Out of the Park Baseball 24 Available Today on PC and Mac

[Steve_OS]

Out of the Park Baseball 24 is available today for PC and Mac via Steam, the Epic...

Written By: Steve Noah

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[ty5oke]

For anyone that has the game, have the implemented any new stats for players? Looking for things like whiff%, swStk%, zonecontact...etc

[KSUowls]

OOTP 24 is....OOTP.

That is both a great thing but also slightly disappointing.

If you are a fan of the series then you will be very familiar with all the things that this game does well. OOTP 24 is no different in that regard, and it has arguably improved in some aspects of the sim engine. Fans of the series should already know what they are getting into, a great simulation game. So, rather than focus on what we already know, I'm going to list the problems with the game as I see them.

Trading:

Spoiler

The new trading features of "Hard Mode", and the new "trade deadline" both combine with existing trade logic to contribute to 3 huge swings and misses.

Strike 1 - Trade Deadline - This was far less exciting than I had hoped. I received 0 offers from the AI, even after setting half of my 40 man roster "on the block". There were not any prompts to make finding trades easier either. The screen just provides a different UI of the existing league wide Trading Block. It's a mini-game that doesn't actually change the experience compared to prior versions of the game.

Strike 2 - AI Trade Logic - First, the game needs some major tuning with AI to AI trades. There are incredibly abundant, even after turning the trading frequency all the way down. I am hopeful that this will be cleaned up with patches, but as of right now it is a little bit world breaking to see so many roster moves (even before the deadline). User to AI trades continue to disappoint. I'm not sure if I heard this in an interview or if I am just imagining it, but the AI seems to put more value on prospects who make it into the top 100 rankings. While this makes sense to a certain degree, the series has long overvalued CPU team prospects vs. the player , and the extra weight for ranked prospects does not help. I tested out a few different trade scenarios for various prospects around the league. One example that I tried really hard to figure out how to make work was to get Druw Jones (#14 prospect) from Arizona. I tried EVERYTHING. It was not until I offered AJ Minter (retaining 100% salary), one of my top prospects and Austin Riley (retaining 100% of his 10 year salary), that I even was able to get the AI to show anything under the "make this work" command. At which point it wanted another one of my top prospects.

Strike 3 - Trading Hard Mode - It's a neat idea. You gain/lose reputation around the league based on how good your trade offers are and if you cancel trades after submitting them for review. Unfortunately, this system does not pair well with point #2 above. If the core system was more realistic then I think that this would be an interesting feature to add. The inexplicable nature of User to AI trade offers makes it a handicap that is more annoying than challenging.

Owner Goals:

Spoiler

I love that they have added the ability to challenge owner goals. The system is very incomplete though. Playing as the Braves, I started out with 4 Owners goals.
Target Year - Priority - Goal - Description
2023 - Average - Team Record - Win the Championship
2023 - Average - Upgrade a position - Left Field
2025 -Very High - Build your Farm - Top 6
2026 - Average - Long Term - Build a Dynasty

Of these 4 options, only the 2nd option "Upgrade Position" could be changed, and I only received 1 option to change it. That option was to land a top 20 prospect somehow. The game won't let me trade for one of those elite prospects though (as shown earlier in the Minter/Riley/+2 prospects for Druw Jones scenario).

It would have been nice to be able to challenge the owner on more than just 1 goal from an entire list, and also to just have more freedom in what a good goal would be.

I also have to mention bugs. I expect most of these to be fixed sooner rather than later (they already released a patch less than 48 hours after the retail release which improved some things), but the game is like a ticking time bomb with crashes right now.


Positives that are new to this iteration are:
1.) Visuals - When jumping in to play a live game, the visuals are much improved versus prior versions.

2.) Catchers can actually block pitches when playing a game. When I would play games in OOTP 23, my team (not the AI) was almost guaranteed a passed ball every game (often times more than 1). Fortunately the actual sim engine was better, and so I only experienced it during those times where I actually jumped into a game. Still, it made wanting to play key games live very scary and frustrating. I have not had that problem so far in OOTP 24. The few passed balls that I have seen have seemed more consistent with real life.

OOTP 24 is a fun game. It's exactly the experience that a fan of the series should expect at this point, but it also doesn't really do anything new. I might feel different about that if the general trading system operated more realistically, but it doesn't.

Quote: Originally Posted by ty5oke

For anyone that has the game, have the implemented any new stats for players? Looking for things like whiff%, swStk%, zonecontact...etc

Not that I have seen.