Championship Manager 2010 Preview

gamescom 2009 was coming to an end, the football season had just kicked off and Spurs were sitting pretty at the top of the English Premier League, so what better time to sit down for a chat with Roy Meredith, general manager at Beautiful Game Studios. Read on for details on what to expect from Championship Manger 2010, the success of the headline grabbing "pay what you want" pre-order promotion, and the importance of community.

VideoGamer.com: Where are you with the game right now?

Roy Meredith: We're releasing on September 11. Traditionally that's been impossible because you have to wrap the data by about September 4, you have to test it for a week and then you have to build and ship and manufacture the product, and get it out in the marketplace.

What we're doing this year is getting it out for September 11 and the minute you install it you get a launcher which comes up. You can download the closed transfer window data so you can start the game with two start points. You can start with June data or start with the September data.

VideoGamer.com: Is the September data a free update?

RM: Oh yeah, absolutely, Absolutely without a shadow of a doubt. The reason behind that is that it gives people a lot of option, a lot of alternatives. I don't particularly like the fact that we've signed Crouch so I'd start with the June data. I'm sure Liverpool fans would start with Aquilani in there, so would go with the September data. There's another reason we're doing this as well, which is Season live. This is six updates, five pounds for all six, and from October through to March it allows you to start with the results bang up to date, right the way across Europe, 49 competitions.

I'll give you an example; Once Man United get beaten at Wigan on Sunday and go on to lose their opening two or three, In October you can go and see if you can get them to qualify for the Champions League. It's that Newcastle situation from last year; in March Shearer had eight games to save Newcastle.

I think there's a tendency with people with these games to build that core, you're like me, you'd probably build a core Tottenham experience. And if you're really like me you'd fail a few times until you do get to the core experience. Then you have that game which you see as the proper game, but then I always go in and start a couple of other games just to see what the transfer situation is like, what the money's like at Preston or Nottingham Forest and play that for a while. Go and play Barcelona and see if I can build up a super squad. But I don't treat that as my main game, I've this main game going all the time as well. And that gives people the opportunity to do it in short bursts and have specific challenges against it.

VideoGamer.com: Can you talk us through the major new additions?

RM: Let's have a look at training. There's individual drills and also team drills. This is the highpoint of it, the fact that you can control both sides. Invariably if I start as Tottenham I'll get sacked in January and get offered a job as manager of Colchester United. I don't know much about Colchester in real life, let alone in the game. Now you can browse around or go onto the training pitch and get an auto pick option, which will give you roughly best players, best positions. This now gives you an opportunity to try both teams on the training pitch. The advantage of this is that you can change formations, you can change tactics for each side, you can bring in trialists and not have to arrange friendlies. If you're in January and you want to trial people, as in real life, it won't let you, it won't let you as clubs are too busy to arrange friendlies.

In takes you onto a training pitch and you see it play out. At the end of it you get a training report generated into email which will tell you how the players performed.

Scouting. The normal way is to look down the list and spend your money, or send scouts out to Paraguay and they come back three months later with a list of 24 attacking midfielders. What we've decided is we needed more a) of a gameplay challenge and b) reflect real life and enable people to build knowledge.

There's two ways to scout. You send a scout out and depending on the skill of the scout the knowledge will build quickly. Send a crap scout out and you'd get up to say 56 per cent knowledge on a player. There's another way to search players as well, which is to do with money. This is scouting networks. As your money is invested in regions you build an improved picture. You can send a scout to look at a specific player to build the knowledge much quicker.

We watched a match last night - Werder bremen vs Aktobe in the Europa Cup - and there was an Aktobe player who struck a free quick that was amazing. Now if we were on a scouting mission and watching him, we'd look at him. Now if you went scouting you'd know his work rate was very high, and his shooting ability and accuracy is really high. But how do we know about the versatility, how do you know about this leadership, more of his mental skills. Those are the ones that take the time to build. Maybe the free kick was just a hit and hope as well. You'd probably have to see him two or three times. And you need that to reflect the realism in the game.

Set pieces. This is where you go and create your own free kicks and corners. There's five phases to a free kick, each phase is where the ball is passed or played. You can shoot, pass, cross, chip, whatever. You set the free kick up, obviously you don't know where the defence is, you only know that there will be a wall of some sort.

[A free kick is spilled by the keeper]

Oh that wasn't bad. Of course that would indicate that maybe you would need a player running in because the defence came out. You can refine it, you can add more steps. You then check it for use in the match.

You can also set up defending formations for corners and free kicks as well. The opposition AI within the game will learn about your free kicks. So you get a storming free kick that you've worked on; you play it once in the game, well other managers are scouting you and your next opposition will know and therefore the defence will try to close it down.

VideoGamer.com: If you're scouting out a team, will you actually see their plays and then plan against that?

RM: Yeah. Absolutely. You won't see their free kicks laid out in front of you, but you are able to view the next opposition's games within the 3D match engine and recreate the set pieces in the training ground.