I Love 1.3

Having been a long term beta tester of FM Live, I've had some time to work with the wizard and the whole system of in-game shouting it brings along. Now initially, I shared your sentiments. I felt that the wizard was unnatural and made FM too easy with all its preset modes. In a way, I even considered they were dumbing the game down for people who didn’t understand the sliders.

After my initial skeptical reaction, I realized I was there to beta test though and I gave the system a chance. It has to be said, it took me a while to get used to it. You have to let go of the slider mentality and various other ideas you’ve been accustomed to using whilst playing FM.

This takes effort, especially when you’re a long-term fan of the series. Once you manage to let go of your old mindset and embrace the new one, you will never want to go back… I’ve always found that the old FM slider-based tactics were understandable but not intuitive. I knew how to set the thing to achieve what I wanted to see, but my intuition always said it should be different.

The wizard offers a more intuitive style of play. It’s not just the creator which does this, but also the system of in-game shouts. No need to tweak sliders, just use the shout that’s available and the game does that for you. It creates more dynamic and intuitive play, in which you don’t have to pause the game for five to ten minutes to think which slider you have to move to where to get the desired effect.

I really think that the shouts like I have seen them in the 1.3 version of FM Live could make the whole game of FM a far better game than it is now, because it actually allows you to translate your real-life views on football to a match without the understanding of theories and translating your ideas into a slider-based approach.

And for those who can’t miss their beloved sliders, you can always overrule the wizard and open the sliders up to manually adjust certain settings, so you really get the best of both worlds. You get a new and intuitive style of play but when needed, you can return to the old-school style to adjust things.