jmlima

I mean, I can see why they are doing this. Obviously because if buys them some leeway with regards to dates and means they can fudge them along and say 'it was always intended to be like this'. Now, if you were a project manager and presented your stakeholders with a roadmap like this a couple of months before the end of a multi-year project you would be... let's say, less than popular and your professional abilities would be... questioned. A roadmap in project management is always live, that's a requirement. But it also contains targets, otherwise, you may just as well drop your project. We fully appreciate the deadlines are internal, and by not committing to them, they are just buying time and good will. Again, it's not some master stroke idea, it's a way of mitigating loss of face on a project that looks to be spiralling a bit.

I blame the roadmap. Will all those TBA's you have to excuse the development team. They never realized they had to release the game.

To be fair, they are not forcing anyone to give them money right now. They are just asking for an early contribution to the Sega Sammy's Benevolent Shareholders fund.

'Unlocks TBA' AHAHAHAHAHAH... ROTFL. Oh man, cue in epic meltdown. Let me guess, a PLC needs the gamers 'support' via pre-orders to finish the game.

I mean, it's a business decision, there are always those who are easily parted with their money. But, even the White brothers had more info on their 'game'.

By now, any cover that does not feature the frog will be a disappointment.

People always post-rationalize those types of things by believing they are 'supporting' the title by pre-ordering blind. (Which, of course, other than with indy developers, they are not)

There's a sort of precedent here. OOTP allows some editing of an abstract stadium configuration BUT, you need a third party editor (not affiliated with OOTP) to create the real stadiums from scratch. I suspect, for legal reasons, this would be the best it could be done. I can certainly see some lawsuits if 3d models of stadiums started to show-up on (say) the sketch-up store or even as 3ds's and this was being done via the editor of a game on which a corporation is making money of. Someone will always find a way to export those models out of the game, the issue is whose tools are being used for it. In short, if it looks like they are making money out of using the stadium's models and those models appear in other sites, I could see a problem. Digital copyright is a very nebulous area. EDIT to say, in FM you can have 3d kits, and even player images, but you are using photoshop or similar to produce them, not FM. Until someone does a Ferrari on Sega, that should continue to be a viable way to go around these things.

Think at this point, disappointment has been almost fully priced in. We've reached that sweet spot where the blinkers fans will see everything they do as 5d chess, the disappointed ones will see everything they do as some kind of evidence they were always right and doom (not the game) will surely follow. TL;DR: your normal video game discussion forum.

Have no doubt about that when there are 4 shirts on display and one of them is of Southampton and the other of Brighton. Man City? Man Utd? Ah, we laugh in your face. Give us sunny Southampton any day of the week.

Fairly confident, like 99% for prof reasons I know the answer to that one. Copyright of the design of modern stadiums will be (in prob 90% of cases) with the stadium designers, not clubs, leagues, or others. It would require a separate contract with each designer (and them to agree to it....) for each stadium. Some designers are VERY zealous of these things.

Looks really crap that the best thing they can say for a new game poster is the looonnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg announced premier league thing. Starting to wonder if Sega Sammy should not consider a 'restructuring' of their marketing department. Then again, monopolies tend not to bring best value for customers.

1) They have not turned it into a dumbed-down console type game, with in-game achievements, and crap like that. 2) Female football works well.

Doesn't TGS end on Sunday anyway?

Think of unity like you would of flash and as3. If the as3 code is ****, then flash wouldn't save or do bugger all for it. Unity is there (like flash) to enable easy(ish) multi-platform development. It has got a ton of third-party modules (most unusable by professional developers) that help you build, much in the way of building-blocks. Unity's real strength is that it makes it a lot easier to build for multiple platforms using the (nearly) same code. That's where it really excels. (For indy developers also gives you a framework to work on, with a lot of automated stuff and third party modules you can re-use, which why indy developers flocked to it. You can build a basic FPS in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it from scratch.)

If this was real, pre-ordering right now would be a testament of faith.

Biggest news re this rumour is that it would put to dust the notion that the game is being dumbed down. If anything, this would open the tactics options even more such that, if you just want to 'plug in and play', would be left with the only option of downloading / using the default / workshop tactics. Note, not judging if this is good or bad, merely noting that this seems to be anything like the simplification that was being rumoured previously.

That would be sort of like the 20-80 system used in baseball scouting.

Loba was already doing analytics even before the 90s. And he wasn't the only one. By mid-late 90s analytics were already coming into football. Yes, VHS tape style, but nevertheless. Caveman football really started to end by the late 70s. Heck, even direct football had a basis on percentages so that can potentially already be said to be analytics.

Finally something I actually know about. Funds are complex. You are looking at funding and build times from a perspective. In some countries stadiums are part funded by the taxpayer (don't even ask why...) in other countries, some clubs will get fully subsidized stadiums. If the new stadium is part of an overall larger event (say an Euro), funding happens even quicker. I mean, Euro 2004 had a bucket load of state handouts, and clubs got in massive debt, that they offloaded to the clubs, not the football bits. Some of them are still paying the stadiums, some interest only (!), the stadiums also bust several clubs. This is just to illustrate how complex these things are and how far they are from a 'one solution for all'. The financing bit is, well, better abstracted as FM does not have a chance in hell of ever reproducing the myriad different ways the financing operates. One thing we can say. A club with 100m will not just suddenly throw those 100m into a 100m stadium. They would still finance it over a period of time so, strictly from a cash flow perspective, what you see going out would not be those 100m but the regular payments over the course of many years. Re design and building, you don't need a 4 year build. Again, in some countries, the design can take 6-9 months, approvals can be fiendishly complex (months, years, who knows?) or rubber stamped, depending on country, club, ownership, etc. Design may stagger a bit if the stadium is integrated with the inevitable associated shopping centres, office blocks, resi blocks, and so on. But, a competent and well resourced design team can still pull all of this in under a year (if the brief does not change... which it probably will as investors come on board...). Build time, anything over 2 years and you are slower than you need to be. I mean, depends on size, 2 years for a full blown major stadium, for one of those regional 5-15000 seats affairs, anything over 9 months and it's too slow. In short, yeah, 4 years but from design to completion (not just build). If for an event like an Euro, probably less as things can be compressed, approvals fast-tracked and so on. These days, because the decision on hosting is made a decade in advance, all these things can be properly planned and staggered over a longer period, which makes the process much more cost effective and allows investors to be brought on board in a more effective manner.

Facilities are totally abstracted in FM. They are nothing but an adjective and (presumably) some form of code bonus to development, ticket sales. But, to your point. Facilities can be downgraded easily. It just takes a novel development and presto. To give you an example from stadium design. Your UEFA graded facility can be easily downgraded by the simple action of UEFA changing the standard of what is an UEFA graded facility.

Double bluff! Some 5d chess mastery from Miles.

Uffff. It will be a lean game then. No more pressers, interactions, social media, etc. Actually. That's a great idea.

Yup. They had (or so their story goes) to code it from scratch since the code was with other people (presumably those that did CM4).