Last year, I wrote a review of Out of the Park Baseball 2014.

Most of that is still true. The game itself hasn’t changed that much. Buying this year’s OOTP won’t get you that much more than last year’s (to the extent that I almost recommend you look at that before reading this)- and that isn’t a bad thing. And yet, this year’s OOTP represents the first steps into an even better future, while still remaining the great baseball management simulation it’s fans love.

Why? Because, now, it looks like we may see a future where we can truly see the game as it takes place. Before, aside from a ball moving around a photo and some little headshots of players popping up in the proper place on the field, the action during actual games was mainly left to the imagination, now….

That’s a 3D Model of Yankee Stadium I got off the internet. That, other others like and the default one that comes with OOTP, are now one of the views available. And, unlike the previous games, where those little baseballs going over the field were only marked with things like Fs or Gs to indicate fly or ground balls, now you can see the arc of the ball as it goes through the air and see where it lands. It isn’t perfect, of course, and sometimes it doesn’t work. But the possibilities it opens are endless:

Imagine seeing the runners actually moving around the bases? Imagine perhaps one day actually seeing the fielders on the field make the plays? It may be a ways off, but this is the first step, and it will only improve from here as the engine continues to improve.

As for the rest of the game, it’s still great OOTP. You can run anything from an a single team in a single league over the course of just one season to running an entire universe of countless leagues and farm systems across multiple continents. And, yes, those leagues can interact with each other, now more than ever, as OOTP has added in default leagues from Europe as well as the posting system function. In my current game, for example, I came across a guy who had been dropped from a AA roster, went to the Netherlands, did pretty well, and then got a contract in Taiwan. Little details like this are just some of the fun things that happen in OOTP. And there are other little details added as well-

For example, whereas once you could either have a computer-generated image of your players, or, in cases where you were playing using real players, a photograph of them, now you can have both, as the “facegen” system can now mold the player’s actual face onto a 3D computer body. Like David Ortiz here:

As you can see, it’s not exactly perfect, and as a result the picture above looks more like an action figure of David Ortiz than Big Papi himself, but with other players it’s a bit better. And, what’s more, what is great about this is that it means the picture can now change as they move from team-to-team, or if a new uniform style is added. Previously, David Ortiz always was in his Red Sox cap if you had downloaded his image to use- even if you were playing a simulation of a year where he was with the Twins. Now, the picture would change to show that.

So, really, to end this review in a horrible and abrupt way: There really isn’t much more I can say about OOTP 15 that I couldn’t say about OOTP 14. But that isn’t a bad thing- because OOTP 15, like OOTP 14…. is awesome.