Stories

All information on this page is confirmed facts about Sports Interactive future smash hit CM4. It's scheduled for the end of 2002.

- How will CM4 look? Will it be just another update?
CM4 will be coded from scratch which means that it's going to be completely different. They're gonna have just as drastical differences between CM3 and CM4 as it was between CM2 and CM3.

At SI Games there's a section with fans made screenshot. None of them is official screenshots of the game - that's a well kept secret.

- Internet Gaming?
One of the few things we missed with the CM3 Series was a fully implented internet function. This is a feature which is going to be implented in CM4. Marc revealed that all of the SI Team will play the first CM4 Internet game. For now, there's a nice utility called CM Online which can be used to play online with.

"Just imagine it: every club from every league managed by a real player. Want to import the latest goalscoring talent from the South American continent? Just e-mail the manager in Buenos Aires. Want to offload a troublesome player? Slap him on the transfer list and send a few e-mails to some managers you think might be interested. An awesome concept and one that takes the game that bit closer to real life."

- 3D Match View?
There's been many discussions on wheater SI should implent a 3D match view or not. They've came up with a inbetween thingie which will be the usual match commentary text and a 3d view of the field where you can see where your players are. This way you can spot what's gone wrong etc. As Oliver and Paul (programmers) answered in an interview (Planetfootball):

PAUL: "We are now working on a match engine. Although it will not just be a pure way of watching the games, as that would take 90 minutes. We would just make the key points available in a 2D rather than 3D format. We obviously want to make this as flexible as we can. It would look a bit like the tactics screen looks at the moment, with numbers moving around, so you could see how a goal was scored and maybe what went wrong."

OLIVER: "We are hoping that we could switch this between commentary or not, as was the case in CM3. We want this to be an analysis base rather than the graphical direction, which could have been the case."

Or as Oliver said it in an interview with Game Spot.

"CM has always been game for the imagination. We don't want to destroy that by having some bloke running around, otherwise it will look just like every other management game on the market. We'd rather leave it to the player's imagination, but at the same time give much more information as to what is happening in the game. "

New CM... do I need a new computer??
Let's hand the ball over to ID Gamers and Marc Vaughan.

IDG: We saw a big system spec change between CM2 and CM3, is this going to be the case with CM4 and if so what type of system do you think your fans will need to run the game optimally?
MV: "We always try and keep the required specification for CM down to a minimum. However when we change engines the spec does tend to creep up (as for from CM2 to CM3), I imagine that CM4 will work fine on any reasonable PC that people are using currently (ie.P500+) - but they might have to restrict the number of leagues that they're using if they haven't upgraded by its release. "

What about consoles?
For the first time, Championship Manager games will appear on video game systems. CM4 will probably appear at the X-Box, but wheater it appears on the PS2 isn't sure yet as the PS2 hasn't got storage space. Sony might change that and add a hard disk to the PS2, but that's not confirmed. This is a massive boost for SI and CM sites as the fan base will now be maximized masively. People without PC's will also benefit from this.

Gimme a list of features which will be improved or totally new! :

Online leagues
2D Match highlights
Reserve leagues
Increased media interaction
Improved managerial responses
Assistant Manager
Player Agents
Brand new match engine
More leagues