Beyond The Sideline Football Announced By OOTP Developments

Having a football management/sim game with the kind of detail that is in every edition of “OOTP Baseball” would be a dream come true for lots of football fans. Now imagine that game is actually on the way, that it’s coming from OOTP Developments and that the man heading it up used to work on the “Football Manager” series for Sports Interactive.

If that sounds like an even better dream, you may not want to wake up. OOTP Developments announced today that “Beyond the Sideline Football” is coming, hopefully to beta later this year with a targeted release in 2015. Lead developer Francis Cole did indeed help craft “Football Manager” games, but he sounds ready and excited to turn his talents toward the game we call football on this side of the pond.

“Having known Markus [Heinsohn, OOTP Developments co-founder] from our time at Sports Interactive together, and playing ‘OOTP’ every year since, I was delighted at the opportunity to bring my football game to OOTP Developments,” Cole said in a press release. “‘Beyond the Sideline’ will be an amazing American football GM game, thanks to technology such as FaceGen, releasing on PC/Mac/Linux, and having an existing code base that enables players to easily customize their leagues.”

Features already revealed in the official announcement include:

• A realistic modern football experience with all rules and regulations
• All 32 pro football teams with their current (at the time of release) rosters
• A realistic 2D engine to call plays and watch them unfold, plus appropriate sound effects to go with the action
• Depth charts and strategies that can be set to your preferred play style
• FaceGen technology to create realistic images of all players
• Complete box scores for every game in each league’s history
• The ability to sim whole seasons or even decades at a time to quickly see how leagues unfold
• All Division 1 college players plus many more to draft real talent into pro leagues each season
• News articles to keep you abreast of happenings around the league and a message system for fielding trade offers from other GMs
• Complete stats, injury, transaction and contract histories for anyone who’s even participated in a training camp over the past decade
• Advanced stats to help get a true picture of player performance
• A Health Scan system for determining exactly how hurt your injured players are
• Full league customization options like changing team names, number of teams, and even the country in which the league plays

OOTP Developments also expects to see many benefits from being able to use applicable parts of the “OOTP Baseball” code, including things like the user interface, online league support, HTML output and a customizable text database.

That sounds like something I’d want to play tomorrow. The wait will be a bit longer than that, but you can get all the details as they are announced by following “Beyond the Sideline Football” on Twitter or its official forum.