OOTP Baseball 14 - The Road To Release, Part 1

OOTP 14 - The Road To Release, Part 1:
A new world of talent to discover

Renowned for its simulation engine, realism, and customization, Out of the Park Baseball also provides numerous tools to not only scout, draft, and develop amateur homegrown talent but to also discover fresh crops of players through international scouting. In OOTP 13, this idea expanded, allowing you to choose which countries you want your scouts to focus on while managing the associated costs. That allowed for targeted search results and precise control over how much of the overall scouting budget was used.

Never one to rest on their own laurels, Markus and company have given the amateur talent pool, player origins, and discovery process another substantial upgrade for OOTP 14. More so than ever before, there's a whole world of talent out there just waiting to be discovered. For this first edition of the OOTP 14 Road to Release, we'll take an in-depth look at how OOTP 14 puts the power of international player discovery and player origin options in your hands like never before.

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New player types and origin settings

Each season, the OOTP amateur player draft offers a new list of top young talent for you to select and set on the path to major league glory (or minor league infamy and a career in the janitorial arts). One aspect of the draft that has been greatly enhanced for OOTP 14 is the ability to customize the percentages that dictate where in the world this amateur talent originates. The newly revised player options in the League Settings screen allow you to set custom percentages for two of the most important types of ways players enter the game:

Players created within the original draft pool when a league is created
The yearly amateur draft pool (or list of players created as free agents if you're using Reserve Clause Era rules)

You can now fine tune the percentages of incoming players' nationalities to fit your preferences. You can also set aside a percentage of your choice for the game to randomly select players' nationalities and add some surprise to the yearly talent pools.

If you want your game to create draft classes that mimic the demographics of today's MLB amateur draft (wherein the majority of players originate from the US, lesser percentages come from Canada and Puerto Rico, and a smattering of players come from other countries), OOTP 14 is ready out of the box with those settings already in place. You'll see a higher level of realism in your draft demographics with your first amateur draft pool.

However, if, for example, you're building a custom baseball world in South America and you want a heavier influence of players from nations like Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, you can customize the origin settings to focus on those countries, thereby reducing the number of other nations contributing to the draft. Or you can turn them off entirely by setting the other nations to 0.

The power to customize exactly where a draft class originates is now in your hands!

Discovering and signing international free agents

International scouting, a longstanding feature of OOTP, has allowed teams' scouts to periodically discover hidden prospects in foreign countries. As it works today, at given intervals your scout will notify you of an international player he feels should be signed by your organization. These discoveries could sometimes result in added minor league depth, or if you're really lucky, a major league worthy player.

OOTP 14 expands on this feature by introducing the new International Free Agent discovery and signing period. This new seasonal period has been added in which a pool of raw amateur talent (usually ranging in ages between 16 and 18) is made available to all teams in the league. You can scout these players just as you would any incoming amateur draft pool and attempt to sign the ones you want. This feature is fully customizable and you can set both the date the draft pool is revealed and the number of players that become available.

Be prepared, however, to put your accountant hat on because the best of these free agents are likely to come with hefty signing bonus demands. And even though this is OOTP, not all of us go around pretending our name is George Steinbrenner, so you'll likely want to take the time to plan out your spending because there's a preset spending cap. You'll therefore have to decide whether you want to risk signing a high potential prospect and exceed the spending cap (which will not only incur a huge spending tax but also severely restrict who you can sign the following year) or sign several lesser prospects so you remain under the cap. There are many directions you can choose to go and each year's pool will bring a host of new players and choices.

So let's say you've scouted the draft pool and successfully signed several international players to your organization. What happens next? Glad you asked:

Introducing the International Complex

New to OOTP 14 is the International Complex. Located within each team's Front Office, it lets you review the international free agents you've signed and placed within your international development program. Think of the complex as a training academy where you can keep tabs on your international signings as they receive instruction. As with the international prospect pool, you can customize the number of players each team can keep in their international complex.

One of the more interesting aspects of the international complex involves judging each player's progress and determining when he's ready to be promoted to the minor leagues (or, if you think he's really developing well, whether to jump him right into the major leagues). However, if you feel a certain player is not going to make it to the minors, you can always release him and start over the next year. You won't have forever to decide, though, because players are automatically promoted to the minors when they reach 20 years of age.

This is a truly exciting new feature that will test your skills at evaluating and guiding talent along a potential seven-to-eight-year path to the major leagues. It's a new dimension of player scouting, evaluation, and just flat-out gut instinct that adds additional depth to how you go about building your long-term OOTP dynasty. How will your choices with these exciting young players ultimately affect your organization? You'll have to grab your copy of OOTP 14 to find out.

Additional options for player origins

If the new nationality options and the international discovery period and complex weren't enough, OOTP 14 includes even more ways for your scouts to discover new talent.

New settings allow you to define how many players will enter your game each year from the following categories:

The international amateur free agent pool (teenagers without any major league experience)
International established free agents
Free agents from independent leagues (hidden and invisible within the game)

Within the original and amateur draft pools, you can decide the number of players that enter from each category as well as the percentage each nation contributes, so you can replicate modern MLB or suit your own preferences.

OOTP 14 truly opens up a whole new world of player discovery and origin options to one of the most immersive and customizable sports simulation games on the market today!

Additional Enhancements

In addition to the exciting new features above, here are some of the other great new additions and improvements in OOTP 14:

Player creation algorithms have been tweaked to create more realistic career progressions
Player fielding development has also been updated to create more realistic progressions of both skills and position use over a player's career
An updated player creation dialog that adds fields to set a new player's role, destination league, and experience
Tweaked draft pool quality to create a more realistic mix of top prospects with average talent
Numerous performance improvements and much, much more!

OOTP 14 puts under your control a world of new talent ripe for your discovery, adds a new dimension to how your sign and develop young international players, and improves many related features, so you can mold your mega-million-dollar major league franchise or small market independent start-up to its maximum potential.

The game is truly yours for the taking, so play it your way!

Out of the Park Baseball 14 - The Grand Slam of Baseball Sims! Pre-order your copy today and download it on April 12, 2013, three days before the official release on April 15!