A world of stories
The news has two tabs now, the 50 biggest clubs in the world have their own stories and your league remembers. Players make the headlines, and a new manager picks his own team from day one.
- News in two tabs: “For you” covers your league and your players, “World” everything else.
- The world’s giants: slumps, winning runs, titles, relegations and sackings at the 50 biggest clubs.
- Your league remembers: runs, title races, “first time since …” and milestone anniversaries of its champions.
- A hat-trick, a youngster’s first goal, a comeback from a long injury: players make the headlines.
- A new manager names his line-up on day one – and the press reports it when the system changes.
- In your books, every recall of a loaned-out player now shows under “Loans”.
- A loaded save carries on exactly as if you had played straight through.
A loaded save wasn’t quite the same game
The worst one first: a save carried on slightly differently after loading. The game had kept two things from its first read instead of looking them up again. A new check caught it, one that runs both ways side by side. Then the news. With our first settings you would have drowned in it, and we only saw where it got too much when we had a picture with real examples in front of us. The big test round took three goes. In the first one a check went red because too few players in small leagues moved on a free, 48% against 72% in real life. 1.8 hadn’t caused that, it had been on the edge since 1.7, but I wanted it fixed now anyway. That fix then tipped two other checks. Young replacements after a big sale got rarer, and restless clubs stopped buying more than calm ones in the summer. So we measured four levels in the same worlds, and the middle one suited all three. While redoing the fans, the languages started copying each other again, twice, so those lines got written again. And the curly apostrophe: we guessed about 300 places, it was 2,256.
What comes next
For the last few weeks an update came almost every week. The next big one will take longer, and I’d rather say that now. We’re working on something huge: you’ll see your matches in 2D, all 22 players on the pitch, every pass, every run.
The pictures here come from an early prototype. It isn’t the game and it isn’t the new match engine yet, they only show where we want to go.
It’s harder than it looks. On a pitch you see everything. In the prototype a striker ran clear at the keeper and then passed it backwards. At corners the ball stayed in the middle of the pitch and the corner came out of nowhere. Things like that stand out right away and every one of them has to go. In the end all of it has to run on your phone, offline, and the screens have to stay calm and simple.
We want the highest precision and the best feel for the game that we can reach. There’s no date for it yet. Until then, smaller updates fix bugs as they turn up, every report stays on the list, and I’ll keep you up to date here.
All changes in 1.8
- The news has two tabs. “For you” covers your league and your players, “World” everything else, and each tab shows how much you haven’t read yet.
- The 50 biggest clubs in the world have their own stories: a crisis and how it ends, a long winning run, the champions on the day it’s decided, the drop in the summer, the upset, the change of manager.
- Your league remembers runs, title races, every “first time since …” and milestone anniversaries of its champions and cup winners.
- Players make the headlines with a hat-trick or four goals, a very young player’s first competitive goal or a comeback from a long injury. The news also tells you who is suspended for the next matchday.
- A new manager names his own line-up on day one, and the press reports it when he changes the system.
- Rumours now come from a real bid and they have an outcome.
- With “Your place in the game”, Gold members can now be a female manager too.
- “What’s new” in the main menu shows the card “New in 1.8 · A world of stories”, with seven lines.
- On the first day of a new career you get the sponsor first, then the transfer window, then your inbox in peace. Nothing pops up in the background any more, I noticed that myself while playing.
- A loaded save carries on exactly as if you had played straight through.
- In your books, every recall of a loaned-out player now shows under “Loans”.
- The fans sound like themselves in every language now, written from the way people talk in each country.
- More than 9,000 new versions of the news in seven languages, plus match reports for each way a game can go, 1,050 texts. The same sentence never comes twice in a row.
- In Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French the club name now takes its article, like in the papers there. That was 4,731 places in the news and 181 on the screens.
- Your assistant only tells you what’s true before a match. You only hear “they’ll sit deep” against a side that’s set up to defend.
- From the third tier down more players move on a free and fees are rarer. That also goes for the offers you get for your own players.
- French and English use the curly apostrophe everywhere now, and all the screen texts in seven languages have been read, about 15,300 of them.
- On PC and with large fonts, one-line labels now shrink a little instead of being cut off with “…”. In Google Play Games the game runs like on your phone, upright in the middle.
- Membership is easier to see. The main menu shows “Become a member”, and after the first match of your second season a card comes up exactly once, with “Not now” just as big.
- The fans only talk about beating the leaders now when the opponent really was top before the matchday, and only from matchday 5. Before, after losing on matchday 1 the winner was already called the leader, I found that one myself. The same goes for the lines about the top group, the bottom of the table and the world news “bottom side beat leaders”.
- Crests and names in the match preview are back on one line.
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