Part two of Pro-G's talk with Sports Interactive about Football Manager 2008.

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FM 2008 isn't a revolution, but it's not lacking in new features.
FM 2008 isn't a revolution, but it's not lacking in new features.FM 2008 isn't a revolution, but it's not lacking in new features.

Football Manager 2008 is set to invade bedrooms, work computers and social lives across the UK when it is released on PC in two weeks. To mark the end of our spare time, Pro-G sat down with the game's creator, Miles Jacobson, MD of Sports Interactive. In part two of our interview Miles talks about the changes made to this year's PC game and which young players are worth keeping an eye on.

Pro-G: Back to the PC version, how difficult is it from a design point of view getting people interested in a new version of FM and not just view it as an update?

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Miles Jacobson: The biggest issue we really have with the game is how subjective it is. My favourite new feature, the feature I use the most in the game is being able to move the transfer and wage budgets around. But that took someone around two hours to code. It was a very simple thing to do. The confidence stuff inside the game took quite a long time, as did the advisor stuff. Now confidence I use a lot, the advisor I don't use at all. So it's different people's perceptions. But there are well over 100 new features in the game this year. If you were to ask some of the action games how many new features they have in this year there might be four or five, and yet they have much larger teams than we do. We've always got piles and piles of ideas but we do have a finite team size.

We made a big mistake with Champ Man 4 in that we bit off more than we could chew and that's why it was late and that's why it was so buggy when it came out. We didn't even realise that it was so buggy because we'd lived with it for so long as had a lot of journalists. And we were getting nines and 10s for that game. We shouldn't have been; we should have been getting sevens and eights. We fixed it by the 17th patch I think. We're realistic about what we add in. If I stood up and said 'It's a revolution, look at all this!' people would have gone back and said no it isn't, so I would rather be honest with everyone and say the long term plan for Football Manager is for it to evolve each year. We're not planning to go away and do what we did with Champ Man 4 when we had a completely new engine. Everything under the hood and above the hood was new. We don't need to do that any more because the engine that we're working with is usable. The way it's been set up is quite modular. We can take out chunks and replace them with new chunks and that's the way that we develop now.

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