The Football Manager titles already offer plenty of micromanagement and small details to pay attention to, but the games two editors offer fans even more options.
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If you're unclear on how to use them or what they do, this post will hopefully help you better understand. The two editors are the free out-of-game version, and the paid ($5.50 based on last year's pricing) in-game editor--we'll start by explaining the former.
The free editor allows you to customize the entire database that Football Manager 2015 uses in game files. This means club information, player attributes, contract details-everything that makes up a game. There are many menus and hidden player attributes that aren't visible in-game such as a player's injury likelihood, potential rating out of 200, and more. The editor comes free with the game, and can be found in your Steam tools. Opening it up allows you to edit a database file--you select one of these every time you start a new save file in Football Manager, and any data you edit will be reflected in the game.
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To begin editing, you launch the editor and select a database to use, saving it as new at the end. If you make changes to a player's attributes, save that database, and start a new career using your custom database, the new attributes will be reflected in the game. This is useful for correcting what you think are inaccurate attributes, transferring players that have moved teams in real life before Sports Interactive can update the official database, or just plain cheating by extending contracts or making a player a 20 out of 20 in every category.
The difference between the free and paid editor is that with the out-of-game editor, all of those changes must be done to the database before you load a file, and then your save can not be altered. You can change a database again and start a new file with it, but you cannot alter a save file already underway.
The paid editor allows you to do just that. You can open up a current save and make changes to its state, such as extending a player's contract or removing an injury he has. This obviously opens up the door to plenty of cheating, but that's every individual's call. Sometimes the game can do something unrealistic or strange, and if fixing it can increase your enjoyment of the game, then go for it.
This reasoning, despite initial reluctance to even include an in-game editor, is all explained in a recent blog post by the developers. It also lists the changes to Football Manager 2015's paid editor, so check it out to see the additions. The game leaves beta tomorrow, November 7, which will see the release of both editors alongside the full game.
