A Closer Look At Match Day Experience Improvements & New Graphics Engine
With less than a week until the Football Manager 2018 beta are launched it’s time to look at the new changes to the Football Manager 2018 Match day experience. The improvements to the match day experience and the new graphics engine were just some of the new changes to Football Manager 2018 that were focused on for the 6th, and perhaps final in-depth feature video published by Sports Interactive.
As you will discover, a number of innovations that makes the atmosphere and the surroundings to the match-day are made more immersive and more authentic looking. In reality it provides you a better match-day feeling. Let’s look closer to what the new changes to the match day experience involves and what the new graphics engine has to offer. For a complete list of Football Manager 2018 features and an even closer look at the changes coming for FM18 please visit our main article.
Football Manager 2018 New Graphics Engine
World exclusive is a new video teaser about the new graphics engine for Football Manager 2018. The graphics engine will let you see huge improvements New Stadium Designs, Beautiful Lighting Revamp, Enhanced Player Models, More Motion Captured Animations, Data Analyst Viewpoint, Customisable Camera Options and much more…
New FM18 Features To Match Day
Redesigned Match Preview
The new match preview features more graphical representation of information than ever before. This involves cleaner graphics of recent form, injured and doubtful players. You will even get a part of the opposition scout report featured inside the match preview. This lets you see the strength and weaknesses of the opposition before you select your team. Dedicated panels of your current league position and upcoming fixtures will also be featured inside the match preview.
Dramatic Changes to The Match Flow
The match flow involves all the different screens and tabs you visit before the match starts. The Football Manager 2018 match flow have seen some dramatic changes.
- Tactics Meetings; may happen on match days or the evening before. From here you can talk to your preliminary match squad and individual players about what you want them to focus on for the upcoming match.
- With the new graphics engine in Football Manager 2018, it means great changes to the match day experience, as cut-scenes are now included in the game. Cut-scenes may show players warming-up in different ways, shots of different stadiums plus a whole lot more that you will need to discover yourselves.
- A new animated team sheet of the players from both sides that are selected for the up-coming match will now be shown just before the match starts. This lets you familiarize with the opposition line-up, individual players and formation before the match kicks off – a handy option before setting up opposition instructions. The new animated team sheet features also some useful commentary from the pundits on what their thoughts are about the up-coming clash.
- Next up you will be heading to the dressing room to make the final team talk. The team talk has also seen some slight improvements as it looks to be more intuitive. The tone system you’re used to from the past has been kept, but more contextual team-talk options are now added. These may include statistics and data into what you tell your players. You will have the ability to talk to the whole squad plus individual players or a particular area, either it’s all the defenders, midfielders or strikers, and provide a secondary or third message to them. The presented summary of the squads reaction to your team talk will definitely come in handy as this will be displayed beneath. The reactions from individual players will be shown underneath the overall squad’s reaction.
- The half-time and full-time team talk will include stats and analysis from the match. These will now rotate in the upper bar.
- The pre-match tunnel interview may happen if a media source wants to talk to you before the match starts.
- At half-time you will receive a review of the action from the first half including match events, match stats and notable performers. This will be updated at full time and features a summary of the result by a pundit.
Major changes to the match interface
The scoreboard, match timeline and match events are now moved to the top of the screen in order to give you a better view of the match action. Four new tabs will be displayed underneath it;
- Pitch; shows just the pitch view
- Tactics; are where you make in-match changes to your tactics alongside substitutions. An overlay of a horizontal pitch let’s you easily swap players, conduct changes to team instructions or alter player roles or duties.
- Analysis; shows you real-time analysis that enables you to make more informed tactical modifications without having to exit the match action. From here you will receive match stats, graphics of both sides heat maps, average position, player analysis of best performers and those who needs to raise their game. The right side of the screen will be dedicated to advises from your backroom staff about implementing these analysis into your tactics.
- Updates; hands you information and news from the other fixture, involving latest scores and scorers from around the world, alongside a real-time league table according to current results.
Match Settings
For Football Manager 2018, you will be able to customize the match screen view with a range of possibilities. You can customize the cameras height,zoom in or out on the action, or even have the chance to auto-reverse the ‘Behind the Goal’ camera.
A new widget, player watch makes it introduction to Football Manager for the first time. The player watch lets you isolate an individual player and watch statistics and how he performs in the match as well as getting information about his current body language.
Between highlights you will be able to see the new ‘Recent events’ screen, which lets you see an overview of the performance of both sides players. The center of the screen will focus on the story of the match and other worthy match information, such as featuring match stats, focus of attack and the most recent events, like a graphical representation of where the most recent shots or crosses came from.
Redesign of ‘Shouts’
While shouts have featured in the game for a long time, we’ve never released an article about what this is and what the benefits of them are. But in general, you will be able to change mentality and team shape with some shouts as well as communicating with your players from the touchline. More about touchline shouts in Football Manager 2018 in this designated guide. [Coming Soon]
Pro-Match Changes & Improvements to Match Analysis in FM18
The match analysis section you can head into after the match is ended, provided by the team of data analysts, have seen a number of additions included for Football Manager 2018. New additions of what’s being analyzed involves spaghetti maps, clear cut chances, combined top pass table, multiple position data columns and an improved heat map. You can discover more about the changes to scouting and the role of the data analysts in this article about the Football Manager 2018 scouting improvements.
New Football Manager 2018 Graphics Engine
Another huge change to Football Manager 2018 is the new graphics engine made for the game. The graphics engine now supports Direct X11 for PC compared to the previous DirectX9 for FM17.
The improvements to the graphics engine will affect lightning and textures of the pitch, which will be significantly enhanced and make the match action look even better than ever before! It even gives the team of Sports Interactive more possibilities in the future to further improve the game. This means that you can expect exciting innovations and further development within this area of the game improved further for Football Manager 2019 and for the next years editions.
It’s not only the background tech that has been improved, but also the graphics for player models and stadiums as the video above shows.
You will for once notice more visual difference and variations between players. This can involve how a player moves around the pitch and operates on the ball leading to a more authentic portrayal of the player during the match.
As briefly mentioned earlier, stadiums are greatly improved too, meaning they will look sharper with more features included in and around the stadium. The stadiums of FM18 will also come in different variations and looks according to the type of stadium and its capacity and scale. Some of the cut scenes will show off the stadium so you’ll be able to take in the atmosphere before match kick-off.
Hundreds of New Motion-Captured Animations Coming For Football Manager 2018!
A number of new motion-captured animations focusing on the role of the goalkeeper will make it’s way to FM18, this to ensure he moves and reacts as realistic as possible. This will come alongside new or tweaked animations for passes, shots, controls and celebrations, and a number of AI improvements and changes to how players behave on the pitch, which you can see in some dedicated videos about the new 3D match engine of Football Manager 2018.
