Post a Comment On: The Game Designer

Football Mogul 17 has been delayed due to some personal issues in my life. However, we are doing final testing and expect to launch the game on Tuesday (November 8th).

This year's biggest upgrade is an entirely new historical database including over 250,000 lines of season data. Previous versions of Football Mogul included historical teams, but our database had a lot of errors and missing stats so we went back to the drawing board and assembled an entirely new database.

We were able to incorporate some stats, such as snap counts and Yards After Catch, that you can't find at sites like Pro-Football-Reference.com and NFL.com. But the most important result of this upgrade is that the historical team and player ratings are much more accurate.

This is a screen shot from last year's version of Football Mogul, showing the AFC at the beginning of the 1996 season:

[Image]
If you remember 1996, you may notice that the ratings are way off. The Patriots beat the Jaguars in the 1996 AFC Championship game, but the Jaguars are ranked 21st and the Patriots are ranked 24th (out of 31 teams in the league). 1996 was Drew Bledsoe's best season, but New England's "Quarterbacks" have a grade of "C-".

These problems have been fixed for Football Mogul 17. In addition to having more data, we've also rewritten the way that player ratings are calculated, correcting every line of a player's stats for that year's league averages and that team's strength of schedule.

[Image]
This results in much more accurate ratings for individual players and across entire teams. The Patroits are now the 2nd best team in the AFC (behind Denver who went 13-3 that year and had a better point differential). The "Quarterbacks" column now has 4 teams with an A-minus or better: New England (Bledsoe), Miami (Marino), Denver (Elway) and Jacksonville (Brunell), Marino and Elway are now in the Hall Of Fame, and Brunell was at his peak in 1996, leading the NFL in passing yards and yards per attempt.