14 DAY TRIAL // Our Incoming 2015 series focuses on the most important game launches of the next 12 months and next up we talk about Football Manager 2016.
What we know
Football Manager 2016 is as sure to arrive around the start of November as FIFA is to be deployed in September of this year, a chance for the football fans to move away from direct control of the players in order to focus more on the tactical element of the sport, taking on the role of manager in order to guide their favorite club towards victory, however long that takes.
At the moment, very limited information about the title is offered via official channels, mainly because the developers have a policy of only talking about their coming title until in late summer.
Sports Interactive will surely keep the core formula unchanged, but they do need to increase some innovation in order to keep long-term fans engaged and capture the imagination of newcomers.
The tactics system, complete with its variety of initial positional choices and the many roles that players can use, remains the core of the game, but it would be interesting to see whether it can be improved to become more intuitive while also asking the player to spend less time with it.
Football Manager 2016 will also include the updated rosters and the very carefully researched statistics the development team is well known for.
Why it matters
Football Manager 2016 will be a challenge for Sports Interactive because the installments delivered in both 2014 and 2013 were almost complete from a features point of view, with some gamers even saying that the game had become too bloated and that they were abandoning the main mode in order to focus more on Classic.
The studio has long said it has clear long-term plans for the franchise and that it wants to focus on particular features and to transform them in interesting ways, and fans are speculating whether this year tactics will get a major revamp or if gamers will get new ways to interact with the other various managers and players.
With the increased popularity of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, it would also be interesting to see if the team tries to move Football Manager 2016 to any of them, especially given the fact that the Vita has been supported for a while.