OOTP gives me too much and not enough, anymore. It's still as deep and as advanced as ever but the menus are clunky and far too maximalist. I love scrolling through Football Manager stats or pouring through the details in an NBA 2k player card or team history list. But OOTP is too much on too many pages and too poorly designed. It's heaps more information than you want most of the time and somehow hard to find the information you do want when you want it.

The emails and stat tracking feel impersonal. Just navigating around league box scores and following hyperlinks is tiresome. The sim itself is fantastic and feels pretty good though the actual in game play-by-play isn't particularly engaging. OOTP feels at its strongest when you're chunking out weeks of sim time and managing your entire farm system. Which is fine. I understand the appeal. But despite loving these exact sorts of games, I just can't get OOTP to click for me like it did in the past.

Where once I found Baseball Mogul, OOTP's only real competitor, to be too simplified I now find myself far preferring it. It offers nicer QoL elements and despite having an incredibly thin minor league system or international complex roster management (it doesn't even really have any kind of standardized DL and 40-man roster) Baseball Mogul feels a lot more enjoyable nowadays to actually sit down and play.

Not sure what it is about OOTP for me anymore. Something about it feels so much more lifeless in comparison to Football Manager (the other top dog in the in-depth hyper realistic sports sim genre). I'm just not in any way engaged by OOTP. Shame because it is still a damn fine sim engine.