Front Office Football Seven is available now for $36.95. You can also try before you purchase it, right here.
The new version of Front Office Football includes dozens of new features, designed to enhance your simulation experience. The new game features the following:
- Staff Members. You now have a five-man staff, consisting of a head coach, an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, an assistant coach and a strength coordinator. Staff members are responsible for scouting as well as player development. Offensive and defensive coordinators call plays. Strength coordinators help your team avoid injuries. Each staff member, aside from the strength coordinators, specializes in work with one position group.
- Staff Draft. At the beginning of the year, you have the opportunity to sign any staff member who is entering the final year of his contract. After the resigning period, there's a five-round staff draft. The draft order is based on the previous year's franchise financial performance. The first round is for head coaches. You have the opportunity to skip your pick, keeping the current coach in place, or you can promote a staff member on your own team, poach an assistant from another team or select someone entirely without experience.
- Staff Names. At the beginning of a new career, you have the option of using familiar coach names for your universe.
- Game Film. During the season, you'll have the opportunity to view the Film Room, which contains breakdowns of every game played during the current year. Run and pass selection is broken down by down and distance and personnel packages, as are defensive play choices.
- New Contract Formats. Contracts are now limited to five seasons, and incentives are gone. Rookies are automatically signed, as the new league formats make a rookie's contract structure very specific. Rookies cost less, so you'll be able to spend more money on veterans.
- HTMLHelp. Front Office Football Seven uses a more modern help interface, based on HTML. This is now a native Windows 8 application, and will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well.
- Draft History. All players who either played a down in the league or were drafted into the league will have a complete playing history. A new screen showing each round of every draft will give you the opportunity to quickly locate any player based solely on draft position and year.
- Player File Generator. The Player File Generator allows you to take a .csv file and create a player file compatible with Front Office Football Seven.
- Multi-Player FTP Support. Most mutli-player commissioner and team owner functions are now automated through FTP. As a team owner, just open up the game, select Import Game Files, and the game downloads all the most recent game files and reloads the game in the current stage. As a commissioner, imports and exports will run much more smoothly.
- Multi-Player Stage Editor. The editor will allow team owners to view all the actions they've taken while constructing their current stage file. They can delete actions without having to start over.
- Data Export. At any time, you can select the Export Data command, and Front Office Football Seven will generate a set of .csv files that includes player information, game information and a wealth of statistical data. While this data is in fairly raw form, enterprising spreadsheet and web site aficionados will be able to create far more impressive and extensive web sites than the game creates.
- Amateur/Staff Draft Imports. Using the data from the exported .csv files, commissioners will be able to hold drafts off-line, and easily create a file that contains all the draft data. This data can then be imported directly into the game, saving the commissioner hours of making each selection by hand.
- Ratings Tracking. An option allowing ratings tracking within Front Office Football Seven. Twice a season (before training camp and prior to week three of the exhibition season), a clearing-house consisting of all player ratings will be created. These can be accessed from player records, or through exported data. Player development has been changed significantly in Front Office Football Seven, so these stages are the crucial points for player development within the game.
- Extensive AI Improvements: Roster building was a focus of development. Many features within the game were rebuilt, including the attendance model and player scouting.
- The Quarterback Coterie: A new screen showing the yearly performance of all league quarterbacks, normalized for each season they've been in the league. This will enable you to compare quarterbacks both on career performance and by how they performed at every level of experience.
- Yearly Calendar. A screen that shows the league's calendar every year. This will help players understand what stage they're in and what needs to be done at any time during the year.
- Long-Snappers. The Long Snapper is now a dedicated secondary position. Each team must have one.
- Internal Structural Changes. While this was the most time-consuming new feature other than replacing everything to do with scouts and coaches, it's not something you'll necessarily notice. But from a development perspective, it was necessary and very helpful. The game is much more stable and modular. New features can be added much more quickly. The game runs faster, which means some of the new AI algorithms can handle a lot more analysis. This makes future development possible as well. This is a risky development item since this and the AI upgrades took up months of development time, and they won't be immediately obvious to those who have played the game in the past. But I'm confident these developments will greatly enhance the long-term value of your gaming experience.
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