In a recent visit to our headquarters, Beautiful Game Studios general manager Roy Meredith admitted that Championship Manager had "fallen on rough times" when he assumed his post at the developer last year.
"As a brand it's still really valuable," he said, "but in terms of game quality it's really not so valuable. Our intention is to produce over the next few iterations of Championship Manager something that gets a much higher Metacritic." It's all about Metacritic these days.
So how exactly is the developer going to go about this, beginning with Championship Manager 2009, which is due to kick off the new season late - in April - following a longer-than-usual development cycle?
Championship Manager 2008, says Meredith, was "built but not crafted", and looking at comparison shots of the last CM and the upcoming one we had to agree with him that the older title looked "dull, dull, dull". So, for starters, CM 09 will benefit from a graphical and engine overhaul.
"People take the piss out of these sorts of games, saying they look like PowerPoint slides powered by Excel," said Meredith.
"I know the point of what they mean and we need to move away from that, but we have to be careful because the fundamentals of a game like Champ Manager are its numbers, statistics and its sports analysis, and so we still need to have a lot of information on the screen... but we can make it more dynamic and interesting."
A brighter overall appearance with some new graphical flourishes make CM 09 easier on the eye than previous series entries. New animated icons and other indicators are being introduced to the game's menus to make them easier to navigate and to alert players to pressing matters.
Overall, BGS says it wants to make the game more "tactile and touchy-feely".
These factors will also help to make the series more accessible, another of the developer's stated aims. As well as appealing to a traditional audience that'll spend endless seasons in the virtual manager's dugout, BGS wants CM 09 to attract and be easily playable for gamers looking for more of a quick fix.
Accessible means "fun to play", but it doesn't mean being able to go and play golf, or to have a WAG on your arm, Meredith added, stressing that it needs to "stay true to the football manager experience".
The biggest of CM 09's new features has to be its fully animated, 3D match engine. It utilises a "far out camera angle" because "close-up match engines are rubbish for a football management game... as it's very important to see the whole pitch... so you can make tactical switches on the fly", said Meredith.
While the match engine is said to feature 500 fully motion captured animations per player (excluding goalies), the video of it we saw running showed off a number of bugs that won't be completely ironed out until "right up through alpha".
It's actually quite funny waiting to see your player send over a corner only for them to start bonking the corner flag (ok, they didn't really do that, but there were some random slide tackles going on in the middle of the pitch).
The match engine can be used to watch specific training drills or practice matches between your club side and reserve team, both of which you control.
While it's still a work in progress and is "nowhere near finished" graphically, the point is clear - the match engine enables you to see which players are or aren't performing as expected from a completely fresh perspective. And it definitely looks set to help submerge players more deeply into the whole experience.
The match engine should support the vast majority of PCs, although "if someone has a particularly crap laptop" it will probably revert to either a 2D or a more basic 3D perspective.
Tactically, CM 09 raises the ante too. There's a huge array of set formations players can choose from (returning to the series is the ability to set two formations - standard and defensive - for one game).
Once you select a formation the AI can also select what it deems to be roughly the best team for you. Of course you can choose your own players too, but it's a nice feature for less experienced gamers, or for those who'll end up getting sacked by Man United and end up taking a job at a Colchester United side they're unfamiliar with.
BGS has also answered the community's calls to make the team selection and strategy screens resemble a real life tactics board more closely. While you won't be overwhelmed with crazy arrows all over the screen, you'll be able to set player runs and feeds to bring the best out of your speedy wingers and pass masters.
Meredith also said the developer's keen to boost the focus on some of the off-field action as it wants people to be playing matches and "looking forward to the middle of the week scenarios" too.
After all, the big weekend kick-off and the 90 minutes of action that follow is really just the culmination of the hard work done throughout the week, whether that's building relationships with players and the club's board, creating and practising new training drills, dealing with the press or scouting for new players.
In a bid to boost realism BGS has been working with expert advisors such as Man United youth academy director Brian McClair and ref Graham Poll, and the game will also feature a number of new licenses.
Recently confirmed licenses include the Spanish league, the Football League, the Ryman League and the Home Leagues (Welsh, Irish and Northern Irish), and more are expected to follow, while an absolute ton of new pictures and journalist penned news stories have been created to spice up your in-game email inbox.
The game will also introduce a host of new weather, crowd and sound effects, and it's the attention to detail we witnessed in our brief look at CM 09 that gives us the sense that it's a product that's being lovingly crafted rather than simply put together.
At this stage it's hard to predict how it'll turn out, especially when BGS is still holding back on four of five other "vital features".
But if the developer's intentions are realised you should expect the best-looking, deepest and yet most accessible Championship Manager yet come the game's release.
That's what they're trying to tell you- they want new features and a new interface, and to clean up the stale look and feel of the last two games. We will see if it's any good- FM is still the best around and the latest one was even better than I expected; they'll have to do something incredible this year to top that- then again, FIFA beat PES this year, so there's hope yet.
It needs to come out in the 1st week of september or it will never do well. They need to hold back releasing it, tweak it and then update the august transfers to usurp FM2010 to stand a chance. I love Eidos's original(now Sports Interactive) FM and have done since 1994.
The menus look absolutely horrible but the 3Dpitch LOOKS nice. How it will play is an entire different story. Still, how can they possibly beat Football Manager?
football manager was good now its bugged as anything and a rubbish 3d match engine i have been on football manager forum and people are getting annoyed with football manager so maby it is championship managersyear this year
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