FHM: The Road to Release Continues
There's Still Time to Pre-Order Franchise Hockey Manager 2014!
The special pre-order pricing for Franchise Hockey Manager 2014 (FHM) has ended, but you can still place your order and immediately download the open beta version any time between now and Sept. 3. We've been thrilled by the response to the game, and we hope you enjoy playing it as much as we've enjoyed creating it.
Download links for the full version:
After you start playing the game, feel free to post your thoughts about it on our FHM forum. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook to stay up to date on all the latest FHM news, as well as general happenings from around the sport.
FHM 2014 - The Road to Release, Part 2
Rewriting History and Creating Custom Leagues
Long-time players of our other management game, Out of the Park Baseball, know how much fun it can be to travel back in time and rewrite history. We're happy to say you'll be able to do the same in FHM.
You'll be able to time warp as far back as the 1947-48 season in the NHL, and you'll be able to revisit all of the World Hockey Association's brief history from 1971 through 1979, before the league folded and four of its clubs joined the NHL. FHM 2015 will see the NHL going as far back as 1917-18, and possibly earlier, but this time around we need to stick with modern era rules and avoid the tricky database problems caused by the replacement players used during World War II.
However, you'll still have decades of rich NHL history to mine. Want to revisit the high-scoring 80s and the era of the Oilers' Gretzky-led dominance? Interested in replaying most of the Original Six era? Wondering what would have happened during the seasons disrupted (or cancelled) because of labor disputes, had they been played in their entirety? Now you can do all that and more.
Players will see their careers follow similar, but possibly very different, trajectories compared to real life, and expansion, relocation, and contraction will happen when they really did, allowing you to watch the NHL evolve over the decades. In addition, the stats will mirror actual history, so, for example, those 100-point-plus seasons that were so prevalent during the 80s will happen again.
Historical Drafts and Player Generation
When starting a historical game, you can turn the Draft and Generate at 17 options on or off, giving you four ways real players will enter the league:
- Draft off, Generate at 17 off: Teams get players when they acquired the rights to them in real life. For example, Eric Lindros will appear as an 18-year-old member of the Quebec Nordiques in 1991. (And if you're in charge of the Nordiques, you can keep him, rather than make that famous trade with the Flyers.)
- Draft off, Generate at 17 on: Players show up at the beginning of the season in which they turned 17 and can be signed as free agents, giving you a shot at superstars when they first appeared.
- Draft on, Generate at 17 off: Players appear in the season in which their rights were first owned by an NHL team and go through the draft before you can sign them. With this setting, most modern players will show up at 18, when they were drafted, and you'll be able to avoid events that don't adhere to history, such as Eastern Bloc players appearing before the 90s.
- Draft on, Generate at 17 on: Players show up at the start of the season during which they turned 17 and go through the draft when they're old enough. This is the best way to build an alternate history, since, for example, whoever finishes last in your 2004-05 season gets to draft Sidney Crosby with the first draft pick, and players who defected from the Soviet Union during the 70s and 80s will show up much earlier than they really did.
Check out FHM producer Jeff Riddolls' forum post about historical play to learn more about this mode. In the meantime, we'll note that because of the complexities involved, customization options will be minimal in historical leagues, which leads into our second topic for this edition of Road to Release.
Creating Custom Leagues
One of OOTP's hallmarks is the ability to create rich fictional worlds with unique settings, and FHM will offer that too, albeit in a more limited form in the beginning. One major issue is the fact that more complex custom leagues means more complications when we implement multiplayer after the initial release. (Remember, this is the first version of FHM, so as with OOTP, the game will get better each year.)
When you create a fictional league in FHM, you'll have several predefined league structures to choose from. The basic format involves a top-level league and a minor league - more levels will be added to the game next year, but this custom hockey world will generate players from the lower levels, just like the other FHM modes do. You can stock your teams with real players or fictional ones, but either way the league will open for business with a draft.
Then you'll decide where to locate your league. You can put it anywhere in the world and choose the cities and team names - the game will fill in all those fields with random names by default, but you can change anything you want, including the league, conference, and division names. Note. Though, that if you relocate any teams outside the country or region you specified for the league, you may run into problems with scouting and rules restricting the number of foreign players.
The next step involves configuring the draft. You decide when to schedule it, how many rounds it has, how it's ordered, the minimum and maximum ages for draftees, and even its name.
Next, you can fine tune the leagues mechanics by deciding how often teams should trade players (a good rule of thumb is to use the number of transactions you want to see on the league trading deadline day if there are 30 teams). You can also change the average number of goals and penalties per game, as well as average assists per goal. You can create high-scoring, penalty-filled fracases, low-scoring contests emphasizing skilled play, or anything in between, but note that if you set those numbers too high or too low, you could experience game-breaking issues, such as excessive penalties preventing enough players from being on the ice.
Finally, choose the number of games per team, with the number you'd like against division and conference opponents, as well as the maximum number of games per week (7 is the limit, for those wondering how hard they can work their players).
Moving on, you'll set league, roster, contract, game, and playoff rules, as shown in these screenshots:
Finally, you'll be able to configure the playoffs the way you want, including the number of rounds, the wins needed per round, days of rest between games, the way seeding works, and more.
When you're done, you'll be ready to lead your team to the championship in a unique league designed by you.
To get a more in-depth look at custom leagues, check out Jeff's forum post on the topic.
Stay Tuned For More
Thanks for reading this newsletter. The next installment in the FHM Road to Release series will discuss scouting, background leagues, and other related topics.
We'll see you at the rink!
The OOTP Developments Team
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