FM 2007 to be more accessible

Football Manager 2007 will support managers with dual nationalities, and can be tweaked to take advantage of the specific processing capabilities of your machine, while user-friendly additions like menu wizards, the ability to select and apply changes to multiple players at once, and support for multiple databases, ought to make the game more accessible to old and newcomers alike.

That's the message we're getting from the second FM-related update to Sports Interactive's new MySpace page, anyway, which talks up a few of the game's new features - the total of which will eventually number more than 100.

Multi-core support and hyper-threading will form part of the optimisations that help support a wider range of hardware specifications. "We have tried to cater for those with both the latest machines and those with older ones, and obviously the older the technology, the slower the machine will be with higher detail settings, so it's nice and easy to tune the speed of the game to what you're happy with on your PC or Mac, much like you can with detail settings in FPS games," the team writes.

Good news too for those of you who like to play around with user-made databases. "We've added multiple database support into the game, so there's no need to wipe over older databases, meaning that if you try an unofficial update to the game and it doesn't work, you can easily switch back to the original database. Or choose to start a new game with data from the first transfer window, or the second window when we release our official data update around February time."

Advanced users will be better catered to in other ways too, with "new advanced game modes, including the possibility of the ultimate challenge, with random team selection where the computer chooses which team you should manage as well as the ability to have dual nationalities, just like the players inside the game."

On the lower end, newcomers will be able to fall back on easy to use wizards to help figure out what any confusing game elements are on about, while the interface has been tweaked so that you can shift-select multiple players and apply changes to them all at once, a bit like you can in most PC and Mac applications. Handy!

Expect more from the SI blog as it gets going. FM 2007 is due out on PC, Mac, Intel Mac, PSP and Xbox 360 this November.