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I initially had a positive impression of this version but the more I played it the less enthused I was. This is the first year of OOTP that I've felt underwhelmed and disappointed by (I believe I've played since 2011). This year feels rushed and buggy.
Positives: Runs smoothly, sims faster, 15 year contracts
Negatives:
- Owner goal "negotiations" are basic and underwhelming for a new feature. You can sometimes swap one goal for another, they're still often nonsensical.
- Trade AI is unimproved, trading between AI teams is significantly worse and they aren't fixing it because they're afraid to make it worse (per patch thread). This is the worst part for me. Completely immersion breaking.
- Trading hard mode was an okay idea that needed major tweaking before release. This part makes me feel like they either didn't test it or didn't care about how bad it is. Reputation effect is unclear, you lose reputation for rejecting/ignoring AI proposals that are frequently awful. It makes no sense and just playing through one season during testing would have shown that. I know you can turn it off but this was a "feature" that was semi-hyped.
- Little care/attention seems to have gone into ratings. I know it is supposedly based on ZIPS but in some cases that doesn't appear to be the case. And some ratings not quantified by ZIPS like defense/range seem to be arbitrary in some cases.
I don't know. At this point it almost feels like a baseball simulation version of Madden where they're churning out roster updates with half-baked "improvements" and calling it a day. Maybe I'm alone in this, maybe not - I'll note that the steamcharts all time peak for OOTP 23 was 1,826 while OOTP 24 is 1,354. I'm sure a large portion of their sale come from their direct store and for all I know they went up this year, but it's hard to ignore that big of a dip with steam sales. Had to raise an eyebrow somewhere.
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