactics & Subs that gives you access to in-detail stuff. It's kind of buried at the end of an eye scan, which is weird. Also, once you expand this panel, you have to close it by clicking cancel in the bottom right, which is another long journey for the eye and the mouse. Almost none of the other interactions use this sequence! You cannot click the button twice to collapse the expand, even if you didn't take any actions; likewise, you can't click in the open space above the expanded panel. This panel also re-animates every time you click a tab (Tactics, Player, Set Pieces, etc.), which is a bizarre and disorienting choice. The distance from the tabs in the top left to the cancel button in the bottom right is, again, a screen width.

In the top right, you have your match speed, viewing options, play/pause stuff. There's actually a nearly hidden bar that allows you to record, rewind time, etc. ... though it's divorced from the game clock in the top left, and the absence of a timeline reduces player control overall. All of these options are uncoupled from all the information panels that would cause you to interact with them.

In the bottom right, you can hide the Tactics & Subs panel, even though it uses the same coloration as the SUBS button below it, which actually flicks between substitutes and players on the pitch (unhelpfully labeled "PITCH" rather than "ON PITCH" or "PLAYING"). This may just be me, but I found the label inconsistent with what's being shown: at a glance, I thought it was showing subs when SUBS was the label; it's the reverse. You can also show/hide the Touchline Tablet here ... provided a highlight is playing. If a highlight is not playing, the icon stays there but no longer hides the window, which feels bad. In general, the game does a poor job of distinguishing between "in highlight" and "not in highlight" than it used to, though the motion graphic in the top left is appreciated.

Some questions:

• Why are these four discrete interactable areas not combined as tabs or better arranged to minimize eye and mouse movement?
• Why are they so poorly labeled?
• Why do they all use different and internally contradictory interactions?
• Why does the interaction icon for "Tactics & Subs" work differently than the interaction icon for "Instructions" even though they're the same icon?
• Why, if I open a Shouts panel, am I able to click outside it to cancel, but can't do that with Instructions or Tactics & Subs, even if I haven't made any changes?
• Why do some of these icons lose functionality in different game states?
• Why are there no hover states or tooltips for these buttons?
• Why are there no keyboard shortcuts? If there are keyboard shortcuts I'm not aware of, why are they not shown to the player?
• Does a new user know to use spacebar to play/pause? How?

Let's turn to that Touchline Tablet, which basically lets you blob some (not all) of the old widgets and rearrange them. It's on the far right of the screen, past a lot of dead space (highlighted in yellow), including the wasted notable events space and wasted "dugout" space that rarely populates (and sometimes vanishes before you can act on it). My eye frequently has to "read" past these blank spaces.

Vitally, I cannot drag or rearrange these panels, which is a major step back from previous versions, and the panels pay no respect to higher resolutions; I cannot even resize Match Stats or The Dugout. Also, if I see something actionable on the Touchline Tablet, my eye and mouse now have to jerk all the way back to the bottom left to make adjustments. Some of what's in this screen is redundant or unhelpful. It duplicates player information shown in the bottom bar (albeit in a much more readable list format)! It duplicates match stats! Yes, it lets you customize them, but you won't see that customization reflected in the top left, because someone at SI has decreed that the customization and flexibility present in earlier versions has to go in favor of a "realistic" touchline tablet that is anything but realistic.

So we're left with an active impediment to clarity that fights the user's eye and is uncoupled from the actions you might take in response to it, which are scattered in the corners of the screen. And because this is the defined vertical height and layout of the panel, you frequently have to scroll information within the panel because you can't pop out or resize the information as discrete panels. Again, you used to be able to do this! It was granular and great!

Some bonus questions:

• Why are the team names shortened at higher resolutions? It seems unnecessary.
• Why is game speed set to max by default in FM21?
• Why do left clicks on the subs product menus similar to right-click menus throughout the rest of the game? Meanwhile, right clicks here do nothing?
• When I'm viewing my substitutes, why does clicking them do nothing? Shouldn't I at least be able to select "Substitute On"?
• Why is Notable Events not available in the Touchline Tablet? If I use the (superior) Match Stats panel available the tablet, I can't turn off the leftmost panel without losing the events.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

Just to illustrate some of the UI complaints with an example.

In the screenshot, I've highlighted where my eye naturally falls in red; it's where it's led by the perspective of the scene. Meanwhile, things I will need to read or potentially interact with are in green. The yellow overlay is unused dead space. I'm playing on a 27" 1440p monitor, and my eye has to traverse all of the yellow to find the things in green, which are laid out in ways that defy reading order or any eye-tracking research I'm aware of. I have to go from the red to the green box to the green circles, read through the rote text, select one, then go back to continue in the top right (which, again, defies convention; most confirm prompts in most UI design sit in the bottom right because that's where readers finish). And that's a best-case scenario. If I want to do anything else, I have to go to the far corners of the screen or dig into other menus to find information not available on this screen, the overwhelming expanse of which is wasted.

And why is it wasted? To fit in a 3D "backdrop" of the corner of a flatly lit office with a drop ceiling and some cabling on the wall. And a "Football Manager" step and repeat that reminds me I'm playing a videogame called Football Manager, in case I'd forgotten. I guess the idea here is that I, the manager, am standing in front of this and being interviewed by James Mitchell? But why is James Mitchell represented, in 2D space, as being in front of the step and repeat, while I, the manger, am at the bottom of the screen? There is a 2D schematic of our conversation that is completely at odds with the pointless, gamey 3D depiction of it. I had to leave other, useful information behind to get to this full-screen presentation. Now consider how this conversation is depicted (up and down) versus every single conversation you've ever seen represented in, say, a messaging app, or social media DMs, all of which acknowledge that people read from left to right and from top to bottom, and that real-life conversations happen in lateral space.

The best user experience I can hope for here is that if I see this screen often enough—and I'll see it 50+ times a season!—I'll get good at clicking through it really fast by learning an algorithmic set of approaches to press questions, same as in previous years. But the act of reading and clicking on things is now harder and less intuitive than it was before, and I am far more conscious that I'm playing a videogame than I was in the past.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

2 hours ago, imp44791 said:

The biggest problem of all is that the designers have opted for a path away from the “spreadsheet game that urges you to tell stories to yourself inside your head” option to one of trying to create a computerised world. Hence you get the pathetic little Ken doll for your avatar and the bunch of empty chairs room during team meetings and press conferences. It is disastrous. It looks like an adventure game from the 1980s where you enter a room with a static picture and a block of text below it describing what you see. I half expected to see “You can go: North, East and Up”.

[...]

Can I please have an option to opt out of the Ken doll please and use a photograph like back in the day? It is absolutely woeful.

Equally woeful is the UI in many parts of the game as others have mentioned. I do not mind so much the change of the menu orders during the game as others do, because I did not have the experience of the last 6 years so I don’t have the same muscle memory as them. But the press conference/team meeting one (the 80s adventure game module, as above) is an absolute torture. The eyes dance around from tiny lettered question to tiny lettered answer, it searches in vain for important information like where the player you want to praise/light a fine under actually is. It gives an actual headache. It’s bad.

Strongly agree with all of this. The current game feels like it's creaking under the weight of some imposed directorial vision that doesn't fit. Is the end goal to make FM a first-person virtual reality RPG where you wander around some empty offices, sit down at your chair, and do paperwork at your desk? If so, the graphics need to move beyond Second Life territory.

But I'd argue that these choices make the experience of interacting with the game more time-consuming, less intuitive, uglier, and more prescriptive. I can no longer freely imagine what my office looks like at a lower-league club in Chile, or Sicily, or Australia; it's always these same drab rooms with their flat lighting and blurry pictures on the wall. It actively murders my immersion in the world that the mechanics work so hard to create.

I wish I could turn off all 3D except the match engine, and nuke my "avatar" from orbit.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

9 minutes ago, kiwityke said:

He looks good when he has time and space. He looks less good when he doesn't or he has to work for space or to get the ball back. Something you get far more of in Serie A.

He tends to dwell on the ball a lot, something you just can't do in the Premier League.

This is such a tired, trite comparison between the leagues. Never mind that Pogba played in 40 Champions League games for Juve.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

3 hours ago, wicksyFM said:

 

Yes it is. SI say that the fix is a top priority. Would really like to know if a fix is save game compatible.

Oof. Hope a hotfix is coming soon, but I'll have to put aside my save for now.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

3 hours ago, upthetoon said:

I don't know whose brainchild this UI/UX belongs to, and i doubt it will be changed for FM21. This is not a case of getting used to. It's not possible to 'get used' to it, as it's a very painful experience. To compound the bad UI, there's a trove of information hidden behind SO MUCH OF CLICKING. You click and click and click. Even the Columns & resizing have not been fixed for years.

SI needs to tear down and rebuilt the entire UI experience of the players. Never did i imagine that we will have a very promising ME but end up with such a disastrous UI.

It is... bewildering. On my 1440p monitor, there are numerous screens where 70% of the real estate is empty, dead space (or a terrible, prescribed 3D backdrop that actively hurt my immersions). My eye and mouse have to rove across huge gappy spaces to find information that's laid out in bizarre fashion. Confirm prompts are inconsistently in the top and bottom right, and often wholly divorced from the action I'm taking. It's frequently unclear what I can even interact with! Even figuring out who's reacting to what in a team talk is needlessly complex because nothing is laid out in a way that's intuitive to a human reader: my eye has to rove clockwise around a 2D representation of a dressing room, even as that representation is battling with a 3D representation behind it. I'm constantly being dragged out of the default interface into a fullscreen presentation that requires you to investigate and click in the far corners or edges of the screen to labor through the most minor of tasks, e.g. asking a captain to talk to another player.

My eyes are literally getting tired navigating FM21's menus and interactions. And that's not even getting into the presentation of matches; the removal of widgets and the heavy prescription of SI's vision of what information the manager is allowed to know midgame is baffling to me. They are making it harder to read and respond to the game, which is upsetting, because the actual football is much improved this year.

At root, I feel like there's some overarching conceit about slowly making the game "immersive" that is causing fundamental tensions in UI/UX.  Representing the game abstractly works wonders because it allows people to access the information they need to furnish their imagination. No library of 3D assets can compete with the variability and range of the FM experience. The goal is to represent football management, not to depict it.

And don't get me started on the gestures system, which should be flatly scrapped. "Solving" the problem of subjective adverbs by hiding subjective attitudinal modes behind subjective (and culturally constructed!) body language just adds an extra layer of gauze between what the player wants to convey and how the game interprets their intent. I just end up reading the tooltip anyway! The issue has always been imposing longwinded, fussy, prescriptive written prompts that a player has to labor through, learn by heart, and then perform by rote. The gestures system deepens that problem; it makes the process of manager-player interaction more tedious. Just replace all of it with active verbs that are easier to parse, easier to translate into other languages and cultures, faster to read, and clearer in intent: Praise, Criticize, Encourage, etc. Scrap prescribed written prompts wherever possible; let the player imagine what they are saying and how; give them meaningful, intuitive abstractions that they can project their own feelings onto. I honestly think SI could learn a lot by looking at how a game like Crusader Kings 2 structures, represents, and allows for meaningful player-AI interactions using simple verbs and clear feedback, while still allowing for variability and unpredictability.

[Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread]

The UI in much of this is an unmitigated disaster, especially at 1440p. I do not understand why so many retrograde changes were made, or the fixation with early-2000s-looking 3D "immersive" scenes behind everything.

[Football Manager 2021 - New Headline Features]

5 hours ago, Mars_Blackmon said:

To some of their fans, graphics don’t really matter compared to the other games. Some people just don’t buy FM for the graphics.

 

im not against graphics but i didn’t start playing FM for graphics. I enjoyed W11/PES & FIFA and wanted more depth.

To be clear, I don't care about the graphics in FM that much. There are plenty of other, more substantive improvements I'd like to see. But I do think some of the defense of how they churn out and market their games comes from a place where people aren't familiar with the rest of the videogame industry.

[Football Manager 2021 - New Headline Features]

Literally every single game in existence uses the best version of its graphics for marketing purposes, to the point that gamers are uniformly clued into this and tend to be skeptical. I think SI get away with a lot of strange practices and excuses because FM is the only game some of their fans play and the only developer they ever interact with.

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

Here's my time played on Steam.

FM11: 792 hours
FM12: 780 hours
FM13: 641 hours
FM14: 668 hours
FM15: 285 hours
FM16: 337  hours
FM17: 302 hours
FM18: 276 hours
FM19: 118 hours
FM20: 0 hours, despite receiving the game for free

It's not looking good for FM21.

[What year is the best version of football manager?]

By playtime, it looks like it was one of FM11/12/13. For pure nostalgia, probably CM97/98. The objectively "best" version of the game is probably from the last few years but not the last couple.

[Adjusting Column Width by hand]

This has been a problem in every FM for as long as I can remember.

[Football Manager 2020 - Feature Announcement Blogs]

6 hours ago, Zemahh said:

What's "more specific targeting" on that screenshot, I don't see any new options?

We can already specify the type of transfer, position and the role.

Yeah, I've been using this for years. The new feature is just a more intuitive menu for something that already exists. Which is nice and all, I guess.

[Football Manager 2020 - Feature Announcement Blogs]

I've said it for years, but the marketing and drip-feed of information SI do for FM is just wildly out of the norm for videogames. It's kind of refreshing how unpolished it is, but that's undermined by the attitude and presentation to consumers feeling adversarial, especially when Miles is involved.

A Twitter poll to slop out random lines from patch notes is ... wow.

[Football Manager 2019 Official Feedback Thread]

3 hours ago, jujigatame said:

I must say though, training seems like a horrific change for the worse.  Did anyone ask for this level of complexity to be added to the least interesting, least fun part of the game?  At least before you could generally influence training according to your preferences by moving the match prep vs. general training slider, and add/remove rest days, and choose a particular focus like tactical familiarity.  Now the whole thing is so monstrously intimidating it's become an all or nothing affair.  Either you delve into it and spend hours customizing your schedules, or you leave it up to your assman and have zero influence on it at all.  In short, I strongly dislike the new training module and view it as a grave miscalculation on SI's part.

This was my initial impression, but not how it turned out in practice. What I do is pick the premade routines and then tailor them slightly. I do this about once a month to make sure everything's in good shape (and again if a schedule change messes it up), and it takes less than five minutes. There are some easy marginal gains to be made (the premade routines don't make use of, e.g., Community Service/Team Bonding/Match Review much), and it's hard to mess it up totally if you're working from the templates.

I was initially very intimidated, but you really can put as much or as little effort in as you want, and it's more intuitive and easier to adjust than it looks at first glance.

It also addresses something that was deficient in the game before: You didn't really feel like you were "coaching" your team outside of matches. Now I spend a lot more time thinking about—and a little time tailoring—how training works based on what I need in the short or long term.