Simply put, the best baseball management sim. Ever.
OOTP2007 offers the entire world of baseball. Only Football Manager (or Worldwide Soccer Manager) offers a similar scope. OOTP's ability to customize one's baseball universe is unrivaled in any sports management sim, though. You want to have a league with a major-league team in each of the contiguous 48 states? You can do it. You want to replay the history of baseball from 1901, complete with automated team moves and expansions? Download the Lehman database, and It's there. Statistical season replays? With Lehman and the three-year-recalc option, it approaches Diamond Mind. Hobbit and animal leagues leagues are still out ( ;) ), and European soccer-style Champions League and Shaughnassy Playoffs are still missing, but relegation-promotion can be handled by edited the league structures during an off-season.
Developers Marcus Heinsohn and Andreas Raht were aware of the negativity v2006 had introduced to the community, and took the unprecedented step of invited that versions harshest critics into the beta testing team. Over 100 beta testers, each playing the game their own way, hating the way the game was and wanting to make it better, worked for three months. Their diligence, and the developers' willingness to listen, shows.
The interface has been streamlined with the addition of iconic links to some of the most frequented pages, and a Managers Homepage that also contains links to most anywhere you need to go.
The addition of Instant Play-by-Play has sped up the in-game responsiveness to almost OOTP6.5 levels. Indeed, I'm glad it's just a touch slower, because in v6.5 I would sometimes be progressing so fast I'd let a batter whom I want to pinch-hit for, hit. Certainly, though, the ... pause ... that killed the game-play for me in OOTP2006 is gone. Exhaustive work by a few dedicated beta testers went a long way to making the in-game play-by-play much less flowery, less predictable, and more realistic.
This year, OOTP has licensed FaceGen technology, and uses it to give fictional players and coaches a face. The players' faces change uniform as they change teams, grow older, and get fatter/slimmer according to their body/mass index. FaceGen really brings my fictional world to life and adds a whole new level of immersion.
News stories have been expanded, both in type of news and number of stories of each time. As with any sports-management sim, they become repetitive, but at least there are more than a couple to get used to.
The interface is still a little rough around the edges. The game tries to remember your pull-down settings for each stat-page you visit, but it fails at times, carrying over the settings from another page into one where you'd rather have something else. The text cursor is almost impossible to see at times, against the dark background, and it's activation pixel is at the top if the " I " instead of the middle, leading to some miss-clicks until you adjust your Kentucky windage. These are the only problems this fictional-only player has with the game, though, and keep it from getting a full "10." Since the game doesn't have sound, it can't be scored for that category, so I give it a five there, since a zero unfairly lowers the average.
The end result is a fantastic baseball game. Stats on top of stats, split every way you can think of ... how does he hit a 3-1 count at night? It's there. As long as you don't need motion-captured-players-in-a-pixel-perfect-stadium ala EA, Out of the Park Baseball 2007 is the best baseball game ever written. Period.