amazing!

OOTP 26 continues to be the in-depth baseball simulation leader. The balancing in Perfect team has made it extremely fun. I'm Free-To-Play but can still field some very competitive teams. Most of the marketplace shenanigans seem to have been curtailed. I still wish the actual gameplay looked better and had fewer lags, glitches, and obvious repetitive animation cycles. But let's be real, your playing OOTP for the depth, not the gameplay animation. And no one does that better.

I've returned to Out of the Park after about 15 years. The long and the short of it is that this appears to continue to be the best baseball sim on the market. If you want to play this type of game, you pay the cost of admission. For the most part you should be greatly satisfied. However, there are numerous frustrations that while not game-breaking or experience-ruining, they'll significantly sully the experience.

[Edit: Even though I highly recommend this game warts and all, I've selected "No" to call out its numerous issues.]

While there's certainly a lot that's been added to the series since I played it, there's also a lot that really hasn't changed or improved much. Obviously I have no trouble paying to upgrade from the last version I purchased many years ago, but I would anticipate being frustrated to upgrade year after year.

Most of the issues are interface-based. Broadly, the interface is great! It's functional, and to an extent customizable. However it does not play well with certain resolutions, and some screens/areas are just trash. A few examples: The pending free agent offers screen can't be sorted which makes it an absolutely nightmare if you're negotiating with large groups of players at once. On the depth chart screens, removing a player from the lineup also pulls them out of the depth chart. And adding a player to the depth chart as a starter automatically puts them in the first empty lineup spot. Why?? This is a nuisance when I want to build and reorganize them individually. As well, you have to be super-accurate when dragging and dropping on this screen as well as the scouting one, or else the item you've selected just disappears.

Drop-down menus just aren't well organized. There are so, so many screens and reports. On one hand that's marvellous! But it takes forever to find and memorize the location of what you're looking for. Many links are duplications. Why does the Combine Scouting shortcut just take you to a partially-functioning Team Home Screen if that function is disabled?

My BIGGEST GRIPE is that the game STILL lacks proper documentation. I remember the game lacking a manual way back in the day, or it would come out long after the yearly game release. These days, a manual doesn't exist. I member of the community told me documentation is now wiki-based. Well, yes, a wiki exists. But it's incomplete and some entries are outdated. As well, it appears to be maintained by the community rather than the development team. A lot of the information seems to be cobbled together from developer posts on the official forums. (But I'm not 100% certain of this.)

The community is fractured between the offical forums, the subreddit, and the Discord server, as well as the few mods on Steam Workshop. Having all these avenues of contact isn't a bad thing! And I'm relieved the forum still exists, many companies opt for insufficient Discords for troubleshooting and information sharing these days. But it means you need to hunt between all of them to find what you're looking for. The best way to research a particular topic is the plug it into a search engine with "Reddit" appended to the query. But the issue here is that a lot of available information is for previous versions of the game, and while often it's still applicable, other times it's not. The official Discord is fairly busy and well populated, and the community has provided helpful answers to some of my questions. But others have gone unanswered. If there was adequate documentation for the game, I wouldn't have had to ask!

And I'm not talking about asking how the under-the-hood, "fog of war"-style engine components function. I don't expect that stuff to be revealed, not in specific detail anyway. Many of those features can be disabled if you don't want to bother with them. I'm referring to core functions of the game that should be clearly explained.

I made a detailed bug report on the forum that was completely ignored. On multiple occasions I submitted an offer to a free agent that exceeded their demand. They replied by declining my offer and requesting a lesser amount! Ridiculous. I also reported it on the Discord and a community member just replied to the effect of "Yeah, contract negotiations have multiple issues. It really needs to be looked at in the next version." What a brainwashed sentiment.

Online leagues remain one of the best ways to experience the game in my opinion, but they're even more complex and drawn out than they used to be due to all the features that have been added on over the years. Of course, the commissioner/league admin can choose to disable many of these systems. But even a basic online league requires an extremely dedicated and knowledgeable commissioner.

I find the much-maligned Perfect Team card-collecting mode to be a hollow experience. I had a lot of fun with it for a couple of weeks, and you can definitely accomplish a lot as a player who doesn't buy extra packs through pay currency. But this is mainly facilitated by farming the daily Twitch drops, five each from official and community streams. This requires three total hours of having Twitch open in your browser. Of course, you can mute the tab and don't have to actively watch or have it open in the foreground. But it feels like work.

Another way to get ahead is by completing collection missions, which is just what it sounds like. Acquire the listed cards from packs or by buying them with in-game currency on the in-game auction house, which just unlocks more cards and packs. This will allow you to dominate the early leagues. However, it also means once you get to a certain level, almost everyone will be running the exact same cards. It's boring. Listing cards on the action house is also a chore, and the interface is maddening in that you get a pop-up whenever you sell a card, interrupting whatever you're doing and sometimes resetting your menu action. Infuriating! I also seem to get logged out of Perfect Team mode at least once per day, and there's no option for the password entry field not to hide your typed characters. Why?? Who's playing OOTP in a public place where passers-by are going to steal their Perfect Team login information? It's absurd.

As well, while the Perfect Team leagues pit you against other players, there's absolutely no social interaction in-game. Some players list their forum or Discord handles in their profiles, so I guess you could look them up there or just chat in the general Discord channels for this mode. The draft-based tournaments are also interesting if you like draft-based CCG-style modes--many are free to enter, and you don't have to have the cards in your collection. But I tried it for a bit and I really don't see the depth. Since the simulated games add a lot of randomness (I mean, it's what the simulation engine does), it all feels like a crapshoot.

A lot of people seem really into the Perfect Team mode--there's certainly a lot to do. Another component is the daily fantasy-baseball-like mode that allows you to guess the day's real-world top performers (as long as you own their cards). But after a while that too grows boring. Anyway, I'm glad this mode provides an additional revenue stream for the developers. But it really does make it feel like aspects of the main game are neglected. A lot just doesn't seem to change from version to version, and there are multiple features that are in dire need of an overhaul.

Despite all this, the core of the game is largely excellent and as deep and engaging as ever. You can get lost here for hundreds if not thousands of hours. I still recommend the game. I just wish it seemed like the developers even cared about these issues.

Note: My playing time is misleading, as I leave the client open all day when I'm monitoring my Perfect Team league or intermittently working on my online player league rosters. But I've still invested beyond 100 hours as of the writing of this review.