Sports Interactive has released a first deep dive video for Football Manager 27, looking to address one of the main complaints for last year’s game with an exploration of the user interface and how it will smooth navigation through the game’s menus when it launches this November.
The key bullet points are that SI has tried to provide:
- A more intuitive navigation system, making it easier and faster for you to find the information you need and are interested in
- Reduce the clicks and unnecessary navigation by improving how information is shown on a single screen
- Give you the ability to better tailor some of the information you can access via customisation options with some tiles and navigation preferences
- Provide the ability to tailor the game and its layout to the way you play, maximising the space on screen
- Introduce flows and options that make the experience more familiar to long-time FM players
In order to achieve this, the two navigation bars at the top of the screen have been revamped, and most of them now include drop-down menus so you can quickly reach the section that you want without loading multiple pages and additional clicks. The Squad drop-down will quickly get you to the overview, first team, youth team, dynamics and loans… and these options can even have their own drop menus. You can also customise where a menu option will first take you, so clicking Squad could skip the overview and head straight to the first team. Further customisations allow for changing the layout of bookmarks, shortcuts and other landing screens.
Another area to improve was with the barrage of messages that you receive. In addition to colour coding by priority, SI is trying to present key information more directly – a Scout Report message no longer needs you to click into it to get the info – and duplicate items, like multiple transfer offers, will be gathered together.
Football Manager 27 will also look to do more and better use the screen space available to you. There will be fewer cards than before, there will be support for 4K screens and ultra widescreen resolutions.
It’s good to see SI pushing on from last year’s heavily criticised entry. That was a major reset for the series, jumping to Unity Engine, revamping the menus and layouts and trying to reconsider gameplay from its fundamentals. Unfortunately it didn’t really work, coming in a year later than planned, getting a lot of flak for its functionality and missing features. You couldn’t even shout until this was patched back in.
In our review of FM26, Aran said, “Football Manager 26 is the first step of a new era, and as we’re seeing with some of the biggest clubs in the country, any new era comes with the challenge of rebuilding and both setting and meeting expectations. Football Manager 26 can get better with updates, but I doubt that this entry will be the one to make the most of the switch to the new engine, overhauled UI and new features. It might take one or two more years for this rebuild to really meet its potential.”
Source: Football Manager
