[toog@rogers.com]

I just started having the exact same player models issue yesterday; up until then OOTP 22 had been working fine ever since the release. Verifying on Steam didn't help. I also uninstalled and reinstalled via Steam, to no effect. I did not try the twins_34 process of changing Steam folders, etc.

I have a custom save location on my data drive because the default puts it on my OneDrive and it catastrophically gums up the cloud sync process because of all the tiny files. And sure enough, the way to fix the issue was to copy the player models from the steam installation folder over to the data folder, as Giants44 describes.