Football Manager 26 wouldn’t have reached its current level of polish and quality if last year’s entry hadn’t been scrapped, so says Sports Interactive Design Manager Ant Farley.
The game marks a significant step for the franchise as it leaves behind the Sports Interactive Operating System engine in favor of the Unity engine. This change saw Football Manager 25 suffer through multiple delays and feature cuts before ultimately being cancelled to focus on making sure the game was up to the standards that players have come to expect from the 20+ year franchise.
In an interview with Football Gaming Zone, Farley says that canceling last year’s game wasn’t an easy choice to make, but it was necessary.
“There’s no way we’d have been able to reach the same level of quality that FM26 currently has if we shipped FM25,” Farley said. “Some of the decisions where we rethought and changed direction, we’d have had to push them out there if we released FM25. And, once they’re out in the world, it becomes difficult to rethink it. We probably would have needed to fix them, rather than rethink them.”
He added that instead of building a complete game, they would’ve been spending more time fixing bugs than anything else. But with the focus shifting towards Football Manager 26 instead, it gave them even more determination to make the best game possible.
“The original disappointment [of the cancellation] “was tangible, but it quickly made way to an attitude of ‘let’s crack on now, we’ve got a chance to make something we are really proud of, ‘” he said. “We weren’t proud of FM25, we didn’t think it offered good value for money for our playerbase, and that’s our real motivating factor.
“When we had news of the cancellation, it gave us the determination to get it right for FM26.”
Football Manager 26 launches on November 4. An open beta will be taking place starting October 24, with progress being able to be brought over to the full game post-launch.
For more Insider Gaming, read about Mexico moving closer to adding a tax on the sales of violent video games. And don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Comments