This Thursday (22), the director of Football Manager, Miles Jacobsonrevealed that the popular club management franchise will include women’s football in the future – although, for now, it’s a work in progress.
“I would like to make one thing very clear… we have NO interest in making a separate version for women’s football for FM.”
“What we’re doing is adding women’s football to FM… a sport, a game,” he continued. “FM players will be able to seamlessly switch from managing a men’s team to a women’s team and vice versa. Women’s football will be part of a living world that constitutes each of its saves; that world will simply be much bigger and more varied.”
Jacobson also reinforces that the investment for this project will be in the millions, and the short-term return will not be very significant, due to the huge disparity in popularity between men’s and women’s football.
“But this is not the point”wrote.
“We know our voice is very powerful, and we want to use it for good.”
The work ahead will be long, and the director explained that there are several factors to consider when implementing women’s football into the game, from analytics, special circumstances, and motion capture suitable for female athletes.
“Women’s body shapes are different than men’s, as is their bone structure, so we have no choice but to go back from the beginning and recreate all of our animation and motion capture data using female players,” Jacobson wrote. “This is not the simple case of going to a motion capture studio for a few days – it takes months to fine-tune and refine the data generated by each motion capture session and make it appear correctly in the game engine. .”
“Then there are other questions we need to ask ourselves, like how detailed should we be right off the bat? There are a lot of readings available on the impact of the menstrual cycle on training and injuries, but how are we going to incorporate that without having a significant effect on gameplay? What about pregnancy? If we have pregnant players and coaches in the game, will we need different 3D models for their different stages?”
Other elements, such as translation and localization into different languages, will also be taken into account.
Still, the team has been working on this implementation for Football Manager for some time now, having already captured two motion capture sessions with the twin players. Rosie e Mollie Kmita.
Sports Interactive also created a women’s soccer research department, seeking to seek and implement as much information as possible into the game’s database.
But, as Miles Jacobson stresses, it’s not yet known when women’s football will officially come to Football Manager. The hope is that, by then, the game will be officially sold again in Brazil.
