The title might sound straightforward, but let me explain what I actually expect from the game and why I have doubts about the recent versions.
So, I previously played FM09, FM11, and FM19. My biggest career was in FM11, but I kinda got bored after I won the Champions League with an underdog.
One point is that I always watch full matches (could be with faster speed but still). Which means that the match engine is extremely important to me. And that is why I quickly was disappointed in FM19 and left.
So, we have FM24 now, and ME has quite a mixed response here. And many recommend FM13 or FM15. But I'm not sure about the older games now. At least FM11 isn't a game I would play again - after playing FM19 the tactics seem quite poor... I don't know if it is the same in FM13/15 or in those games they already made serious steps forward? And new games, of course, have quite a lot of QoL in them, and much richer out-of-the-pitch experience. And, very importantly, SI introduced now save porting - which is for me, a guy, who watchs full matches and has long real-life lasting careers, could potentially be a game-changing feature (if SI provide good games in the future).
But let's return to the match engine, FM19 seemed a complete mess to me for the following reasons:
1. The inspirational talks (pre-match, shouts etc.) seemed to have a much bigger impact than anything of the tactics. I decided that I'm not good at those talks, hired the assistant with 20 motivation (and crappy everything else) and similar game philosophy to my team, and let him do the talking. And I vastly overperformed. But I wasn't satisfied since I had little to do with that overperforming.
2. The "unmotivated team" plays an absolutely boring game. At any FM sometimes any team will play worse simply because they have "a bad day". It' realistic and ok. In FM11 that usually meant that the players wouldn't try to open themselves and foul a lot. Which was irritating, but you could still change the tactics to try and win those games. In FM19 on "bad days" players would fail to do the simplest of passes and would not tackle the opponents. Those games drove me mad, if my team played like this, I didn't figure out any way I could influence the outcome with the tactics. And if an opponent had "a bad day", I could've as well fastforward till the end of the match, there was no way my guys would lose. In both cases - very disappointing experience.
3. Scoring. So, there are two factors which lead to a goal - excellent game of the players of the one team and mistakes from the other. Usually it's a combination of both. In FM11 this combination was kinda balanced. If I scored, I was pleased to see the great performance of my players. And if the opponent scored... well, of course I was angry at my defenders, but quite often I was amazed by the opposing players that I didn't have alike (I like to play underdogs). So, nice emotions anyway. In FM19, like, 95% of the goals were due to the blatant defence mistakes... That means that if I lose - I'm extremely angry, and if I win - "meah", it's not my team who did well, I won because their defenders presented me with the ball all the time... Ok, after some matches I had a great laugh, but most of the time my emotions were just "disappointment", regardless of the results.
So my main question is - are these problems still present in FM24, or does it have others instead?
I read that many people complained how gegenpressing is too OP. I'm not sure if it's a dealbreaker for me, definitely not as big as the three points above... It's nice to have balanced tactics, but FM aims to be realistic, and unfortunately, real life isn't balanced. If it's just that some tactics are statistically better than the others, I'm ok with that. But if one tactic (gegenpressing) is just a one-click cheat, with which you'll overperform no matter what else you're doing - that would be an immersion-breaking experience of course.
I know that I can tr they demo myself, which I'll probably do, I just decided to ask experienced people as well
