Football Manager has laced up its sock ties, turned off his mobile and jogged down onto the pitch for 2017 with the usual plethora of changes. In half an hour of FM joy, some tiny, some large changes and innovations were revealed by Sports Interactive head, Miles Jacobson.

Top of the list is AI enhancements. Players now make almost twice the amount of decisions per second, ensuring that they appear to have much more situational awareness leading to more believable ‘split second’ decisions. This is good as it makes the all too common problem of the ‘keeper blasting the ball into his net of his own player will happen a little less often. Defenders AI has been a focus and they now adapt much better to the opposition and help the midfield better while in possession.

Player animations have been improved with Mo-Cap from Creative Assembly although no sign of any cross over kill animations from Total War, yet.

This season sees a much larger focus on handling social media using the new Social Feed tab. Here you can listen to fans, who clearly know more about football than you do, vomit their opinions all over the place with no consequences. Keeping an eye on the zeitgeist will give you an indication of when the fans are on your back, the latest transfer murmurs and reaction to the ‘big stories’ in the game. It is effectively a revamp of the Subscriptions feature.

The improvement that received an audible ‘finally’ from me was the inclusion of adding my own horrible face to my manager avatar. Using some proprietary software from FaceGen and a photograph, you can add your own visage to the inaccurately toned avatar you have created for yourself ingame. Adding guidance points to help the computer isolate your face looks like it is a secret, game breaking formation. Will test and confirm!   

New backroom staff posts such as Data Analysts and Sports Scientists will improve analysis of players and teams and help to prevent injuries from happening. This is a growing trend in the real world, so is good to see Football Manager keep up.

Online features have been improved with many multiplayer game options added as per player requests. Features such as the ability to skip friendlies on multiplayer games to get right in the action. Create a Club has more options too, helping you make a team filled entirely with your created mates and giving you the option for starting each new game with up to a £250 million transfer budget. Quick start is also a thing to help your get into a new game faster, although this has long been a feature in demos for the older games..

Also, if you have the computer to power  it, Football Manager 2017 has a 64bit version for use if you have it. Making sure it eats up all of your CPU power while generating those Goal of the Month renders.

It certainly is a typical update from Sports Interactive. I think they change just enough every year so they can justify a full release and not just a database update. But, hey I am yet to play it, i shall reserve full judgment until then. Like ya know, a sensible person. God I miss Sensible Soccer.

Anyway, you can see the full presentation here.

Minimum specifications:

• OS: Windows Vista (SP2), 7 (SP1), 8, 8.1, 10 (1607) – 64-bit or 32-bit
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 Intel Core AMD Athlon 2.2GHz+
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT AMD/ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 Intel GMA X3100 256MB VRAM
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Storage: 3 GB available space