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Originally Posted by Charlie Hough
It's never going to happen, but this game series should be officially split into two products:
Out of the Park Baseball 2007 and Baseball Manager 2007.
The first game should be a more traditional baseball simulation with emphasis on the game of baseball itself, a highly accurate game engine, and excellent managerial AI. It should also feature robust historical play, replay accuracy, and features that will keep the game simple and highly enjoyable for the fan that does not want the features of the typical SI game. Some of the features for scouting, media, and purely wild fictional baseball should be removed in order to make room for a more accurate simulation of contemporary major league baseball and its past history.
The second game, Baseball Manager, should basically be a baseball version of Football Manager. The development could focus largely on career play, limitless customization, countless options for fictional play, global features, and all the media interaction, scouting, and other features that have made SI famous.
I truly believe that this is the ultimate solution, although it might require another programmer to take on the development of the traditional OOTP series while also working with Markus to share code and ideas as he focuses on the FM-style game.
I think that SI has no understanding whatsoever of the traditional American sports simulation market, and it only knows the career-based simulation market that emerged in the mid-90's. That's understandable considering that SI operates on a different continent and hasn't come out of the realm of Strat-O-Matic, APBA, Diamond Mind, Cactus Development, DK Sports, and all the rest.
But something has to be done to divide this series into two products with separate agendas, otherwise this game is going to become the baseball version of FM and drive all of the more traditional gamers to products like PureSim and back to games from the companies mentioned above. And I'm pretty sure that I will be one of them, even though I'm a fan of the FM series. I just have no interest in seeing OOTP become the baseball version of FM, because I know that it will come at the expense of the features and playability that I'm looking for.
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