20s RTTS hands down.
TL; DR: RTTS in 20 is better as a career sim than 21 in virtually every conceivable way.
In 20 you have:
-A save file where all your player's info, appearance, and attributes are easy to find, read, and change. You can access your inventory at any time and change your player's equipment up whether online or offline.
-You start off every career as a scrub and naturally build him up over time with good play. Every new career you could choose your starting three pitches. One of those starting three pitches could even be a knuckleball!
- The only "narrative" is that you've been switched to a different position to try out and get a secondary position. You're secondary position, as a position player, was never SP.
-In 20 you can go to my player--stats and awards and check your performance trends (bar graphs that show your swing timing, contact/good contact %, discipline, and pitch recognition as a hitter. As a pitcher it shows your pitch location and pitch type percentages), a game log that shows individual game stats and the outcomes of every single AB or innings pitched for every single game you play in a season, stats by pitch type, stats by count, scouting report, career stats, and events and awards
-In 20 if you win an award or lead the league in a category your manager emails your inbox and tells you that you've won things.
-In 20 you can raise every single attribute cap to 99 overall and train/play your way to 99 in everything regardless of archetype. Any equipment you have, except for the attributes hard-capped at 99, will go over that 99 threshold.
-In 20 you can influence your draft spot through the showcase. You have the option to go to college and reject a team that drafted you.
-In 20 you can use showtime to locate pitches/hit
-In 20 you get promoted largely based on your overall compared to others at your position. If you’re on a terrible team with no depth then you can get yourself called up in May and June once the AI decides you’re the best option. However, the allstar game has always been a trigger for promotions.
-RTTS 20 has tired old code that actually worked with itself
In 21 you have:
- A ballplayer menu that changes your equipment to their default locations any time you check archetype progression, a graph that isn't totally clear on what parts of your overall/attribute levels are from, and you're entirely locked out of your inventory if the servers are down. You can only have one ballplayer with one appearance at a time.
-No naturally linear player progression. Get your CAP up to 50 once in the attributes and you can't go below mid-70s in overall with only an archetype badge active. You get to choose your pitches only once, upon the first setup. And once you get your pitching attribute up to 50 in every pitching category the game FORCES you to change out a pitch to get to your next appearance. I literally changed out my fifth pitch fifteen times in a single season.
-Forced two-way narrative (It’s actually happenin--!). It's stupid that my position player gets asked to pitch and my pitcher gets asked to hit multiple times every single season. You start out every career as an SP until you lock yourself in and you'll always have pitching/whatever position you picked to field as a secondary position.
-In 21 if you go to my player--stats and awards you only see stats by count, scouting report, career stats, and event and awards. To see your performances you have to go into the calendar and manually check the box scores to see if your character played in a game or not.
-In 21 if you win an award or lead the league in a category you aren't notified at all. You have to remember to go to the league leaders and awards menus at the end of the season to see if you won anything yourself.
-In 21 there are 6 unique archetypes for pitchers and 24 for position players. You have to mindlessly grind out stats and once you get to 100 in each diamond archetype you are given one diamond perk. There are 49 diamond perks in total, 21 of them pitching related and 28 for hitters. If you grind out every single pathway you STILL have to buy 19 diamond perks to get everything in the game related to Ballplayer/RTTS. At 8,500 stubs a piece, a common sell now price for perks, it would cost at least 161,500 stubs to get everything even after you've spent hundreds of hours grinding out every single one of these stupid archetype loadouts.
-In 21 you are forced into an unskippable cutscene and chosen by a team, always drafted in the 3rd round, and do not have the option to come into professional baseball as a 19, 20, 21 year old.
-There is no showtime in 21
-In 21 the call ups are so obviously scripted, even more than in 20. You can be a 95+ ovr and the best player on your team from day one and not get called up to AAA until the day after the AA allstar game in July. You will get called up to MLB on August 1. The “oh he’s blocked at the big league level” thing is painfully obvious too. I had a 96 ovr catcher on the A’s get traded because he was “blocked” by 82 ovr Sean Murphy. What?
-21 has the same old code that desperately needs improvement but now with forced new systems and progression without any thought put into how the mode works with two-way players and archetype loadouts. The overarching goal was clearly two-way player and DD integration above all but in doing that the mode was delivered broken in every way possible and devoid of most of the fun the mode provided in previous iterations.
Woah.... That's one of the most impressive and extensive list I've seen so far... Well put, it covers pretty much everything. I 100% agree with you.
Glad to see we're on the same page on this.