With the new Baseball season just starting, a flurry of new titles hit the market. Theres’ MLB14 The Show for Playstation owners and RBI Baseball for XBox players but what about PC gamers. The last mainstream game was MLB2K12 which was a poor update of the previous years title. You may not realise however that another company has been releasing Baseball titles for the last 15 years called Out Of The Park Developments.
So, what is Out Of The Park Baseball 15? (or OOTP15 as im now going to refer to it as). The easiest way to explain it would be to say this. You know Football Manager 2014.. Well take that game and remove all traces of football from it and replace it with baseball. Now add in a historical mode allowing you to play any season since 1871, throw in the ability to customise almost anything on the fly and we’re pretty close to OOTP15.
Does that cover everything.. No, far from it.
Lets start at the beginning then. Upon booting up the game, you will be confronted with 3 types of game. You can play a game based upon the current 2014 rosters, the historical mode to replay from any year that you choose or a custom mode allowing you to pick any setup you wish. Whatever you pick, once the game sets itself up, you will see something a little like this.
OOTP15 runs on a day by day basis with everything paused until you press the big ‘Play’ button at the corner of the screen and select to move forward. This is your hub and using those and the tabs at the top you can do almost anything such as review your teams strengths and weakness’, hunt for the next big thing, or just review your standings in the league you picked. There is a ton of information available at your fingertips and while it can be quite daunting at first, soon it becomes second nature and you can always set the AI to do things you don’t really want such as finding new staff members or setting your fielding line-ups. You will be spending a lot of time in this section of the game, so if you’re expecting something similar to The Show or RBI Baseball and spending most of your time on the field, then you are going to be sorely disappointed. OOTP15 also remembers a ton of game history and allows you to open up an old game record and get all the game information as if it had been played that day.
Speaking of the games AI, OOTP15 also scales back what you are allowed to do dependant upon what league you select. In one game, I played as the manager of the Greenville Astros, a rookie level team who play in the Appalachian League and an affiliate of the MLB team Houston Astros. As their affiliate, I wasn’t allowed to get my own team, but would have players sent to me, or taken away whenever management decided. It lead to much annoyance as one of my players got on a really hot streak and was promptly taken away (or promoted as I guess the player saw it) but it made me realise that I couldn’t just count on one person to carry the team.
While the managing section can take up a significant amount of your time, you will spend about the same again on game days (MLB season consists of 162 games per team so you are gonna be here a lot)
Once again you are confronted with a ton of information in front of you but once you stop and take it all in, it all becomes quite intuitive and you can even toggle on and off anything you desire. As manager of the time, you’re not going to be doing any of the pitching or swinging, but issuing commands to your players and hoping they follow through. You may need to brush up on your baseball knowledge to figure out what ‘safety squeeze’ or ‘send forced’ but the game does have a usual manual at the touch of F1 is you do get lost. If you don’t want to manage the game, you can opt for a webcast view and get information of all the games playing at that time which can be stressful towards the end of the season when your game finishes and your rivals are still playing and could eek out a win and beat you in the standings.
Now then. One of the big features talked about this year was 3D gameplay allowing you to see ball trajectories and rendered ballparks. Developer Markus Heinsohn recently announced on their forums that while still a feature, 3D mode wasn’t really working the way that they wanted it to and when I have been using it, there have been a few weird glitchy issues and freezing on full screen. To come out with that information is very honest and brave instead of letting customers find out after purchase (Aliens: Colonial Marines. Im looking at you)
The developers have stated that they are continuing to work on the 3D engine and will be updating throughout spring and summer for free to make sure the 3D engine works, and from what i’ve seen of their work Franchise Hockey Manager (a game the company released in September last year and still receiving patches), I have no reason to doubt them. The 3D engine should allow players to import any field they want to play in or even create their own and import it into the game.
Conclusion
For a company without the financial clout of Sony or Sports Interactive, OOTP15 is an incredible effort. It does suffer a little from being a yearly title but you can see that they clearly love the game and the sport. Don’t expect the game to come with any photos or logos as they haven’t acquired any of the licences, but that’s nothing that the modding community wont have sorted by the end of the 1st week (or if you know what you’re doing, by importing them from last years mods). The game probably could use more of a tutorial system for new players and if you’re not up on your baseball knowledge, you may need Wikipedia on standby for some of the acronyms (or open the built in glossary into a browser window) 3D mode is still a work in progress, but watching the balls fly towards the fences is very satisfying.
Should you buy it.. If you want a more in-depth baseball experience than you get in MLB The Show, then you can’t really go wrong and for almost half the price of The Show.
