When the work week is too busy to make the usual Friday news post, mild-mannered journalist Friday Starter becomes… Saturday Starter.
Out of the Park Baseball 24 announced and available for pre-order
Out of the Park Baseball 24 is slated for release on March 24th, 2023. Some of the new features announced so far:
- “Live starts” is branching out to include the KBO, so you can start on any day of the Korean baseball season and have it match real rosters.
- More small improvements to the 3D game-viewing experience: Names and numbers on the back of jerseys, more animations, and on-screen stat visualization options. Maybe most interesting to me is the new “audience model” to give better reactions to the gameplay. I have heard the same “No way, no way” fan voice reaction sample too many times in a decade-plus of these games.
- A new Trade Deadline day experience, showing things like rumors on which teams are looking for what as the trade deadline nears. This has long been a weakness of single-player OOTP for me. It’s hard to get a sense of who is plausibly available unless they’re on the in-game Trading Block, and it’s hard to know what AI teams are interested in without offering them a million trades.
There used to be an argument around which baseball management game was best back in Baseball Mogul‘s heyday, but the latest versions of that game unavoidably haven’t kept up with the quality of OOTP. I was really frustrated by OOTP 23 losing the Japanese league last year, and I see no sign so far that it’ll be back in 24. But even without that, there’s simply no other baseball manager/GM game at this level currently.
(Reminder: This is actually going to be the 24th OOTP game, so they are technically exempted from my contempt for baseball games naming themselves after the next year. It’s actually a sequel numbering, not a year numbering.)
WBSC eBaseball Power Pros seems to be doing well?
The dramatic return of the Power Pros series to English-speaking lands is certainly out-performing my expectations. For a long period now WBSC eBaseball Power Pros has been the second best-selling game and top-selling download-only game on the U.S. Nintendo Switch store.
Now, it has been kind of a known Switch store exploit to list $1 games (like Power Pros) and watch them climb up the best-sellers chart since, as far as anyone is aware, this is a list of the games most frequently-downloaded, not the top-grossing games. So Metroid Prime doesn’t count 40x as much as Power Pros for each sale because it costs 40 times as much.
And you’ll notice there aren’t really any other new games in that top sellers list above besides Metroid, which is itself still a remake. The timing of the release was perfectly ahead of other baseball titles and on a down week for Switch releases in general.
But hey, still, Konami, doesn’t that seem like Americans are interested in this gameplay? Maybe a new, full MLB Power Pros or even a translated NPB Power Pros would do better this time around?