OOTP 2007
 

Announced today and dated for 23rd March 2007

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...lay.php?f=3683

Some really nice features there, Marc.

Definitely looks like some improvements were made, however, I'm probably going to save my cold, hard "cashe" for DDS Pro Basketball and play that and FOF2K7 until about summer. Maybe then, I'll come back to OOTP and really look at getting this game.

I hope it delivers. I've been pretty hard on OOTP2006, but I'll buy again if reviews are good. I'm also interested in how they'll price it.

$34.99, €29.99.

Screenshots etc on www.ootpbaseball.net (might be a little slow right now!)

I really want to give this game a fresh try this year, and if the historical sim improvements deliver, it looks like this game will be well-worth my money.

You won't regret it :)

baseball mongrel the better game this year

*opens can of worms*

Is that a money-back guarantee? ;)

The new features have me intrigued. I'll keep an eye on it.

Definitely buying. The historic sim improvements have me pretty excited if they can deliver. Also looks like many of the complaints from the last version have been addressed.

Here is the full feature list:
http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=137884

As you can see, we've added tons of stuff, brought back missing features from 6.5, and tweaked existing features. I am confident that this game will be the best baseball magagement sim ever. :)

Man.... This:


and expansion will make this a must-buy. Hopefully they make it in.

As a beta tester, I don't think I can say too much, but I will say one thing regarding Historical simming. I was never a historical simmer before, always preferring to just sim fictional leagues. But the new historical features in ootp07 are so cool (in particular the 'import complete history' feature and "ability to view real career stats" feature) that I've now found myself doing historical sims. I'll shut up now.

[edit] Actually...1 more thing: those on the beta team who are historical freaks seem to be very pleased with the statistical accuracy in historical simming.

That's what really has caught my eye. IIRC, Cato or someone had devised a way to set up league records for particular points in history to accomplish roughly the same thing, but it was all manual. Same with the expansion draft, which I remember giving some advice on in this forum about how I did my own manual draft. To see these options in the game automatically - assuming they work, of course - has me frothing at the mouth, to be honest.

Football and other sports have always been different for me, which is why I have given Jim a pass on the historical/customizable league thing, but with baseball, I tend to start at a particular point in history and either play a real team years later, or sim up to the present and take over a real team with a league that now has an alternate history. This has really got me excited, so I hope it comes through reasonably well.

I'm really hoping you can take over an expansion team to start off a historic sim, so you can recreate the expansion draft and everything.

Oh, they already work perfectly. For example, when you import 1962, you'll have the complete history up to that point. Think baseball-reference.com 45 years ago ;) For example, Maris holds the single season HR record, Ruth the all-time record, Cy Young is the W leader etc. All the other historical reports work with this as well, so you can check who the positional starters were on the 1924 Yankees, or who won the MVP in 1955. All there. :)

Sure :) Expansion is held after the season ends, for example in November 1992 the game will automatically add the Rockies & Marlins. So you can take control of them, and work through the expansion draft. And then try to win the WS in 1997 ;)

Awesome. Cato did a fantastic job manually setting that kind of stuff up for the previous version (I guess it was 6.5 I last played), and it really added a lot to the experience. Before that, I always forced myself to start in the early 1900s so I wouldn't have that "black hole" of history. Now I can start in 1980, say, and have it all there.

How do you deal with the Babe Ruth pitcher/OF thing - is he (and lesser players like him) still going to be an anomaly that is hard to deal with (i.e., pick one or the other), or have you found some way to resolve this that would allow him to be a pitcher and then switch to OF a few years later.

We have added an optional historical mode to recalculate player ratings after each year, based on a time frame of 1, 3 or 5 years. If used, this will basically turn Ruth into a RF in the same year he did in real life.

We call this mode the "Hall of Fame Mode", as it creates careers which are pretty close to real life, so players who had HOF careers are a good bet to get in there in OOTP as well. :)

That sounds like a decent way to do it. Is this an option that can be turned on and off throughout a career? For instance, let's say I want to play with more of an "unknown" experience where guys might not develop as they did IRL, so I turn this off, but around 1918-19 I want Ruth to become a hitter, so I could switch this on at the end of the preceding year, have him (and everyone else in the league, I guess) recalculated, then switch it off?

If not, that's just something I would deal with. Since the history gets imported anyway, and he's clearly the most significant player this impacts, I'd probably just start after 1920 or so to avoid the issue altogether.

Yes, you can turn this on or off at any time :)

Markus: I really want to believe that this game is going to be great. A little advice though, after some of the problems OOTP has had I'd stay away from making blanket claims like "best ever" and "works perfectly". You're just setting yourself up for a future beating.

So we can come out of the closet! :D

The game is greatly improved from 2006, most of the 6.5 requested features are back in 2007 after being missing in 2006, like the stars, shop player around, minors ghost players (optional) for those running historical leagues, etc. And even better, all them are optional.

We have also the great baseball statistician RonCo in the beta team that is pushing Markus all the time with his suggestions to improve the engine to make it 99% realistic. So far I'm impressed with the historical leagues stats, some of the divisions mirror perfectly real life even with the teams having the same amount of wins/loses and stuff like that. I'm learning a lot only from reading RonCo's threads full of stats analysis for every beta build.

Now the built-in facegen... this alone is amazing for the immersion factor. Every player/coach/scout/gm has an auto generated picture of his face, and for the players, the uniform changes automatically when they switch teams. Of course it can be turned off too and/or you can use real pics alone or mixed with the fictional ones.

Maybe you're right. But I am really excited about this game. It won't be perfect in every area, of course. But I never had this much fun playing my own game before. And that says something :)

I echo Icy's comments. As someone who played ootp 6.5 extensively, then hated ootp06, i have to say some of the best features are the non-glamorous ones. My favorite improvements are:

- strategic one-pitch. Now when playing out games you can toggle between pich-by-pitch or strategic 1-pitch
- instant play-by-play . Sometimes playing out games could be tedious - but now you can set the pbp speed to instant and there is no delay. it really makes playing out games more enjoyable
- ghost players: this is important not only for historical simmers, but for those that sim fictional that don't want to spend their entire lifetime managing all 150 players in their organization - so it's got back that nice v6.5 simplicity
- shop player: yes!
- stats-based AI: it's back and it is actually implemented better than it was in 6.5
- little things like: custom award (let's me finally have Rollaids Relief Man in the game), edit player history, 'match offer' makes contract negotiations easier, lineup/depth chart is easier to use

I really hope this improves on 06. I've wanted a new solid baseball sim for a couple of years, but the UI of OOTP 06 was just too bad. However, it seems like good progress, and I must say I'm really excited now.

I am very willing to support this game. Sounds like the new stuff is great. Looking forward to it.

You'll have my $34.95. Looks great!

I enjoyed 2006 quite a bit, even if there were some problems with it that I knew they needed to fix. I generally get more enjoyment out of text sims than I ever do console games that I spend more for, so..I figure that if the game improves dramatically, I'm in.

I hope this one doesn't make us wait as long as last year, but..so long as it gets here and there aren't major showstopping bugs, I'm looking forward to seeing the new version. Almost makes me want to stop my dynasties until the game comes out.

You won't wait a lot, as marc wrote: dated for 23rd March 2007

And about your 2006 dynasties, they can be played in 2007 (also the 6.5 ones), so you don't need to stop them now.

It's usually easier to start over though, with all of the new features and stuff, it's not as fun to try to continue over. But I'll play it by ear.

Do managers and coaches accumulate history?

Yes, GM's and manager now feature a history... and in the history report you can see for example the leaders in wins, winning% etc.

Awesome. That'll definitely get me more into the coach/GM aspect.

So with the ability to have high school leagues will that also in essence mean we can create youth leagues in countries like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic but instead of feeding into the draft they would simply become free agents at age 16?

"Sounds" like baseball nirvana. I *hope* it delivers. Definitly will purchase if the FOFC clan gives its approval. Would LOVE to see what my new pc can do with this game.

Other PCs AI better, Todd.

fix ai markus or puresim get my vote

Will this result in a deal that's tilted in the CPU's favor (but could have been better with a little more human work), or will it be a sort of "reveal the answer" shortcut to negotiations?

Just that :)

I skipped 2006 and went with PureSim for the first time and enjoyed it. Maybe I will give OOTP another chance once reviews start coming in. Sounds good.

As someone who hated 2006 and said so many times on these boards, I think this year's OOTP is miles above last year's. I've too never been a big historical guy, but I find myself creating leagues to replay the past few years to see if I can make the Cubs a WS contender. Unfortunately, much like real life, it doesn't work.

OOTP imports Bartman too?

Expansion? With a draft built in? High school and college ball?

Man oh man, I'm positively giddy.

That still leaves two questions:

1. Ratings able to be universally 1-100? With 100+ ratings available for those superlative types?
2. Sim speeds?

Have contract negotiations progressed from the way they were handled in the older versions of the game? I hated the '3 strikes and your out' guessing game-style of negotiating.

In that case... cool feature.

Ratings can be set to none, 1-5, 2-8, 1-10, 1-20 and 1-100. Internaly are stored from 1 to 250 (you can see them from 1 to 250 in the editor). I would say from 200 to 250 are for those superlative guys 100+. I think this has not changed from 2006.

I enjoyed OOTP 6.51, passed on OOTP 2K6, but if the historical simming lives up to expectations, I'll certainly buy OOTP 2k7

I want mad numbers of deadball-era fielding errors.

This comment made me impressed. Not because of how you feel of the game (well that too), but rather the fact that Markus and SI had the guts to hire someone who's previously stated he really didn't like 2006 as a beta-tester for 2007(I'm not mistaken here am I?).

I think this shows a great commitment to the users from the developers to not "only" listen to the die-hard fans, but also the ones who have negative opinions (which were probably constructive none the less).

We have several beta testers who didn't enjoy OOTP 2006, but showed the interest to improve the game. I think the only way to improve a game is to listen to its critics :)

OOTP2006 was the biggest disappointment in my gaming life.

I've always supported OOTP, so even though I got burned before, I'll be giving 2007 a shot (a few weeks after release).

Can we take Markus' smiley privileges away?

I'm very happy you guys took this approach. I loved 2006 just for being able to view so many stats but I haven't ever really played single player with it, I just let the game sim out for fun. I've always enjoyed the break out the box option to do this with OOTP, and I wish other developers would understand that some us just want to do this and not actually GM a specific team. (FOF...)

Nooooo. I'm a happy person, I smile a lot! *insertsmileyhere*

Marcus,
Sounds good. One question about foreign players. Will we see a little more realistic depiction of players from outside of the traditonally strong countries in baseball. So will we still see alot of players coming from Rwanda or is it going to depend what countries we allow at setup. Also, will foreign contracts be more realistic?

Ditto. I'm not going to buy until I see many good reviews on here or am able to play the demo a good length of time, but I'm hoping this game delivers.

Expansion? OMG. Instant buy for me.

I didn't see anything regarding computer GM/Manager records (similar to WWSM). Is that going to make it in?

Pretty sure Markus said this in this thread.

Holy crap, what a list. What are the % chances this will be out by MLB opening day?

Yep, I read further. It is in there. Looking forward to this.

That's a big stretch - comparing how well the creator of the game likes playing it to how your average slob like me will enjoy playing it. Or more accurately, as was my experience with last years version, *try* to play it for weeks before giving up in a frustrated heap.

Unless the learning curve on this new version is shortened (significantly?), all the bells and whistles ain't gonna make a bit of difference.

It was key to get people on board who didn't like the game last year. We did it in part with the patches but from day 1 we wanted to hear the issues in full from people who felt strongly about them.

In addition, the guys in the beta team are free to say how they feel about the game publically - so if they don't like it they are free to say whatever they like here (as long as they've told us the problems first so we can at least try to address)

Well, they already announced a release date of 3/23, so I would say 99.99% chance of being before opening day. Now, will there be a real MLB roster set out by then, who knows.

Can't they use a REAL roster now? Jim has in his latest relase and now Gary has... would think Markus would now too.

aaah. but the MLBPA is the strongest PA of all of them.

Not sure if it matters. All those guys do is implement the lahman db in the game itself, with ootp, you just have to download it and import it.

Yeah...I'm certainly not the authority on the subject...but I think the issue is more that OOTP has been built to import a "Lahman-Format" DB for importing players, which Sean Lahman requires to be licensed if you are going to distribute with your commercial product. I believe PS did have it licensed to use last year.

But he provides it as a download regardless, so I think it's more of a technicality...as SI/Markus "could" include their own version, wink, wink...but it would be a little obvious that it was "lifted" from Lahman's DB. And why do that when it's reasonably easy for customers to download.

Thats at least what I "think" the situation is.

Whoa, if that's the case you must not have played many games.....:eek:

I am really excited about the early feedback on historical play....last years version took a big step back here IMO. And as it is the main style I play left me feeling very dissappointed.

I like the approach Markus is taking though, bringing some of the most critical players onto the Beta Team, kudos for that guys.

It does sound like OOTP2007 will be a better release than 2006, and that's a good thing. For me, I don't know, I am stuck in my old ways and have a real comfort level in playing a long historical career in OOTP5 - and will do so again starting this spring. With the lahman db and having complete control in how I move through the historical seasons (e.g., expansion, movements), I have that wired since I've done it enough times.

I recall trying out one of the other baseball sims where it did everything for me and it just didn't feel right. I also found that it didn't have enough variance from expectations regarding historical players. I found the historical variance each time I play OOTP5 to have just enough believable unpredicatableness to make each career (covering mostly the Golden Age) fun and exciting.

Good luck with this release. I'll reading along with great interest.

I didn't think the Lahman database was up to date, meaning you could import last seaons rosters?

Lahman has been recently updated to the end of the past season and does it every year.

I preordered OOTP 2k7 last night. I just couldn't help myself. Anybody else preordering?

Is there a discount? I don't recall any info in this thread about preordering.

If you bought the last version, you received an email with the 20% discount code.

Guess I'll be waiting to order then. If they wanted to give a discount for early orders, I might be persuaded. *hint, hint*

It was anounced today at OOTP forums, a 20% discount on preorders if you purchased OOTP2k6. You should receive an email about it.

Hmmm....

That makes it 27.99. Not bad at all. I told myself I wouldn't pre-order this year, but....

I pre-ordered this morning.

Damn discounts! :) Haven't pulled the trigger yet.... would love to hear more from the beta testers.

What's going on with the high school - college leagues? Anyone care to expand on that?

Don't assume they are going to be like real life HS and college leagues. They won't come anything close. They are just leagues that will be used as feeder leagues for the majors. As of right now, undrafted HS players don't even go into the college league. Markus is looking at that option.

I've been wondering about this as well, so I asked some questions over on the OOTP board.

I figured as such, just wondered how it was going to work.

Mizzou, I wouldn't want you having too high expectations about it. High School and College leagues are not mirroring life 100%. For example, there are no redshirts, no elegibillity years, no graduations, etc. Let's say they are just leagues with a maximum age set and that act as feeders for the pool of draft players, but the rest of real HS or College features are not there yet.

The feeder leagues are cool for having real stats from your draftees and to follow them in their youth career, but don't base your purchase on the believe that you will have a full HS or College system because it's not there for this version. In the beta team we have suggested it to Markus, but maybe for 2k8 as the game new features are more or less closed now to only test bugs and functionality and i think it's a better approach than to keep adding stuff until the last day.

If you didn't order last year but you are on the ootp mailing list - a mail should eventually get to you with a discount code (although not as tasty as 20%)

They should have just called them feeder leagues and left HS/College out of it. It is sure to confuse folks.

Agreed. Also, I'm wondering how tasty that discount will be for mailing list people.

I usually don't preorder anything, but I think I'll go ahead and use the 20% discount code and get this one. The historic sim improvements just look too good to me not to go ahead and grab it.

I'm really trying to not help the over hype ball to grow as it can damage every game release, but about historical leagues i'm just going to tell you that as non American who has grown surrounded by soccer instead of baseball, i never had any interest on historical leagues. I don't know a lot of the players before 1990.

However in the 2k7 beta, even not being my assignment, I'm playing a lot of historical, learning the history of baseball and enjoying it a ton comparing my simmed stats with the real historical ones. The main reason is that it's so easy to do now and the simmed stats and players development are really close to real ones thanks to the new built in modifiers, that every season re-set the players ratings to the "real" ones based on that season historical stats (this is optional).

Another cool thing is to import for example the 19XX NY team in your fictional universe, or to create an universe with the great teams from the past, imported from Lahman (I have not tried this yet myself so I can't provide a lot of details, just read about other beta members doing it).

As Bucc mentioned above (I think), I don't want the game to too closely mirror real life, so I'm hoping that "X-Factor" (sorry to borrow a term from FOF) is still there, where great/HoF guys might not have that exact type of career, or journeymen sometimes turn into all-star/HoF types.

Sounds like if I don't reset the ratings every year, the game should play like it has in previous versions, as far as uncertainty of development. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, that is why i said it's optional.

Thanks for the information.. does seem confusing.

OOTP, like the Washington Redskins, always looks its best during the off-season. This is a definite wait-and-see for me.

Actually after thinking about this more, I still like the feature. I assume stats correlate to ratings once getting drafted?

Yes they do as in any other league in the game.

I can't wait! Been buying since v4!

Marc: I own OOTP2006, but I didn't get a discount email. What can I do to get the discount? Thanks.

In historical leagues do the teams relocate when they're supposed to also? And move into the correct stadiums? (Or move into a new stadium when they got one in real life.)

For marketing research purposes:

I was going to pass on the 2007 version, until I got the email about the 20% discount. Pre-ordered this morning. Bastards :)

If you choose to enable that option, yes they do (to both the relocation and new stadium questions)

I bought the first version up until OOTP6. The historical relocations and expansions done for me, as well as the LDB in the game itself will have me buying this game this time.