Yes, in case you missed the announcement today, Sports Interactive is developing a new massively multplayer online version of Football Manager, which strips the series down to its bare essentials and allows hundreds of players to compete against each other in Fantasy Football-style leagues.
Football Manager Live is apparently the brainchild of Oliver Collyer, one of the two Everton-mad brothers who created the original Championship Manager. The idea is to create your own team, then join a league or cup tournament, bidding with your online competitors for real-life players drawn from SI's enormous database. Apparently, matches will take place in real-time using the 2D overhead view introduced in Champ Man 4. I'm not sure if that means 90mins of action every time, but surely not. Maybe managers will get to agree on a shorter game length.
Whatever, it's a fascinating concept - especially to addicts like me. Interestingly, the developer seems to be pitching the game at lapsed CM-oholics - the people (that should probably be 'men') who allowed Champ Man to dominate their lives during the late-nineties, before settling down and discovering that obsessing over the relative merits of a 4-4-2 or 4-5-1 set-up for your passing-minded Cheltenham side was not entirely conducive to a successful married life.
What the game will lack, as an MMO, is the sort of wayfaring feel of WoW - the sense of traveling a virtual domain, meeting new allies and enemies. It will, in short, lack an avatar, a physical representation that virtual worlds have usually relied upon - though I suppose there have been many space combat MMOs without avatar systems.
SI seems keen to avoid many of the pitfalls of the MMO. League points will be awarded through a complex system that takes into consideration other factors as well as mere score - this is so that players who only come online once or twice a month won't be worse off than those who are on there all day.
Anyway, the game is due out next Spring, but a beta is starting up soon. I'm about to email SI's director Miles Jacobson to see if I can get on the list... Miles, if you're reading, how about it?
