I love baseball sims and this is the best. It has turned into the same money sink as many other games before it. Play the base game and leave their cash cow PT alone unless your pockets are very, very, deep. I absolutely despise PT now and despise myself for loving it.

For about a decade I bought the new OOTP every year -- largely to support the solo dev -- but the incremental improvements stopped being worth it, and then they introduced the new pay-to-win collecting card mode and I just wasn't interested in supporting them anymore.

Fast forward eight years and I'm struck at how little progress there's been:
They cleaned up the league creation (thank god). I'm told trading has improved, but the first few offers weren't all that. Spring training is more streamlined. There is full licensing. Drafting seems to produce better results, unless you start messing with custom leagues, when the financial models are pretty much busted (leading to a 27-year-old Ted Williams going undrafted because his contract demands were too high).

But the shiny bits are, if anything, worse. The 3D modeling is so bad as to detract from the game, not enhance it. My first run, the default model was a stubby little park with outfield bleachers designed like old Tiger Stadium. On every ball hit to the outfield, the camera switched to a view from the back of the bleachers and just showed badly rendered fans from behind, and / or the view from behind a post, and or the view from behind the fascia on the upper deck. Every. Single. Outfield. Play. How does this pass testing?

At heart, it's still a text game, with a cheap 3D model stuck on top. This highlights other problems. I drafted a team with good defense, but I'm leading the league in errors. Almost all the errors come from over-elaborate scripting of ground balls to the first baseman. On consecutive plays, he dove to his right, snagged the hot grounder, recovered, then from his knees flipped to the pitcher covering ... and the pitcher dropped the ball. Word for word identical, over-described plays. Which is not statistically impossible, I guess. But after 10 games, every grounder to first has been a throw to the pitcher, a 3-1 groundout. Zero groundouts where the first baseman just catches a ground ball and steps on the bag. Which has in turn screwed up a good defensive team (other than the pitchers, apparently, but the 1B still insists on flipping every ball to the pitcher covering.) And the animation just emphasizes this, with the 1B stopping the ball, then standing still while the pitcher runs across the diamond and does this weird, origami-looking flex to turn and catch the toss.

In order to create extra-base hits, the fielders often run in on balls hit over their heads before turning and chasing the ball to the fence, presumably because they can't model the speed of the OF and the speed of the ball to allow extra-base hits to happen naturally. Base hits often require the OF to stand still to allow the ball to drop in front of them instead of moving in 3-4 steps. This was charming in a weird way when it was essentially little stick figures, but now it's just irritating. You're selling a 3D game for $50; it should look like one.

Earl Weaver Baseball II from the early 1990s somehow remains the high-water mark for simple animation of a text-based game. How is this possible?

Similarly, back in the text-only days, there was a lot of scripting to turn routine grounders into more interesting plays ... throws that needed to be scooped out of the dirt or ones that sailed high. When it was text, you sort of ignored it. Now that it's (badly) rendered, it's like watching little league, where more than half the routine infield outs are turned into adventures because throwing a ball across the diamond is at the limits of what the players can do.

It's a hot mess.

The UI is ... challenging. After 27 iterations, one would hope that when you do a double switch with a pitcher and a fielder (no DH league), that the game would understand that the pitcher you just brought in was to pitch. Instead you get a popup telling you that you are fielding an illegal team and you have to go back in and move the dropdown next to the pitcher to "P." Twenty seven years and they still can't get stuff like that right. Lots of little things that were forgivable when it was just Marcus and it was the equivalent of a $20 game today. Now it has lots of flashy stuff (a Hall of Game render that is of interest for 10 or 15 seconds and the aforementioned Perfect Team mode) but the UI is still incomprehensible.

And FaceGen was a cute toy when it was introduced, but it ruins the immersion when every player on a team from a historical game has modern facial hair. There were no goatees and piercings in 1965. How do I turn them off???

I wish I could recommend this game. I used to love it and bought it every year the day it came out. But it has lost its way, doing too many things badly and not looking after the core simulation that runs it in the background.

If you like the Front office part of baseball this is better than MLB the show.