Football Game Potential
 

Hey folks,

Now that OOTP football is back on now, with Front Office Football, I'd like to hear what FOF users have to say about the game and how OOTP can make it better.

I am very excited about the potential. Just bought FOF8 to check out what we can expect. I'm very impressed with the amount of detailed game-planning that exists. What can really sell OOTP/FOF football is combining the level detail with the OOTP-beginner friendly GUI.

Right now I am envisioning day-to-day game-planning creation under the OOTP hood. Test and make better your game-plan and and make it better by Sunday. I could spend hours on football strategy if this part of the game gets nailed.

I've played FOF and been a part of its online community since late 1998/early 1999. The #1 complaint I've seen about FOF over the years--by far--has been the interface. Sure, there are always engine things that can be improved, but few who have dug deeply into the game have serious issues in that arena. Overall, the play resolution engine and the other pieces are quite solid. Those of us who have played FOF a long time, are into Multi-Player--and would thus like to see a lot of new blood brought into the genre--are thrilled with the possibilities here.

I'm not a long time player like Ben is, I just joined the FOF community with the release of FOF8 a couple years ago.

Ben is spot on. Since I discovered the FOF series, and how freaking fun multiplayer leagues on it can be, I've been trying to get people to play it. I've tried several times on the NFL page on Reddit (which would mainly be people in their 20s, I suspect the average age of the FOF community is much older) to suggest the FOF series to people who seem like they would be interested. They will do five minutes of research on the game, discover that the interface is straight out of 1997, and won't really give it another thought. It's a shame, since Jim has made such a fun, quality product, but it's just the reality of the situation.

With Jim's ability to really capture the feeling of being an NFL GM dealing with all the nuts and bolts of your roster/gameplan and OOTP's ability to give the franchise a much needed facelift, I think us NFL fans will finally have the Football Manager equivalent for american football

Couldn't have said it any better! I'm jazzed about this news!

Adding facegen will be great and give the game new life for me as well as the OOTP UI will be fantastic!!!

Hoping for things like news stories, maybe a 2d engine to watch the games play out, much more information on player cards, etc...

is FOF contracted with NFLPA so they can use real players and real teams?

The rosters had real players and the teams were located in the correct cities, but the team names were different. It only took about 30 seconds to change the team names to the real ones though.

OOTP's Insanely deep level of customization would do wonders for this game. Any sports game for that matter. It would be a crime not to include this.

-Also faceGen adds alot of immersion, as well as jerseys and logos.
-OOTP's player personalities, and news stories.
-A 2D Game engine with field art(logos,end zones)
-Pre made draft classes(real players) by the roster team

Theres tons of OOTP features that FOF can benefit from. I hope they include as many as possible in the coming years.

The first version of FOF I bought was in 2004 but I've only real played the game in any depth for the last 8 or 9 years or so and for me it's fantastic in terms of simulating realistic NFL scores and stats.

There's lots more to the game than that of course but that is what it does better than any other 'football' sim (I'm English) I've ever tried over the years (I'm 46 so there have been many).

I've always hoped that a game like FOF could be paired with a highly polished, in depth and customisable game such as the Football Manager series, so I am excited to see what Jim and OOTP can put together here.

For me personally, the biggest drawback for FOF is the single player mode. So much so that I haven't touched it for years, yet in Football Manager and when I have dipped my toes into OOTP Baseball, the single player mode is immersive and challenging but I've only really experienced that in multiplayer mode in online leagues in FOF, where a lot of that immersion is created through the dynamics of the guys in those leagues.

The obvious need is a customizable league structure. Even the other supposed "best sim on the market", Draft Day Sports Pro Football, only allows a certain number of league structures.

I'd prefer a Football Mogul-like setup where the structure can be whatever the user wants, and the game will set up a schedule regardless.

How many expansion teams can you have in FOF?

Currently, none as 32 teams are a 'perfect' size for a league. However, teams do relocate; Oakland moves to Las Vegas in 2020 on cue. You can relocate to another city after going through the stadium turn-down process.

32 appears to be "perfect" at first glance, but the locked league structure is the biggest reason I haven't bought any past FOF games - even moreso than the dated interface.

I’ve playing FOF since 2004, but tbh didn’t really like the latest FOF8.

The stats base is still good, but there are a couple of game ruining elements for me, revolving around depth charts, substitutions and defensive player roles:

You can set who will be the starting players for pretty much every package on offense and players, but there is literally no way to set back ups or injury replacements.
So its sometimes the case that an OT ends up getting subbed in at TE and haring down the sidelines for a long gain.
Being able to set primary back ups is a must for me, on offense and defence - the current system also makes it very difficult to get rookies experience unless they are clear starters.

Similarly on defence, while there is a penalty on under or oversized players, there is no experience penalty for changing positions.
So for example, to avoid cuts the AI oftens seems to change LB or DE players to DTs in order to meet minimum roster requirements, which leads to a number of 260lb DTs floating around. Or a number of DTs are generated way too light t9 be effective.
This needs to stop, either by removing roster restrictions, thus preventing the need to change player positions, stopping these silly conversions/creations happening, or the game converting these types of FA players to a more suitable position to allow other AI teams to pick them up

If we can put depth charts back in, control subs better, and stop defensive anomalies, that would go a long way to fixing FOF8 in its current form.
(Although an offensive playbook generator based on preference selections similar to the preference draft at the start of the game would be great too!)

Rather than tweaks like the above however, what the game really needs to add is the ability to bring the game universe around your team to life.

Creating a home screen/in-game website that summares the weeks results, game reports, details of stat leaders, records broken, players of the week, playoff scenarios, rivalries, etc in a visually appealing format would be huge and reaaly draw you into the game world

Instead the player currently has to pull that information out of the game - most of what I mentioned is there, it just takes an effort to find it and is presented as cold hard stats, not in a way that makes you feel part of a living, breathing world.

Hopefully this is what the liaison with OOTP will add, for me anyway. Fingers crossed for all involved.

To me this is the worst offender in the game. Jim stuck in a whole new game with the gameplanning and play creation, but there are little to no ease of use features.

Can we make custom databases or file sin game like we can in OOTP? Basically I want to create my Endor Football League with planets as nations like I do on OOTP.

The idea of having the ability to have all access to the history of the NFL is huge for me.

With Front Office Football 7 i started from 1960 all the way through 2015 using the great nilodor roster and draft file sets and man oh man did it take me forever to get it all done. Just watching the NFL unfold in a different way was awesome just like in OOTP.

Here is the link to the thread i started with some stats i posted based on requests from the community

https://forums.operationsports.com/f...ad.php?t=91235

High Five to Jim and Markus and Andreas.

Historic?
 

Can you do historic draft leagues?

Any chance we will see the CFL incorporated into FOF?

What about defunct leagues(WFL,USFL)?

In the current game, yes. You can import user-created draft files. These is a publicly-available set of draft files going back to, I think, 1960.
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For feature requests/questions like that, I'd refer you to Markus's post from yesterday.

EDIT: To clarify, the meat of Markus's post was essentially "don't bother with posting any feature requests/suggestions for at least two months."