For those who haven't played an OOTP game before, here is a quick rundown: OOTP allows players to take the role of team owner, General Manager, and/or field manager of a professional baseball team (Major League, Minor League, current, historical). The most important trait of the game is that players have near-total freedom to play the game as they choose.
For this review, I started as a manager of a minor league team and attempted to work my way to the majors (specifically trying to become manager of Atlanta). When it was clear that was going to take too many seasons, I restarted and made myself both General Manager and manager of the Atlanta Braves. I simulated all of the games that the Braves weren't involved in and played those that they were. For the first season, I simulated the final pitch of each at-bat for both the offense and defense while also managing player contracts, price of tickets, whatever. For my second season, I sped up the process by letting the computer make more day-to-day decisions and just alert me when certain situations came up (player-initiated contract talks, injuries, etc.) and let the computer simulate all but the last inning of each game. I also started a season in which I fired my initial starting pitchers and, as they made it through waivers, replaced them with unknown Minor League players. Having played about twenty years of last year's game, I then decided to put the modern simulations away for awhile and started a game with the 1981 Atlanta Braves, the first Braves team that I got to watch regularly on television when WTBS rolled into my area (and the first team I have a palpable emotional link to).
Regardless of what type of league I played, OOTP remained a great experience for a baseball geek. Be warned, however. If you don't live and breathe baseball, OOTP has very little to offer you. If, like me, you long for the days of playing in Strat-O-Matic tabletop leagues, this may be for you (though I continue to be disappointed by the lack of single-series, head-to-head online play as a separate pick-up-and-play mode). My old SOM friends still get together occasionally and play through famous historical match ups (recently the last two weeks of the 1993 National League West regular season—very geeky) and it would be great to be able to accomplish that using the great statistics engine in OOTP. Developers, consider this an official request for that feature.
OOTP 14 doesn't feature huge changes from last year's model. At this point, I don't expect much more than roster updates and under-the-hood stats tweaking. I do appreciate the inclusion of multiple entry-level leagues to better recognize that there are many paths to the Majors, but I'm not sure how many people were clamoring for that features (but, hey, I don't frequent the OOTP forums, so who know?) The important thing is everything I have enjoyed about the game since I first discovered it ten years ago is back and better than ever.
It is important to reiterate that, unlike most other reviews I do here and elsewhere, I haven't made any attempt to rate it on how it should appeal to the masses. This is a four-star game for people like me—baseball enthusiasts for whom text-based is not a archaic phrase. For those guys and me, OOTP 14 is the holy grail polished for a new year.
- Danny Webb
The Good:
- Simulation engine remains second to none
- Infinitely customizable game play means you get to play the game you want to play, not the one the developers think you should play.
- It is so satisfying to guide a team into the playoffs (not that I have managed it often)
The Bad:
- The interface continues to be non-intuitive and clunky
- Lacks a online quick-play mode
Score: 9.0 / 10
