Wednesday 14 July 2021

Championship Manager 2010 - last in the line of classic games

 

Championship Manager was last game in this popular series - at this point Football Manager games, made by the people, who left the original team behind Championship Manager (Sports Interactive studio), was taking over position as single leader in the genre of soccer management games for PC. While the original games of the ChampMan series were just amazing, the premiere of Championship Manager 4 and Sports Interactive leaving the project, the series was neglected, so say the least, by Eidos Interactive, which later became Square Enix Europe.

What went wrong? It is hard to point exactly, but bit by bit Championship Manager games under the wings of Eidos Interactive, were getting out of touch with its audience. First of all there was not much progress between 2004 and 2009, which Football Manager was introducing new features. Championship Manager 2010 was first with the 3D match engine, which was a move in right direction, the interface was improved, new divisions were introduced, new features were added... yet it failed to gain much attention comparing to its main competitor.



Unfortunately with each improvement there were some really, really weird mechanics or simply bugs that broke the experience. Simplest example is the match engine itself - what do you think are the chances that one of the teams will score a goal in first minute? No, higher than that. Nope, you're still too low. Or rather Championship Manager 2010 has this parameter far too high, because goals being scored within first 2 minutes is quite common sight. You can even find screenshots, where people show score 3-0 and it is 9th minute of the match...

Similar story was with the injuries - it is hard to get through a match without one. Literally injury, not someone just being bruised or tired, in most of the matches your players will get injured so they will have to leave the pitch and spend some time recovering. Match engine itself had some issues as well - often players with plenty of space to dribble would try some hopeless shots or goalkeeper saves shot and defender, instead of letting goalie to pick up the ball would send it in the stands.


On the other hand there were some good ideas invested in Championship Manager 2010, like scouting network, but then again it was implemented in such way that it can't be named anything else than a disaster. The idea was that you "hire" scouting network to be active in specific country or area of the world and from time to time you will get their reports pointing at good players. Sounds great, right? But when I mention that you will get those reports almost every day and you have no influence what they will contain, does it still sound great? You literally have zero influence on that network, so you will be flooded with reports about players that are too old, too expensive, too weird or absolutely useless. You will get reports that list same players over and over again, you will get reports about players that you already were told about or one who would never consider joining your club.

Scouting also had one good option that worked in surprising way. You can scout yourself by setting requirements (quite specific requirements) and game would filter out all players according to those requirements. And there was no problem with that, apart from making your scouting network rather redundant, because you can invite most of them for trial, when you will learn all of their parameters at once without spending weeks on observing them. That is quite useful, but also breaks the basic concept of the game, where you should gather the data with time and some of the parameters should be not fully known.

And there was one more problem with that, the problem that at some point you will realize there are tons of pretty good players available at any time on the out of contract list. And I don't mean good players, like decent amateurs, you can find really great talents and sign them for peanuts and with minimum effort put into it. That makes the whole transfer system almost redundant, because there are so many cheap and good players on free agent list that there is no point in negotiating transfers with other clubs, unless you are looking for real top quality player worth millions. Although, with time, you can find some of them on the free agent list or sign contracts with them when their contracts will be running out soon.

Overall Championship Manager 2010 was not a bad game, you can still enjoy playing it right now, but it is one of those examples, when rushing title to be published before it was properly tested is really not a good idea. ChampMan 2010 failed to beat Football Manager, but it had improvements comparing to previous games and with some more work put into it it could have been a very good game. Unfortunately we all know that Square Enix is not a fan of anything other than Final Fantasy series, so it not surprising that Championship Manager 2010 was last in the series of legendary games.



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