Buckle up, because OOTP 25 is breaking new ground with its official partnership with the Baseball Hall of Fame. For the first time ever, you can step into the shoes of baseball legends and rewrite history. From Babe Ruth’s towering home runs to Jackie Robinson’s groundbreaking debut, the Baseball Hall of Fame partnership brings the sport’s most iconic moments to life like never before. Get ready to manage your dream team of legends and etch your name in baseball history!

But that’s not all. OOTP 25 is also introducing the game-changing Player Power Lab—a revolutionary feature that puts you in the driver’s seat of player development. Say goodbye to cookie-cutter training programs and hello to a whole new level of customization. With the Player Power Lab, you have the tools to sculpt your players into superstars. Want to turn that promising rookie into the next MVP? With advanced training programs, drills, and virtual reality simulations, the sky’s the limit.

And let’s not forget about the drama on the diamond. With cutting-edge AI algorithms and player personality systems, every player has their own story to tell. Manage egos, motivations, and relationships to unlock their full potential. Whether you’re mentoring a rookie phenom or reigniting a veteran’s fire, the Player Power Lab adds a whole new dimension to the game.

But wait, there’s more! Out of the Park Developments has listened to the fans and expanded the Minor League System. Dive deep into the world of scouting, drafting, and player development as you build the next generation of superstars. From rookie ball to the big leagues, the Minor League System puts you in control of every aspect of your team’s future success.

Out of the Park Baseball 25 is a home run for fans of the sport. With its partnership with the Baseball Hall of Fame, cutting-edge Player Power Lab, and expanded Minor League System, OOTP 25 delivers an immersive and exhilarating experience that will keep you coming back for more. So grab your glove, lace up your cleats, and get ready to write your own chapter in baseball history with OOTP 25!

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So let’s set those thoughts to the side right off the bat: Returning players will find settling back into OOTP 22 as comfortable as ever, with the usual attention to detail and a handful of new features that only enhance the experience of simulating baseball the exact way you imagine it. The only obvious sign of Out of the Park Developments’ new parent company is a positive one (so no worries about intrusive in-game purchases, for example), and the choice of mimicking baseball in its current form or rewinding the clock on America’s pastime two or more years is completely up to you. Yes, that means you can even dispense with the runner on second to start extra innings if that’s what keeps you up at night.

What’s new in OOTP 22?

OOTP Developments put obvious work into the 3D ballparks this season

While the full complement of viewing options is still available for every ballgame in OOTP 22, you’ll want to check out the Modern 3D mode to admire the effort the devs have made to improve the visuals. Not only do the stadiums look impressive, but the players on the field look less like stickmen and more like actual athletes. There are still occasional glitches like passed balls phasing through the backstop or balls caught on the warning track that appear to rebound back into the field of play, but these are rare exceptions overall. OOTP 22 is arguably the first game in the series where watching the action unfold approaches the immersion factor of reading the description of each at-bat, and in a few years, new players may not even realize this franchise started out as a text-base affair.

Fittingly, the 3D Ballpark Construction Kit has also received an upgrade, with a number of new options and a slightly more intuitive feel overall. For those with little free time and no design talent like yours truly, it’s a feature you may just check out once and move on, but it’s not hard to imagine gamers who want to fully tweak every detail of the ballpark of their dreams getting lost in it for hours at a time.

For Franchise mode, the most interesting new features aren’t necessarily the real world additions — though everything you’d expect has made it into the game, including the 2021 minor league system — but the revamp to the coaching systems. Coaches now feel like they really matter, as they can pass along specific skills to prospects and help teach young players the way you want them to play. If player development is your thing, you can now tinker in this area in ways that, say, your friends who play Football Manager have always been going on about. There are also noticeable effects that coaches can have on teams built to play young talent or contend now while a championship window is open, so it pays to explore what coaches can do for your squad.

The KBO arrives

You can say thanks to the KBO for curing your baseball withdrawal by simming a season or two

There’s a decent chance that most American baseball fans only became familiar with the teams and players of the Korean Baseball Organization in the spring of 2020, when it was literally the only game in town for a bit. Indeed, ESPN aired a number of KBO games while MLB teams were still sidelined due to the pandemic, and it was refreshing to see live baseball played at a fairly high level while American ballparks awaited the return of their teams (albeit a bit strange at times seeing ESPN broadcasters call the action from half a world away).

Thanks to Com2uS arriving on the scene, OOTP 22 now has a full KBO license for the first time. Admittedly, this is going to be a feature that only ranks highly with the subset of players who are interested in truly simming the entire world of baseball, but it also should satisfy anyone wondering if the game has any new leagues. If nothing else, it’s a welcome bit of immediate synergy from Com2uS who otherwise seems to have wisely decided not to fix anything in the game that wasn’t broken.

Feeling a (Perfect) Draft

Alas, not every player on your Perfect Draft roster is going to be quite this good

Perfect Team was always destined to be one of those “hate it or love it” features of OOTP, but there’s no denying that the dev team has continued to make this collecting and team-building mode more interesting with each subsequent release.

(As an aside, if you’re a baseball card collector and in the know about how much the prices of new cards have gone up over the past year, Perfect Team might be the best way to scratch the itch for busting packs without simultaneously destroying your wallet.)

The marquee new feature in Perfect Team this time around is the Perfect Draft mode, which is exactly what it sounds like: a chance to draft a Perfect Team squad from a selection of cards that changes with each round. You then take your drafted team into competition against other players’ draft teams, vying for Perfect Points which you can then spend on packs or players to boost your regular Perfect Team. It’s a mode that console sports gamers will recognize right away as most EA Sports titles have something similar.

The best part of Perfect Draft is how quickly it allows you to assemble a team and get it into play. Instead of being given a certain amount of time for each round, you have a time limit for the overall draft, allowing you to agonize over that 100-rated player in Round 1 or the five bottom of the roster gentlemen you select in the last round according to your whims. Once all teams are drafted, the simulations start shortly thereafter, and if you choose a smaller tournament, it’s possible to see it through to its conclusion pretty darn quickly.

On top of that, it simply slots in alongside everything that Perfect Team has to offer very nicely. If this is your favorite part of OOTP, you’ll be able to have Perfect Draft competitions, tournaments and your standard Perfect Team league all going in parallel, and really maximize your chances of earning Perfect Points while doing so. It’s not going to change the minds of people who don’t care for this relatively recent trend in sports gaming, but for everyone else, it’s a fun and logical extension of what Perfect Team already had to offer. As an added bonus, you’re likely to learn quite a bit about baseball history just from drafting players from decades past a few times.

Overview

OOTP 22 simply looks and plays better than ever

It’s getting increasingly difficult with each new release to either find some new way of praising OOTP that hasn’t already been said, or to find glaring flaws or omissions that jump right out at you. Every game prior to this year has been an impressive feat of simulating a sport that has so many intricate details below the surface, and OOTP 22 is once again the gold standard in filling any kind of baseball league you can imagine with both realism and personality. On top of the beast of a simulation engine, this year’s edition rewards gamers with improved visuals that, while still not perfect, reflect just how far this franchise has come over time.

As it turns out, neither the change in ownership nor the chaos of real life has done anything to knock OOTP 22 off its perch atop the baseball sim genre, and it easily contends with any title out there for overall sports sim supremacy as well. It’s hard to imagine any diehard baseball aficionado who hasn’t already checked out one of its predecessors, but even more casual fans are sure to come away impressed by its scope and style.

Official Download for Out of the Park Baseball 22

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[Press release has been produced by Major League Baseball]

Major League Baseball, in conjunction with Out of the Park Baseball, today unveiled the MLB Dream Bracket presented by DraftKings, which will begin on Monday, April 20th. The MLB Dream Bracket is a 32-team best-of-seven simulation featuring all-time teams for each of the 30 current Major League franchises, as well as teams consisting of Negro Leagues Stars and 25 & Under Stars. Starting today, fans can use the DraftKings mobile app to register and compete in free-to-play pools based on the upcoming game simulations, which will be produced by Out of the Park Baseball.

Game simulations will begin with eight round-of-32 matchups being played each day on Monday, April 20th and Tuesday, April 21st. Select game simulations, featuring various Game 6 and Game 7 matchups, will be available via livestream on MLB Network’s Twitch channel on Monday and Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. (ET) as well as within the DraftKings mobile app. MLB Network’s Scott Braun and Jon Morosi will provide play-by-play and analysis of the games, which will also stream across MLB Network’s social channels and MLB.com.

The 26-man rosters for each of the teams, compiled by the MLB.com beat reporters, consist of 15 hitters and 11 pitchers. For the simulation, players are rated using the average of their three best seasons on a single team. Rosters were constructed with balanced depth to specifically compete in a simulated regulation game.

The full rosters for each of the 32 competing teams, which include a combined 185 Hall of Famers, 115 Most Valuable Players, 61 Cy Young Award winners and 67 Rookie of the Year Award winners, can be viewed at www.mlb.com/news/mlb-dream-bracket-rosters. The 32-team bracket is split by league with teams seeded hierarchically based on World Series titles won; pennants won; Postseason appearances; and regular season winning percentage. The Negro Leagues Stars and 25 & Under Stars are No. 8 seeds in the American League and National League, respectively.

For more information about the MLB Dream Bracket, please visit mlb.com/dreambracket. For more information about Out of the Park Baseball 21, please visit Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP 21).

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Unfortunately, the coronavirus outbreak has thrown a damper on thoughts of balls hitting bats any time soon, but that hasn’t stopped OOTP 21 from arriving to keep the spirits of baseball fans up. As always, the dev team has made sure this year’s edition has been fully updated to reflect what baseball will look like in 2020 whenever it gets going, but there are also enough new features and additions to ensure everyone from first-time buyers to hardcore OOTP fans has a valid reason to pick up the new game.

What’s new in OOTP 21?

Game Flow allows you to customize which events get called to your attention

One of the greatest strengths of the OOTP series is also the very thing that can make it a bit daunting for newcomers. When you can create a sim of any kind of baseball league you can imagine, current, historical or fictional, starting at any year and with the rules tweaked to be exactly the way you’d like them, how do you prioritize the most important decisions you want to make and keep extraneous tasks off your plate?

OOTP Developments devised a tool called Game Flow to solve that very riddle. Put simply, it’s a way to customize the ‘Continue’ button so that every time you click on it, the simulation will stop for the exact events you want called to your attention. There are six different parameters, for your own team and your league, that can be toggled in Game Flow, as well as the time you want to sim once the current day’s game has been played. It’s a simple but very effective way to walk the line between giving players the exact information they need to run their teams — particularly in Challenge Mode, where virtual careers are on the line — and keeping seasons running along at a nice pace.

When playing your first season under current MLB rules, you might be a bit surprised by the number of players on your roster and how you can deploy your bullpen. That’s because the 2020 MLB tweaks are included in OOTP 21, meaning 26-man rosters and separate Injured Lists for pitchers and position players are in effect. Perhaps the one that takes the most adjustment is the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers; it’s a bit of a shock when you put in a specialist to face left-handed hitters and then get a message from the game that you can’t take him out because he hasn’t faced the required number of batters, but that’s the kind of realism the series has long brought to life.

In-game presentation has been spruced up as well, with new camera angles for the Modern 3D engine. Options to choose a different angle before and during the pitch, as well as after the ball is put in play, bring the level of customization for action on the diamond up to the series’ high standards for flexibility in all other areas of gameplay. What you shouldn’t expect is a ton of detail: The players still look like faceless ball-playing automatons, and they always take the field in home whites and road grays instead of making use of the wide variety of uniform combinations utilized by current MLB squads. Still, no one plays OOTP 21 for its cutting edge graphics, so its small but steady visual improvements are always welcome, and the game’s passionate mod community can undoubtedly take care of a lot as it always does.

Field of (your) Dreams

Tinker with all parts of your dream stadium in the 3D Ballpark Construction Kit

An even more ambitious visual upgrade comes in the form of the 3D Ballpark Construction Kit. As the name suggests, this tool gives you the ability to tailor a ballpark to your exact specifications, with control over the overall size and shape, field texture, seating sections, and the height and distance of the outfield fence in all areas. While most of the features simply provide a selection of five or six preset components, you could easily get lost in tinkering with the fence for an hour or two alone, seeing as you can set individual posts and then move them up or down, in or out as your heart desires.

The devs have been pretty open about the fact that this is a first stab at a 3D ballpark editor and that improvements will be released as the year goes on — and again, you can bet your star pitching ace that some ambitious mods are already being worked on. Regardless, even in its infancy, this is an impressive feature that is very much in line with the overall OOTP ethos of creating the exact baseball world you have in your imagination.

Perfect Team 21

Perfect Team is back and better than ever

There seemed to be a bit of a mixed reaction to Perfect Team when it first arrived in OOTP 19. On one hand, team-building modes are all the rage in sports games these days (though more commonly on consoles than PC), and the idea of one that was shot through with OOTP’s dedication to realism was extremely appealing. On the other, such modes are inherently seen as pay-to-win affairs that ask players to spend more money on microtransactions after already buying a full-priced game, which leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many.

Still, Perfect Team has managed to stay on the better side of that debate so far, and even dabbling with it for just a few days is enough time to show how much promise it has in OOTP 21. Everyone starts with a handful of packs to get started before being placed in a pool of other beginner teams. After graduating from there, your squad gets placed into a robust league system with promotion and relegation a la European soccer leagues.

Perfect Team makes a nice complement to standard sims

But the best part of Perfect Team in relation to all other team-building modes in other sports games is its pace. Games are simulated at regular intervals, leaving you time in-between to obtain new cards — which you can do for free by racking up Perfect Points from achievements — and make modifications to your lineup. This means that unlike other sports titles where modes like this need to be the main focus of your time, Perfect Team can be played alongside whatever regular seasons you are working on. The pay-to-win aspect may indeed be real for people aiming to get to the very top, but it’s fun for even casual play.

The list of missions has been expanded as well, so it feels like every card you acquire can help you make progress toward additional cards or packs. Add it all up and Perfect Team is worth a look this year even if you have ignored it to date.

Overview

Everything you expect from the series is easily evident in OOTP 21

OOTP Developments has what is in some ways an enviable task with each new release, because the OOTP series is already so well regarded that the devs’ primary goal is likely just not to mess things up. It’s to the team’s credit that they don’t rest on their laurels and continue to find ways to improve the overall experience. The result is that you don’t have to worry about OOTP 21 being “just a roster update,” as features like Game Flow, Perfect Team 21 and the presentation updates prove.

The 3D visual improvements still feel like a work in progress, and the overall code during my review time was definitely a bit unstable — so if you’re an early adopter, make sure you save often until OOTP Developments gets a chance to release more patches and squash all the bugs. Besides that, there’s everything to love about OOTP 21, and it can certainly help satisfy any baseball craving you have both for now and once the real thing is back.

Official Download for Out of the Park Baseball 21

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Out of the Park Baseball 21 – the 21st version of the award-winning sports strategy franchise – delivers the most new features and improvements in series history! It features unprecedented depth and customization, brand-new guided experiences for newcomers and veterans, authenticity licensed by MLB and the MLBPA, and a bounty of offline and online experiences found nowhere else.

[The content narrative is courtesy of Out of the Park Developments]

Out of the Park Baseball 21 is the biggest and best version ever made. Built upon the foundation of a series that has twice won Metacritic’s PC Game of the Year – the only game to ever do that – it delivers unprecedented baseball authenticity across the board.

“OOTP is an astonishing accomplishment!” – Boston Red Sox Principal Owner John W. Henry

Out of the Park Baseball 21 Basic Features

Discover new talent, draft the next superstar, negotiate with free agents, enter trade talks with other teams, build your dynasty and guide a franchise into an infinite future! As a manager, dive into the more hands-on management and set your team’s lineups, pitching staffs, in-game strategy and call the shots from the dugout. You can oversee your league at a high level, or play out each game in the redesigned 3D game mode, managing play by play or even pitch by pitch. OOTP has it all covered!

OOTP 21 comes with accurate 2020 MLB and MiLB rosters featuring ultra-realistic player ratings, schedules (including the London Series and the MLB at Field of Dreams), and league rules. Plus, all historical MLB seasons (1871-2019, including full historical minor leagues) and dozens of international pro and independent baseball leagues from around the world, featuring accurate 2020 rosters and player ratings. You can even create your very own fictional baseball universe with fictional teams and players, the possibilities are endless. The Infinite Baseball Sandbox!

New features in OOTP 21 include:

• All new Game Flow guides you through the unique OOTP experience in a smart, fully customizable way! Not sure what to do next? Game Flow gets you where you want to be, depending on what is happening right now. Whether it is Spring Training, the dog days of summer, or the offseason, it is easy to find what to do next. A fun way for newcomers and veterans alike to experience Out of the Park Baseball!
• At long last – build your franchise’s dream ballpark! 3D Ballpark Construction Kit 1.0 allows you to configure a 3D stadium to your whims. Choose from many different field shapes and sizes, ballpark layouts and architectural elements and combine them with Ballpark Factors to emphasize the kind of organization you want to put together – defense, power, speed, gaps, you name it. This long-awaited feature lets you live a childhood dream – building your own ballpark!
• Upgraded Live Services! The smashing success of Live Starts expands this season, with additional information being used to make each Live Start even more authentic. Start your OOTP 21 experience from any date of the 2020 MLB season – from Day 1 through the end of the 2020 Postseason – with up-to-the-minute Rosters, Injuries, Trades, Standings, and more!
• New 2020 MLB rules, tactics, and player strategies! Baseball is changing in significant ways, and we have got everything in place. How will you use the all-new 26-man rosters to your advantage, as well as the new 28-man September configuration? How will you strategize around the new 3-batter-minimum for relief pitchers? What will your lineups and rotations look like with separate 10- and 15-day Injured Lists for pitchers and hitters? It is a whole new world!
• Community-driven User Experience improvements! A beautiful new interface with fully customizable player page statistics. Plus! Player lists are dramatically improved and can be configured to your liking, with more information than ever available at your fingertips.
• Big 3D in-game upgrades! New in-game camera modes let you ‘follow the ball’ during the action, and multiple camera angles are available for pre-pitch, during the pitch, and after the pitch. Dozens of new 3D animations are in place, and the entire 3D gameplay has been smoothed and polished. Plus, we have completely reworked in-game audio for better crowd and ambient noise during games – including ballpark-specific audio customization!
• Scouting reimagined! We have rebuilt scouting from the ground up this year, with significantly improved AI, new visual indicators of scouting accuracy, a new and fully customizable Player Scouting Page, new Needs-based assignments, organically created scouting reports coming at different intervals, and more. You have never experienced scouting in OOTP like this!
• Drafting reimagined! A huge amount of new information is in your hands for the draft, including Mock Drafts, Future Draft Classes, sortable Draft History, and more. Realistic high school, college, and junior college player progressions make draft classes more interesting – and authentic – than ever. You will be positioned to dominate!
• New statistics! Strikeout percentages, walk percentages, strikeout minus walk percentages and more are tracked and displayed to ensure you are fully aware of how successful (or not) your players are.
• New league customization options! Build your baseball universe YOUR way with improved League Expansion that has been made even more configurable, including long-desired improvement of Minor League team arrangements.
• The All-Star Weekend goes BIG! For the first time ever, experience and play the Prospects Game and admire majestic blasts in the Home Run Challenge.
• Upgraded technical design under the hood! Reduced save game space requirements use less of your hard drive and optimize the game’s installation and simulation speed
• The most active development team in the business roars back this season! Each week we produce dozens of videos and podcasts, including the popular weekly video shows This Week In Perfect Team and Perfect Team Playoff Push every Thursday, multiple Franchise series, and two audio podcasts – OOTP Now and The Kevin Kennedy Show! You are in direct touch with the developers and the community every day.
• Many more improvements, all built upon the incredibly deep award-winning Out of the Park Baseball engine that has accurately simulated the World Series winner the past three seasons on MLB Network and produced entertaining simulations for FiveThirtyEight.com!

Perfect Team 21 mode:

Perfect Team is an incredible free online competition mode in Out of the Park Baseball that shook up the industry when it first launched in OOTP 19. Assemble, customize, and manage your team by collecting baseball cards from the past, present and future of Major League Baseball. Set your strategy and tactics, then compete against players from around the world to see who is truly the best!

Do you have what it takes to build the Perfect Team?

New features include:

• New player card selection – collect over 4000 cards!
• Beautiful new player card artwork
• A brand new league structure with 2 new league levels and a single Perfect League. Can you become the ultimate Perfect Team champion?
• New promotion/relegation systems for a more dynamic league evolution
• Improved ratings calculations for every type of player card
• Hundreds of new Collection Missions with great rewards
• New in-season Special Tournaments – including qualifiers – and competitions with unique rewards, enhancing the wildly popular Perfect Team Tournament feature
• New content delivered each and every week all Perfect Team season long
• Dozens of surprises big and small all year!

The post Details of OOTP 21 baseball have emerged! appeared first on GM Games - Sports General Manager Video Games.

[This press release is courtesy of Out of the Park Developments]

This includes the delivery of Out of the Park Baseball 21 as well as an all-new mobile experience Out of the Park Baseball Go! and ensures these products will be delivered with full MLB, MLB Players, Inc., and MiLB licensing.

Out of the Park Baseball is a multiple-award-winning PC title, widely recognized as the most in-depth and authentic strategic representation of baseball at the major and minor league levels. Its 20th anniversary edition (Out of the Park Baseball 20), released in March 2019, has shattered all company records for units sold and Daily Active Users and has continued to significantly build its user base each month since release. More information will be available about Out of the Park Baseball 21 closer to its release next spring.

Out of the Park Baseball Go! is a brand-new mobile title that is currently in development. It will allow Out of the Park Baseball 21 users to fully extend their OOTP experience beyond their computers, with the ability to play their OOTP PC-based franchises and Perfect Team Mode clubs on mobile devices. Out of the Park Baseball Go! will be delivered in 2020.

“We are delighted to continue our strategic partnership with Major League Baseball, MLB Players, Inc., and Minor League Baseball,” said Out of the Park Developments CEO Markus Heinsohn. “The combination of Out of the Park Baseball 21 and Out of the Park Baseball Go! will mark the next phase of our transformation, delivering unprecedented access to our fans to live out their baseball dreams anywhere and everywhere they are.”

“Our partnership with MLB, MLBPA, and MiLB has been perfect,” said Out of the Park Developments COO Richard Grisham. “Our fans love the authenticity and realism, and the support we get from the organizations elevates our games to unparalleled levels. The future is bright – and we’re only getting started.”

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[Contents of this story are pieces from the OOTP Developments Announcement]

Here’s what you’ll get in FHM 6:

New Rivalry System!

Rival matches have extra significance for success – and change over time in response to in-game results.

Fans Matter!

Supporter happiness is tracked, changing in response to in-game events and actions, affecting attendance, job security, owner satisfaction, and more!

Alter History!

Change the structure and evolution of historical leagues and teams.

Improved player modeling!

Suspensions for on- or off-ice incidents, stat-adjusted talent ratings, and personality ratings that evolve in response to game event.

Real historical staff!

Play with and against legendary coaches, general managers, and owners, or step into their shoes with the new “Play as” mode that lets you take the identity (and abilities!) of a real GM.

New exhibition mode!

Pit any team from any era against anyone else in a head-to-head exhibition match. The possibilities are endless. Can you determine the best hockey club ever?

Up-to-Date 2019-20 NHL® Rosters

Every NHL® team features accurate rosters full of freshly rated players, along with the real clubs, awards, and trophies associated with the greatest hockey league in the world. Plus! Up-to-date rosters for the dozens of global leagues, competitions, and tournaments jammed into FHM 6.

New team reports!

Tons of new information at your fingertips, including prospect and positional rankings, team power rankings, the best and worst single-game performances, global team ranking system, and more.

25 new historical challenges!

A wide variety of scenarios await to test your skill, ranging across every skill level.

And Much More!

FHM 6 is the biggest and deepest version in series history, with much more packed in than we can possibly list here. We can’t wait for you to get your hands on it!

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[This press release is made available courtesy of OOTP Developments with modifications.] 

From the front office to the field, baseball has changed dramatically over the past few years – and nothing has kept up with the modern game like Out of the Park Baseball. Whether you love today’s world of exit velocity and launch angles or pine for the ‘good old days’ of complete games and ‘small ball’, everything you could possibly want in a baseball strategy game is waiting for you in Out of the Park Baseball 20.

No matter how you like to play, we’ve got something for you in Out of the Park Baseball 20. Take the reins of your favorite club on your own in the 2019 season (or any season in history), compete with and against friends in an online league, battle players around the world each week in our Perfect Team mode, create your own completely customized universe, or try any of the other dozens of options. Out of the Park Baseball 20 is the culmination of 20 years of building the best sports strategy gaming experience possible.

Here’s what you’ll get in OOTP 20:

Integrated live services all season long!

For the first time ever, OOTP features Live Services for MLB rosters! You can start a new MLB game any day during the regular season and Postseason with up-to-date rosters, standings, stats and player ratings, or to update player ratings in your current game based on their current performances. Can you keep your favorite team’s hot start going throughout the season, or take control to turn around a disappointing start?

Our brand new 2019 roster sets include all projected Opening Day MLB rosters as well as the complete minor league system down to rookie leagues, including independent leagues.

All Major League (and over a thousand minor league) player ratings are based on Dan Szymborski’s popular ZiPS player projection system. The remaining minor league players are carefully rated by hand by our recently upgraded research team. Listen here to one of our OOTP Now Podcast episodes as the newest member of our roster squad explains how this is done.

In addition, OOTP 20 features 12 international leagues (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Italy, The Netherlands, Mexico and Cuba, plus 4 brand new leagues with Germany, France, Spain and the Czech Republic) and several US and international independent leagues. All of the teams have accurate and projected 2019 rosters.

Improved 3D Animations

We hit the motion capture studio for the first time ever to create hundreds of new animations which take the 3D in-game action to a whole new level. Diving plays, shoestring catches, hitters celebrating a walk-off in style: it’s all there (except for a fancy bat flip creation feature – sorry about that)!

Improved AI, Game Engine and Modern Strategic Options

Baseball is constantly evolving, as is our award-winning simulation engine. This year we have introduced several new strategic options, such as an opener and a follower as MLB teams continue to seek every possible advantage to winning in 2019. We have also improved the simulation engine and AI to handle and counter these new options and also make the smartest strategic decisions possible at any time during the game.

But that’s only the start! We’ve improved all AI-related aspects of the game, including trading, contract logic, general roster building, and player evaluation, which lies at the core of the entire OOTP AI, resulting in the most challenging and rewarding gameplay ever in OOTP 20.

Perfect Team Mode 2.0

Perfect Team was a massive success after we introduced the revolutionary online competition mode for OOTP 19 in November of last year. Over 12,000 total teams have competed in the exciting universe of Perfect Team, over 5,000,000 player cards have been pulled, history was written, and countless epic moments were created.

For OOTP 20, Perfect Team mode will return with more cards (over 3,200 total) and more features, including exciting tournaments (coming in April), collection missions (coming April / May), an improved auction house, more achievements, an additional league level (6 in total) and all the new strategy and AI improvements of the core game. Build your very own Perfect Team and battle the best OOTP managers in the world!

Out of the Park Baseball 20 includes:

• All new Spray Charts for players
• Improved historical league player ratings and simulation accuracy
• All new tiebreaker calculations
• Added support to have players in lineup backup other positions, and substitute in starting lineups for them
• Teams can participate in multiple tournaments at the same time

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[Contents of this story are pieces from the OOTP Developments Announcement]

Here’s what you’ll get in FHM 5:

Up-to-Date 2018-19 NHL® Rosters

Every NHL® team features accurate rosters full of freshly rated players, along with the real clubs, awards, and trophies associated with the greatest hockey league in the world. Up-to-date rosters are also available for the dozens of global leagues, competitions, and tournaments in FHM 5.

Improved Tactics

New, deep tactics that allow unprecedented control over how your entire team performs, down to each line and individual player.

New User Interface

We redesigned the user interface to make it easier and faster to do what you want to do while you’re managing your team.

New Chemistry Dynamics

Mix and match players to find the right team chemistry that will maximize performance on the ice.

New Player and Staff Personalities

Set your team up for long-term success by hiring staff members with the right personalities and paying attention to how players’ personalities mesh with each other.

Online Leagues

Compete against friends around the world and decide who has the best hockey strategy.

And More!

FHM 5 allows you to build your hockey franchise into a perennial Stanley Cup® winner YOUR way, in the current 2018-19 season or back through the entire history of the sport – all the way back to the very beginning! Different eras demand different tactics, and it’s up to you to put together the best club possible for every era.

The post The scoop! Franchise Hockey Manager FHM5 features for this 2019 season appeared first on GM Games - Sports General Manager Video Games.

Perhaps you can’t wait for Opening Day, or the home opener. Or maybe you’re like me, and can’t wait to bog down with baseball video games such as OOTP 19, which is available for all the platforms you’ve grown accustomed to (Linux, Windows, Steam).

It’s hard to know how they keep improving on perfection, but here we are again. In the settings and advanced tabs of your league, you can get your cake and eat it too by tailoring how accurate the scouting reports are that you get, and how often you want to get them.

One thing that stands out is Challenge Mode, where you can face unique challenges when trying to build your dynasty.

These are the differences the game lists:

• Commissioner mode and the player editor are disabled
• Certain league rules are setting adjustments are also disabled
• Certain AI team control settings are also disabled
• Long-term simulation (“Auto-play until…”) is only available during the offseason
• New in-game achievements can be unlocked while playing games out
• Your achievements and season scores will be tracked in your personal OOTP online profile (as long as you’re logged in), which will allow you to compare your career and accolades with those of OOTP players around the world

Who doesn’t love a challenge? So I absolutely checked that button when starting my career.

Right out of the gate, I’m reminded of the amazing interface of this game. Almost everything you could want to look at is a clickable link. Jose Berrios is from Bayamon, Puerto Rico. Click that link and it takes you to a list of cities in Puerto Rico, sorted by population, latitude and longitude. It lists the quality of baseball in Puerto Rico — excellent, by the way — and the number of active professional players.

And if I’m not mistaken, these menus move faster, too. There is very little load time once the game is up and running, which is a nice feature.

The beginning of the season has all the accurate information. Who are the team’s top prospects? For the Twins, they have Royce Lewis, Stephen Gonsalves, Nick Gordon and Brent Rooker atop the list. All of the injuries line up with realistic timelines. The 25-man roster is nearly player-for-player perfect.

In a vacuum each of these might not seem like much, but they make for the total package when combined.

The “Meet the Team” tab is awesome, showing the team’s top players with their salaries — which are accurate — as well as the reputations for each of the team’s key front office and on-field personnel. Pitching coach Garvin Alston? His reputation is unknown, and that makes sense — it’s his first year on the job.

The Opening Day salary figure for the Twins on the game is $129,132,425 — within $500,000 of what’s listed on Cot’s Contracts ($128,713,226). Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen so many things that have a national slant miss the mark with the Twins — a team from flyover country — but again, I have a huge respect and appreciation for the accuracy shown here.

Another interesting thing is the Team Chemistry tab, which lists the rapport each player has with the bench coach as well as what types of players are on the team. Joe Mauer and Jason Castro are listed as the captains.

One interesting one is Miguel Sano is listed as “selfish” which, if nothing else, is at least interesting to see.

Another cool option is to look at a player’s baseball card, which automatically updates with their season stats from your game. I think that resonates with some fans my age, who grew up in the mid-90s collecting the Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck sets to trade with friends or proudly display in our three-ring binders.

Anyway, onto the gameplay. Before opening the season, I get an email from owner Jim Pohlad. Among other things, it says to make the playoffs, upgrade at catcher, sign Brian Dozier to an extension and reach the World Series in the next five years.

Again, that’s pretty much perfect.

The gameplay is a little different. Check out the rendering of Orioles Park at Camden Yards:

That’s a pretty cool, and perhaps most importantly accurate render of the park in Baltimore. In addition to the nice rendering, there is a ball graphic that shows where it is hit — field specific — for a little added realism. The feature is still developing a bit, however, as outfield flies don’t go all the way to the players who catch them, and it’s still a little choppy.

But the crowd and bat crack sounds are a nice touch. So too is the clock on the scoreboard in the top left. Oh, and if you’re ever wondering how to get back to the home screen? Simply click the home plate icon at the top of the menu. Pretty clever!

The end of game screen is pretty cool, as each game has a unique ID and it even shows the win probability graph that fans might find on Fangraphs or wherever they like to get their baseball information.

Also there’s an automatically generated post-game quick clip including a quote from Trey Mancini, who hit a two-run double in the first inning. In the interest of fair disclosure, as a sportswriter it makes me a little uncomfortable how good this paragraph was for something that was automatically generated.

An early-season injury to Adalberto Mejia also gave me occasion to look down to the minors, which again are perfectly stocked with actual Twins prospects. I also looked at the international tab, and it has players the Twins have signed there working at the international complex as well. For instance, Kai-Wei Teng is listed on the team. He was actually signed by a friend of mine, former Twins scout Cary Broder.

Again, this bit of realism — no matter how minute — is not lost on me.

A week in, and my team is 3-5. My screen tells me where I’m at in the power rankings, what my attendance is like — including per-game average and percentage of previous year change — and the upcoming schedule is mapped out for the next week with probable pitchers to be faced.

I cannot emphasize enough that the details in this game are absolutely incredible, and it’s why I can’t recommend the game enough. The game even saves and indexes highlights like a video system if a player wants to go back and see how a play panned out. As of now, it’s not the most useful feature since the ball graphics aren’t perfect, but it’s still a wildly cool idea that I think will be improved upon in future years.

Also back are all your favorite other features, like playing a historical or custom game, or even importing your OOTP 18 franchise if it’s one you’re truly enamored with. Considering how much time can be spent checking out and tweaking all the minor details, it’s easy to see this being a possibility.

But if you want to go back and re-play the 1987 season — the first Twins World Series winner — you can do that as well. The game is smart in this respect, as you can have the player ratings calculated based on the stats they put up in real life, or how the season progresses in the game. It’s up to you.

But looking back at some of the names I grew up watching — the Kent Hrbeks and Kirby Pucketts — in this game is just the icing on what was already a wonderful cake.

Look at this screen of beauty, complete with the correct division — pre-1994 realignment — and those lovely, lovely 1987 logos:

This game has something for everyone. That’s what makes it great; that’s what also makes it dangerous.

I’ll leave you with this. One of my favorite things about the loading screens is that the game posts interesting facts and anecdotes. This was my favorite one:

“Marylou Cunningham Bines died after giving cancer the finger for 25 years. She was also a Mets fan, and surprisingly it wasn’t that which killed her.”

Details, details, details. When the big things are good, a game sets itself apart with the little things. They didn’t miss any with this game.

The post Review – The detail in OOTP 19 is absolutely incredible appeared first on GM Games - Sports General Manager Video Games.