Love this game. Its the only way I will ever see the phrase, "Here are your World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates." Bob, sell the team and just buy this game. I feel even you would hate to work for you. Or just sell the team.

This game is loaded with micro transactions. Nuff said.

Addicted to this game, unfortunately I am one year ahead in my seasons. Last year I played two spring trainings and two seasons, yes I'm a retired and 72 years old...keeps my mind young...lol Wish I understood hockey a little better, probably do that one too.

Franchise/Singleplayer is basically the same as last years, minor changes made to the Development Lab. Perfect Team/Multiplayer on the other hand, is even more P2W, which sucks.

I bought my first version of OOTP over 20 years ago and have followed the project ever since. OOTP is still likely the most detailed baseball simulation available, although the core baseball understanding is now approximately 20 years old and does not match a modern view of the game of baseball. The introduction of pitcher BABIP in OOTP 24 as a skill that could cause the expected BABIP against to range from .250 to .400 was a significant step away from a game that had previously prided itself on adhering as closely as possible to a sabermetric understanding of what makes baseball tick. These changes have also caused simulations in early baseball eras to become substantially less realistic, which takes away a key selling point of previous versions. Much of this regression in the quality of OOTP concided with its acquisition a few years ago by Com2uS, and the original lead developer who shepherded the game through over two decades is no longer part of OOTP. My primary experience with the most recent iterations of the game was through Perfect Team, with thousands of hours played each cycle. Although the game has considerable potential, the choices made on the development and community management end have steadily driven players away. Rather than taking that feedback and improving the game, the announced changes for PT26 have doubled down on the choices that drove players out of the game in recent cycles. As a result, I cannot recommend a significant time investment in PT 26 unless you already have strong ties to the community. My previous experience over two decades was through both running and playing in online leagues, and a vibrant community is the key to OOTP's success. Leagues run in previous versions of OOTP will seamlessly import into OOTP 26 and there is active developer support and a twitch community dedicated to these leagues. Overall, lacking a major competitor, OOTP will still likely remain the industry standard. However, the key new features introduced in recent versions have been a step backward both in terms of the baseball simulation and in terms of Perfect Team and other features aimed at the active community. I do still recommend OOTP as a market leading baseball simulation, but I would recommend buying OOTP 23 (or any other version of that vintage) and using a model which works better in most eras of baseball history rather than "upgrading" to OOTP 26.

the people who don't recommend usually have doubled their playtime since their review.

Clearly not for me.

Unlike the Colorado Rockies, this game franchise gets better and better every year. I still have no idea what I'm doing but I love the game anyways!

First a disclosure: I was an OOTP affiliate until November last year, when the chief card designer escalated a private scrobble in getting rid of me in that business position and OOTP rather protected the bully, never talked to me, and relieved me of that affiliation; even threatened other affiliates that they would lose their affiliation with they would have me on their twitch show or have me as a moderator. You will understand, that I have nothing good to say about the people that run PT personally. BUT unlike them, I am able to differentiate between personal stuff and an opinion of a game! It is a little early to have a definitive opinion on such a deep game. Especially since OOTP brings you two games in one. On the one side the typical Sim where you can simulate season(s) of basically every professional baseball in US history from 1901 onwards. 1927 Yankees? Do it! Save Bill Buckner and win with the Red Sox? You can do it. Beat the cheaters in Houston, easy. The sim engine had taken big steps backward since the days it predicted the World Series correctly. OOTP 25 was such a bad engine with games having 4-5 home runs in deadball. A twitch-streamer who is replaying the career of Wilie Mays is so extremely frustrated with the results being nowhere near what actually happened, both for overall teams and individual stats, that he contemplated stopping this 2-year ongoing stream-series. The biggest problem in my eyes was the switch from a 255 rating to a 550 rating system with not enough time ( or bad and to small beta testing) to test it. What should give you a finer tunement of players leads to unknown and undesired outcomes. After one week no one can give a verdict on if 26 improves on this again and is on 24 niveau, at least. Let me put it this way: it does look promissing. The Beta Test named "OOTP 25" might be over. The second part of Out if the Park 26 is the Perfect team modus. This is the card collecting modi. Oh boy, where to start? OOTP 24 was maybe the pinnecale of PT. In fact hype for 25 was so big, Out of the park developments had the best start for a game ever. Plus it was the 25th-anniversary edition with a lot of new features. To be short it was a disaster. OOTP developments will tell you something different, but as early as December tournaments did not fill, had to be reduced in size so they were able to be filled and interest in the free pack drops in twitch shows from January on was about 50% of what it was at the same time last year. The change list for 26 read promising but for one point. The biggest ones: No more pack rewards but you win tokens called clubhouse stars in most tournaments. With these Tokens, you can choose if you want to get packs (historic or standard) or singular cards that previously were available in choice packs. Since this was my idea, I am biased on it and like it, of course. OOTP developments took my idea even further and got away with the choice packs and let you buy the card you desire directly. Love it, thank you. Secong big change: Combinators are now Varients. Very simple, renaming crap doesn't make it less crap! They did some minor changes on the bossting part, that are positive QoL changes but did a lackluster job on countering the biggest problem of the combinators aside from it being a pay to win component. The availability: The drop rate is supposed to be higher...I have not noticed that, but yeah it seems there are more of them in circulation. But does that help? No! you will have 99% of unusable "varients" that drop to you and you still have to pay to be competitive. Even worse now, you don't buy, you bid...but more on that later. In my opinion the easiest way to solve this problem, if you want to keep a form of combinators/varients, would be to make every card varient egible. Meaning for a fixed price ( for example iron cards 15k pp, bronze 20k, silver 25, gold 30k, diamonds 50k and perfects 75k) you can turn the normal card into a varient that you then can boost (and sell). This way there would be no gatekeeping to be compedative; it would not be pay to win and the actaul skill would deside again, like in 24, not the wallet. The second big change was that now you can "sell" boosted varients. Wait not sell, you can enter them into an auction house like ebay. There is no instant buy button. So what? Well, this is a pay to win game, having an auction house and limited acces to the base varients, because of them being rare drops the ones with the most perfect points will control the bidding on the "good" varients. They can always outbid you because the do have the resources. And since they are the only ones getting the base cards, they are the only ones that can boost them up and then offer the boosted ones for horrendous starting prices, financing the bidding of the low-level varients. That is not gonna happen, that would be too much for one person? First of all, I don't think so, but this a small community, we know each other. They will find a way to divvy up the market and do it as a Trust. I am not pulling this out of my imagination; 25 years of playing online games with limited resources and auction houses tell me that this is the only reasonable outcome. Think devilsaur-mafia in World of Warcraft. The only way to counter that would be to have the resources not being limited or at least easily accessible,. OOTPDevelopments refuses to do this...it is set up to fail. And third BIG BIG failure: During the first entry pool phase (so from friday to sunday) we had 2024 as run environment. And hooray we had baseball results. No more football scores, no 9 run 9th inning comebacks en masse. On monday OOTP switched back to 2010 as a modern environment and voilà we have the same problems as in 25. 19-12 games, 21-17 games, Yesterday a morning stream lost a round 4-3. In all 3 games he won he came back in the 8th or 9th inning by more than 6 runs. In one game he was down 10-2 in the 9th and won 21-10. In game 7 by the way, it was reversed. The series winner came back and won with 8 runs in the 9th. OOTP has to decide what it wants to be: a Sim, like it had been for the first 24 years, or a video game like in 25 or, as all signs indicate, 26. In my opinion they can only lose trying to be a video game. For a video game they would need, apart from up-todate graphics unlike the 2008 grahpics they have now, to compete with MLB The Show...and they cannot win this battle. Their studio is way too small to take on this juggernaut, and to be honest the product is not good enough to take them on. If they rethink things a stick to being a sim, that is their niche to thrive. I doubt that is possible with the current personnel since Markus left, but please surprise me. So would I recommend buying it to anyone who plays the basegame and has 24? Really, only if you NEED to have the lineups of today. Oh by the way, after having the same price for 10 years OOTP raised the price by $10 for OOTP 25. Markus explained in an interview why they were forced to charge more, and really anyone with half a brain understood that. Then suddenly OOTP Go! was not free but also cost $10. There was a big outcry in the community. I totally got why they charged it, again, but there was no prior information on it. Even on launch day. I was live on Twitch Air as an affiliate when it dropped. And when the first people said it cost $10 I accused them of seeing it wrong. But that is what information policy looks like with OOTP. Even their affiliates do not get important info like that to prepare the customers. Now, for 26 the price is raised by $10 AGAIN. so from 30 to 50 within 13 months. Make of it what you will. So, imo, if you have 24 stay on 24! It is the better basegame maybe look for up-to-date rosters If you have 25 and only play the basegame? You will get some QoL updates for $50...stay on 25, if you can get up-date rosters. Really if you have OOTP 22 to 25 no need to upgrade If you want to play PT, you don't have a choice.

SSDD with OOTP, the thing that really takes the cake is i had to buy ootp 25 to keep my playthrough from ootp 24 coming up. It's just gross and while the game single player is fun i'm tired of the money grab nonsense so i'll leave a bad review so at least people understand how far ootp has declined since i got my first copy 20+ years ago.

30$ more than last year is not justified, absurd and disgusting for the low amount of new content. Game is good tho.

save file bug , get 4 games in and , corrupted file , no play .....

kicked me out and now i cant get into account rip

good game, i enjoy a lot

Regular game feels worse than ever. Simulated stats aren't really balanced right, players aren't performing at or around their talent levels even when you adjust the player variance modifier. New draftees are almost always the same kind of player over and over - lots of power and no average, lots of speed and average. The scouting system is worthless in this version, the ratings I see for non-real players doesn't tend to match their performance in the game. The game by default saves to your One Drive and filled my One Drive in 2 weeks. The only way to change it is to manually edit a config file. What? This is 2025...why not just ASK where someone wants to save games when they first run the game? The Perfect Team mode is more pay-to-play than ever. If you didn't pre-order, you're out like 4 of the best cards in the game that you can't get without spending a TON of real money to buy through the card shop. You'll never perform beyond Silver, maybe Gold level if you're a casual player who doesn't go to all the TwitchTV streams to get your free pack drops, and if you're not scamming the tournament system and the perfect draft tourneys 100% of the time. The "variant" drops of cards are just another way for someone who puts real money into the Perfect Team mode to veritably buy their way into winning tourneys. Spend more, win more, right? And don't get me started about the caustic community who are awful to "new" people on the forums and who behave so poorly that they want to screw everyone they can in the card shop and auction house. It's almost as bad as the US political climate (almost). The community has been asking for a separate Perfect Team league for people who don't want to spend money, but of course the devs won't do that because...how will they make money then if you're not dropping an additional $40 for 75 packs or one "great" card in the Card Shop? They need to revamp this game, or someone needs to actually compete with them. It's getting like Madden - same game over and over and very little new except the ratings. I get you had a winning formula 10 years ago, maybe it's time to start reworking some things to keep it fresh and actually make it better?

nobody does a better baseball game. attention to detail. uncanny!

They fixed the batter/pitcher ratings regressing from last years version but now defensive ratings and stamina is broken now Elite players like Judge and Ketel Marte shouldn’t be relegated to being 1st baseman after 2 seasons and yet they are Don’t buy if you plan on having a long term save

OOTP 26 needs a couple updates but its better than the last two iterations of the game. By the all-star break it should be really good.

Another quality game by the folks at OOTP. Its the best baseball simulation around.

Enjoy playing the game. Getting to know more and more players past and present. Doing research on several of the older players and teams from Baseball Reference. Love the weekly completive leagues.

Best $45 I spend every year.

dwarf fortress of baseball video games

I've been playing this game every year since OOTP 23. I bought the game based on the passionate reviews of the game from the community that plays the game regularly. I enjoy every part of the game. I can replay a prior season and be hands on or that the AI play it out and just be a fan of baseball. Now I buy it every year. But the strength of this game is the community it has built. The developers play the game and listen to the community which is great to see. I am a loyal and satisfied OOTP member. Play Ball!

With Football Manager taking a break this year, I wanted to get back to OOTP, as I've loved previous versions. Unfortunately, my experience with OOTP 26 so far has been a huge disappointment. I wanted to play this on my Macbook (M1, 2020), as it's my preferred on the go laptop because of the battery life. Right away, things looked off in the UI, overlapping texts and facegens, inconsistent font resolutions, etc. I changed some interface settings, which made it look better, and I could start playing. But I kept noticing weird things: when graphics are set to high, the 3D match engine is just black, doesn't render anything. Medium works, but everything looks off, can't see the much touted new live scoreboard because the UI covers a quarter of the top screen, camera was glitchy, just to name a few issues. But it was playable, and I was enjoying starting my new save. What really got to me is that I earned an achievement as I'm playing in Challenge mode, which said something like "You would have received a reward card if you started your Perfect Team. Go start it now!". Not wanting to miss out, I clicked on Perfect Team, having no interest really in any of that. Once I was there to open my packs, EVERYTHING is broken. Pack open animation doesn't display at all, cards glitch out, simply put: the UI simply breaks in PT on my Mac. So I decided to try it on my battery guzzling ASUS TUF gaming laptop, where of course everything works and looks fine, but I can't play it on the go for more than 60-90minutes. Glancing at forums, many Mac users complain of similar issues. If you don't support Macbooks out of the box, then just don't say you do!