Football Manager 2012

Football Manager 2012
Developer(s)	Sports Interactive
Publisher(s)	Sega
Producer(s)	Miles Jacobson
Series	Football Manager
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation Portable, iOS
Release	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X

Football Manager 2012 (abbreviated to Football Manager 12 or FM12) is a football manager simulation video game. It was released on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X on 21 October 2011.

New Features

• Players no longer have to decide on which nations are playable at the start of their career. Football Manager 2012 gives players the ability to add or take away playable nations in their saved game as often as they want.

• Several changes to the transfer and contract systems, including loyalty bonuses, better implementation of amateur and youth contracts, an improved transfer centre and the ability to lock areas of the contract negotiation when you aren't prepared to budge, which allows players to offer incentives to football players or agents.

• A new in-game scouting report which includes squad analysis, tactics information and information about goals scored and conceded alongside lots of other scouting improvements.

• New animations, new crowd system, improved weather system, more stadiums, two new cameras - "Behind Goal" and "Director Cam" as well as all other camera angles being reversible.

• A new adaptive layout system, which means setting higher screen resolutions allows more info to be seen. The new interface also contains new filters, customisable columns, a new tactics screen, and new overview screens.

• Changes to team talks and conversations include the new tone system, which allows players to specify the way they want to interact with their team during team talks. There are 5 different tones to choose from with specific comments per tone.

• A new tutorial and a new in-game "how to" system.

Apart from the above Sports Interactive claims to have added over 800 new features, such as the media system, press conferences, the youth system, newgens, the social networking options, friendlies and international management.

Demo

A Demo of the game was released on Steam in association with Sky Sports HD on 6 October, which as usual is half of a season of game play, which can be continued within the full purchased version. The demo is limited to only the leagues of England, Scotland, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Australia playable as quick-starts.

DRM

Football Manager 2012 is the first in the series which requires all players to use Valve's Steam software, this angered some fans of the series who encountered problems with the third party software. The move to Steam requires the game to be activated online before being able to play. Sega has said that Football Manager has moved to Steam to combat piracy.

Sega states that, “Make no mistake, if a quarter of the people that usually pirate the game switch to purchasing Football Manager 2012, the sales of the game worldwide would more than double. We’ve taken this decision because we believe that the steps the consumer has to take are not excessive, and that as a one-time only measure with no tracking or reporting it is not too intrusive. Having worked with Steam for a few years now we also believe that their system is ever improving and gives Football Manager players a good service of free auto-updating, achievements and other great benefits without cost or hassle.”

Patches

The first patch for Football Manager 2012 (version 12.0.3) was issued on 28 October 2011.

12.0.3

The changelog for the patch was:

• Fixed a crash on season turnover when adding MLS into the game without having it loaded at game start.
• Fixed Vancouver, Portland and Philadelphia not having Academy players properly generated.
• Fixed a crash when playing with two human managers and one of them was claiming a player waived by the other human manager.
• Fixed an issue where adding a league was causing more people then needed to be loaded into the game.
• Fixed an issue with international competitions sometimes getting the wrong number of teams from a continent.
• Fixed scaling of distance run stat in match stats.
• Included positioning training to goalkeeper shot stopping training

12.0.4

Patch 12.0.4 was the second patch for Football Manager 2012 and was released on 2 November 2011.

The changelog for the patch is:

• Fixed a bug where the game gets stuck when the user is forced to register a youth player who turned into a pro in the Australian A-League.
• Fixed issue with player bans not working correctly in the Finland First Division.
• Fixed crash when using the "Pick Team For Me" button when all manageable clubs have been taken over by human managers.
• Fixed crash when activating a new division level which has promotion/relegation playoffs with the division above and is made up of regional divisions. (e.g. Third level in Sweden)
• Fixed crash on game startup if a club's loyalty and passion supporter profiles are set to 0 using the editor.
• Game now doesn't allow nations to be deactivated in 2011 before its competitions have finished. This was causing a few problems later in the game.
• Fixed bug where Spanish outfield player could not be given a valid squad number before match if a goalkeeper already had number 25 and number 13 was the only number free.
• Some colour clash fixes.
• Fixed bug where players currently selected in a national U19 team are then deemed to old when the U19 European Championship qualifiers are scheduled.
• Fixed bug where a replacement player could not be called up to a national team that doesn't have a full squad selected.
• The overage players in the squad can now play for national U23 team friendlies before the Olympic Games.
• Twitter and Youtube login now works on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

External links

• Official website