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.

Been playing since 2017. There remains a great game in here but the lack of innovation, new features and/or new statistical data in the last 5+ years (The Perfect Team era) continues to be embarrassing. Just to name a few: launch angle, exit velocity, barrels, hard-hit rate, xSLG, XBA, etc. There is no Statcast type data whatsoever, despite these stats having been commonplace for nearly a decade in baseball. The skinning options remain poor and text size/formatting is a crap-shoot. Player profile pages have big gaps in some areas and awful spacing necessitating a scroll bar in others. The poor use of space would be less relevant if every pitcher with 4+ pitches didn't need to be scrolled to see all their data. You *still* need to restart the game completely to change the font style, meaning you need to launch the game 7 or 8 times just to see every font option available. Lastly - Perfect Team is a *ridiculous* experience. I admit that it was fun watching Dave Stieb beat out Dave Stieb for the ERA title in my league - though for a while it looked like Dave Stieb may have actually come through to take it, despite Dave Stieb being hot on his tail. Meanwhile, Dave Stieb's hot start to the season seemed to fade after the All-Star break but Dave Stieb came through with a hot finish in September to win the ERA title. Tim Raines on the other hand...

Click Hit Happy Click No Hit Sad

This game is loaded with micro transactions. Nuff said.

The "small developer" (aka: Com2us, a company work hundreds of millions of dollars) wanted me to make a review for them, so I will. The only reason I have 26 is because my online leagues converted to it, unfortunately. Single player hasn't been improved since 23. This "Draft Combine"/"Improved" Dev Lab don't bring any further strategy to the game. Just some cosmetic things that probably took, like, a week to implement. OOTP is now just an IP that was sold out in order to be a pay to win shell with Perfect Team. The devs for this are lazy, egotistical, and actively censor any criticism of the game on social platforms. The only reason to buy this game is if your online league requires it or you like paying full price for a pay to win mobile game....on the PC.

Many, many years ago I fell in love with and played daily the Earl Weaver baseball game. Being able to tinker and create lineups and then run games and seasons with simulation. What a thing in the early 90s. Just recently I was reminded of it and began looking for a game produced today that would give me the fun and appreciation of baseball. To me, on the whole, baseball is defined in my mind in the era of 1970-1990. I was a kid of the Big Red Machine. OH THE MEMORIES! OOTP is a game that has brought back to me all the joy of the "old" days of baseball because I get to see the interaction of not only the BRM but each of the teams of those childhood years. The years of chewing huge wads of bubble gum from freshly purchased and ripped open packs of Topps baseball cards. If this review strikes a chord with you then do yourself a HUGE favor and purchase OOTP.

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.

ban people with genric answer insteado f reason and proof andn o warnign ahead whatj oke

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. 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.

do you have autism? do you love baseball? look no further!

I love this game, I really do. But as a long, long time Football Manager player - I see this company already heading towards the same mistakes. Unfortunately, as long as systems such as "Perfect Team" exist - that is, systems within a game that become its primary revenue driver - the rest of the game will suffer. If you have interest outside of Perfect Team, sadly, you will see very, very little development year by year in this game. Menus will remain clunky, memory leaks will never be fixed, and every other minor issue that you could initially look past will eventually wear you down and become burdensome after you see it pop up iteration after iteration. This game is fantastic on paper. The original concept is incredible. But without meaningful development, it will eventually suffer the same difficulties that Football Manager and Sports Interactive now face, and the company will suffer greatly for it. I have yet to see any meaningful development in the three years I've played and purchased OOTP, and I imagine that isn't going to change. Sorry OOTP, I want to support and believe, but I've been burned too hard from FM. Please do not follow in their footsteps. Continue to develop your awesome game. You need a dev who is passionate for the game as a whole, not just for driving revenue through PT.

I play OOTP every day, but I cannot recommend this game any longer. Don't let the fact that I have tons of hours mislead you... it’s more a reflection of habit and addiction. If I didn’t get the game for free as part of the beta team, I honestly wouldn’t be buying it. Perfect Team is a financial success, but creatively, it’s the biggest misstep the franchise has made. It shifted focus and resources away from the core game. After all these years, can anyone really say the offline experience has improved dramatically? Many longtime players would argue it has regressed. I could write a 10,000-word essay on all of its issues, but here are some highlights in no particular order: - OOTP is poorly optimized for 2025. A single save file can balloon into hundreds of thousands of files, creating a massive burden for backups, syncing, and long-term storage. In short, cloud saves are just not feasible. - The in-game 3D remains frustrating. Animations are rough, results aren’t physics-based, and the follow-ball feature is disorienting. After more than a decade of development, I still stick with 2D because 3D is just not good. - Game mechanics are bloated and inaccessible. Concepts like traditional player creation modifiers, sabermetric modifiers, league totals, and league total modifiers are scattered and unintuitive, especially for new users. - Online leagues are outdated. There’s no official server support, so commissioners must know how to set up their own server or pay someone to do it. More importantly, there are no anti-cheat tools. Commissioners can view or edit ratings, and concerns about this are often brushed off. A simple player editor lock would go a long way to improve online league transparency and integrity. - Documentation and support remain major weaknesses. Bug reports frequently go unanswered, and there’s no official manual to help players understand how the game’s many systems interact. It’s trial and error, even for veterans. - The community wiki helps, but it’s often outdated or too vague. Developers have been hesitant to explain how core mechanics actually function, citing a desire to preserve mystery. In practice, this just makes the game harder to understand and harder to teach. - The game often feels unpolished at launch. While there is some internal testing, the bulk of beta testing is handled by unpaid volunteers like myself, most of whom have full-time jobs and other commitments. As a result, the testing window before release is inconsistent, and many issues simply don’t surface until after launch. Despite everything, I keep coming back to OOTP because no other game offers this level of control over a baseball organization. The depth of strategy, both on the field and in roster building, is still unmatched. Even when the mechanics frustrate and confuse me, the foundation of the game is strong enough to keep me engaged. Customization is another huge draw. Whether I want to replay a historical season, build a completely fictional universe, or run a modern league with my own twist, OOTP gives me the tools to do it. Few games offer this kind of creative freedom. I’ve also built a lot of familiarity with the game over the years. I know how to work around most of its limitations, and at this point, it feels more like a sandbox than a traditional game. Most importantly, running an online league is still fun. The stories, rivalries, and personalities that emerge from human interaction are what bring OOTP to life. The software might frustrate me, but the online league experience is what keeps me coming back.

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.

Not sure why these idiots tried fixing a lot of things that were not broken but now the game is broken and they refuse to backtrack. It will never be what it once was so if you are like me and loved the old versions, play them and steer clear of 26 or anything that follows it. They have destroyed their own business. I would recommend almost anything over ootp26. I'm trying to muddle through because I want to stay in my online league but this will be my last year and I have contemplated demanding a refund. The development system has been completely destroyed.

If you’re looking for a flashy, microtransaction-laced arcade slugfest, keep walking. OOTP 26 is a baseball simulation (the thinking fan’s sandbox) and it’s never been better. I don’t touch Perfect Team. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s just not my game. I’m here for the soul of OOTP, what's made me come back for every. single. version: the endlessly customizable, time-bending alternate reality where I can rewrite baseball history from scratch. Want to recreate the deadball era with new clubs, new stars, and ballparks named after 19th-century canal moguls? Go for it. Want a 12-team league playing a 154-game schedule in 1927 with custom logos and historically plausible uniforms? You’ll feel like Branch Rickey crossed with Rod Serling. The engine is deeper than the Mariana Trench. Scouting, finances, development, injuries, aging curves - it’s all here. You don’t just play OOTP. You live it. You build a universe, brick by brick, then sit back and watch the drama unfold. Will your slugging first baseman flame out at 29 after a freak shoulder injury? Will your rookie southpaw develop a killer changeup and become the ace of the decade? Will your expansion team in Fort Wayne draw enough fans to survive? The answer: maybe. And that’s what keeps you coming back. Bottom line: OOTP 26 is the best version yet of the best sports sim on the market. If you dream in baseball box scores and think alternate history isn’t just for Civil War buffs, this is your field of dreams.

What the fuck is this shit? I thought it was a simulation. Not absolute nonsense all the time.

Me when I hit the baseball out of the park for the 26th time:

Perfect team - like any other Ultimate Team - has ruined this game.