Out of the Park Baseball 2006
I wrote a few weeks about geopolitical simulations (in reference to Balance of Power) and why no one seems to be able to finish one anymore. What has become of the geopolitical simulations?Well, they’re still around, believe it or not, and they’re more complex than ever. Only now they’re called sports text-sims.
Don’t believe me? The premier game of the genre is Football Manager, developed by Sports Interactive. There are over 5,000 teams from 50 countries represented. Each of these teams is pursuing resources from a limited pool and is in competition with each other. Teams have different styles of play and their pursuit of these resources is affected as a result. There are direct conflicts (matches) and more indirect conflicts (pursuit of players).
Quibble if you’d like, but in my mind, FM is the most comprehensive geopolitical simulation ever created. Call it a sports geopolitical sim.
Two additional titles published by SI, Eastside Hockey Manager and Out of the Park Baseball, now have a look and feel that is consistent with the FM world. I’ve been playing OOTP for the last week, and I think it qualifies as a geopolitical simulation as well. Less complex than FM, certainly, but it’s still in the realm.
I couldn’t possibly review OOTP for you. Even twenty hours of play would barely be scratching the surface. Anyone who wants to honestly (and accurately) review this game needs to put in forty or fifty hours, and I’m just not compelled to play for that long.
Why I’m not compelled to play for that long is exactly what I want to talk about.
It’s not that OOTP isn’t a “good” game. It’s quite good, at least to me, and the interface overhaul that was performed to align it with other SI titles was well done. Yes, the interface needs more refinement, but it’s still an improvement. The addition of world leagues this year was totally inspired. The AI was a bit chewed in the initial release, but that’s being improved via the inevitable patches.
Here’s the real problem, though: most sports text-sims are, at a minimum, fifty-hour games. You can’t spend ten hours with one of these games and feel like you felt anything but the tip of the elephant. Even a hundred hours is well within reason if you want to experience everything.
So I’m not playing two or three of these games a year. They’re so incredibly time-intensive that I play only one a year, at most. I only know one person (Paul Costello, who’s an absolute witch as a G.M) who plays these kinds of games seasonally and goes 50+ hours with each one.
And if I’m only playing one, there’s no way I’m playing OOTP. There’s only one possible game to play, and that’s Football Manager.
Everyone who plays games should play at least one version of Football Manager. It’s a legendary game, and it deserves its legend. The real-world league structure of soccer/football is one of the greatest mechanics ever for a game. The promotion/relegation mechanic creates continuity. Your low-level squad could get promoted several times based on their final standing in the league table. Woking could play in the English Premier League, at least in theory (I think they could, anyway—I’ve damn sure never gotten them that far).
Baseball makes for a much less interesting game structure, unfortunately. Teams can’t get promoted or relegated. U.S. minor league teams are essentially feeders into major league clubs (with a very small number of independent teams out there). It’s a series of leagues at discreet levels with no connection in-between.
Worse, in the minor leagues, winning is really not important. The goal is player development. But if your role in the game is a manager, you’re going to be judged on wins and losses, not player development. In the world leagues, winning is important, but it still doesn’t have any continuity with the highest level of baseball—the American major league.
How much more interesting would it be to take a AA minor league club like Corpus Christi and get them into the major leagues?
It would be damned interesting. We can’t do that, though, and that’s why Football Manager has a far superior gaming structure than both OOTP and EHM. It’s not the other two games’ fault—they’re just mirroring the real world—but the real world, in this case, gives an enormous advantage to Football Manager.
Player movement is also far more interesting in FM. In baseball, player movement below the major league level is far more controlled, and minor league trades are generally made from the major league front office with an eye to improving the parent club. OOTP including world leagues is an excellent addition, but the player movement model pales compared to FM. Free transfers (free agents), players on loan, transfers under contract (which almost always involves payment and could involve additional players as well), youth squads, development teams—all involving a database that could potentially contain tens of thousands of players. It’s dizzying, but it’s also great fun.
One last point of distinction. OOTP’s in-game engine is static and quite lifeless compared to the 2D match representations in FM. And the FM text commentary has been honed for years to excellent effect. There’s also the option in Football Manager to see only key parts of the match instead of every second. Again, it’s a very clever way to keep the game moving, yet it doesn’t feel like you’re missing anything.
So what can OOTP do to narrow what is now a sizable gap between itself and FM? Most importantly, it desperately needs a 2D in-game engine. Graphics at even the level of the now-ancient Microleague Baseball would be a HUGE improvement. It’s just too damned hard to get immersed into the existing in-game engine of OOTP. It’s bland.
Next should be a hard stop on complexity. These games are complex enough. It would be very, very difficult for anyone to argue that these games need to be made more complicated, even for hardcore players. But it is very easy to argue that these games need to make their complexity more accessible. In OOTP, sometimes it feels like I’m drinking from a fire hose—it’s hard to taste anything.
One of the ways to make the game more playable is to spend time creating an in-depth walkthrough. Not a giant manual, not help screens (although those are both worthwhile features), but an actual tutorial that walks you through the first month of a season and touches on all the things you can do.
If that tutorial is too hard to create, if there are just too many options to create a learning path, just imagine how hard it would be for a new player to play the game.
I think the people who create these kinds of games are both sports fans and data guys. Every year, with every new version, they add more data, and they refine the sim engine. It’s the most natural thing for them to do. But a game like OOTP needs—desperately--to make its complexity more accessible than it needs to refine the number of innings the twelfth pitcher on the roster will throw during the season.
The other thing I think would make a difference for OOTP, and for all text sims, would be to create what I’d call a glide path.
Oh, now we’re getting all pretentious and shit. “Glide path.” Good grief.
In non-asshole terms, what I mean is that the game should have a mode where you can enjoy it without playing for fifty hours. Build another game path, one that reduces the number of choices a player has to make, but that still allows the player to experience a substantial subset of the game.
If you do that, and you showcase that streamlined experience in a demo, you’ll attract new players, and some of those players will happily wade into geopolitical world after getting a taste of the real thing.
Yes, you can argue that a player can do that in the existing version by automating various functions, but how many new players would really know how to do that? Almost none.
This has gone on far too long, and I apologize. I should have created a glide path for this post. Wait, it’s not too late. Here you go:
--OOTP is an excellent baseball text-sim
--as a game mechanic, soccer is a far better world for a text-sim because of the promotion/relegation structure
--these games require 50+ hours to fully experience, so most people will only play one a year
--in that case, the one game you should play is Football Manager.
Absolutely.
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