For years I have kept two different characters in the MLB career mode The Show’s Road to the Show: Sam Wade, my Maryland string bean, handles the launch, and Country Breakfast Vaughn, an Arkansas fried steak cut, is the batter. Ramone Russell from Sony San Diego told me that many players do the same thing, jotting back and forth between saving files that don’t exist on the same timeline.
This will change with MLB The Show 21, launching on April 20. Now players will be blessed with true two-way potential: they will both pitch and bounce in their careers and will have the opportunity to develop one – or even both – skill sets as they advance on the baseball leagues field.
I have the idea and I like the convenience, but I worry about the potential to break the narrative realism in a way that, among all the vicarious fantasies that sports video games offer, presented the most realistic duration and expectations of a young player’s development . No matter what kind of stallion I built at the beginning of RTTS, he has always spent at least an entire season in the minor leagues, and there are often two.
But Russell assured me that MLB The Show 21The new approach to. it will fit into reality, and not just because people can point to Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels as a double threat in good faith in today’s major leagues. Russell says this year’s two-way story will find support with podcast scenes discussing the player’s unique potential and commenting on his progression, should the user end up specializing in a single branch anyway.
“If you don’t want to be a two-way player, you can just say no, like, ‘I just want to hit.’ You can still do that, ”said Russell. For the “visual podcast,” said Russell, former players Sean Casey and Cliff Floyd will make regular appearances, accompanied by MLB Network studio host Robert Flores and several other guest stars. “The second feedback we received for Road to the Show was, ‘I’m doing home runs like crazy, I’m beating the guys and it’s like MLB doesn’t notice. Nobody understands, ‘”said Russell.
For all the depth in its manners and fidelity in the field game, the presentation of MLB The Show has been its weakest component year after year, and the career modes for a player, in general, leave for its users to fill their stories with your imagination. It is good to know that Road to the Show will have specific support, understanding that other sports series have tried to imitate social media in their career modes, and the novelty runs out if the comment given is unique.
Russell said Road to the Show in MLB 21 it will also eliminate the goal of grinding up to the highest overall rank in a player’s essential attributes, and being limited to just that set. This will be done largely by a perk-and-loadout system, which can be changed daily to allow players to develop various areas of talent. In previous RTTSs, players chose several archetypes, but were then blocked from setting limits for the rest of their career. (A pure hitter, for example, may have little in terms of speed or defensive range.)
From what I’ve seen in Sony’s promotional materials, “perk” may be a little incorrect; it seems more that players can switch the old RTTS archetypes (with the new ones included) from game to game. As a first-year secondary league player, they may still have power or contact ratings in their 40s. Equipping a powerful loadout does not guarantee home runs; allows players to develop a game of power. Considering that the previous RTTS archetypes were somewhat limited by position, this approach seems to give more latitude to the development of a hitting midfield player, like Francisco Lindor or the murderer Oriole Gleyber Torres.
“You are no longer trying to make this guy a 99 in all categories,” said Russell. “You can create any player archetype you want to create for any situation. […] And then you can exchange these parts and pieces to create multiple shipments. “
Although Road to the Show remains MLB The Show’s most played mode, it is by no means the only one to receive improvements and new features this year, especially as the game is making its debut on the PlayStation 5 (and Xbox Series X). Two additions look like they can add a ton of depth to various game modes, but I’m going to need practical time with both to really assess their impact.
The first seems self-explanatory – a toolkit for creating stadiums, which fans have been begging to have for years. In the past, The Show sort of threw players into their open customization toolkits (the uniforms in Diamond Dynasty several years ago, for example) with little on the way to a starting point. It is not so with the park’s creator, Russell said.
“Michael Compton, the lead designer, created 30 incredible stadiums that ship with the game,” said Russell. “So, you can access any of these 30 and change them as you wish, share and plan them. But, if you want to build something from scratch, you can, and we have models where it is nothing more than flat grass. “
Personalization options and architectural features abound in the stadium’s creator, with “thousands of props” ready for players to prepare their pitches. Russell said that Show players had asked for this type of modding suite for at least a decade, and delivering it required the locking of graphics programmer Jonathan Ramsey “in a cave for just over two years, working on nothing but the creation of stadiums. And I’m not exaggerating anything. “
So there’s something I’ve been wondering for a while – at least since the end of 2K Sports’ MLB 2K series: a gesture-based pitching system. It was one of the few things that MLB 2K did with distinction, and Sony San Diego has never tried anything like that, even in the seven years since MLB 2K was last published. But now the pitching experts will have a more deterministic delivery system. Russell said that Pinpoint Pitching, as the new controller is called, will provide the highest pitch accuracy yet, but it takes more time for players to adjust and dominate.
The three other pitching systems are still available; Sony San Diego always preserves legacy systems whenever the studio presents new game options. Russell said the developers rebalanced these other control sets – the old meter, the Right Stick-based Pure Analog option introduced in 2011 and Pulse Pitching the following year – to ensure that neither offers a specific advantage over the other. “We are trying to ensure that we will never have a goal[-game] there, like, you can be effective with all of them, but one is not above the rest. “
Still, I asked why San Diego Studio would go to the trouble of developing, and then balancing, a new set of commands when the game already has three. Players also have strong preferences for one of these options.
“We wanted to give people a mechanic that had a lot of depth, where, if you did everything right, it could be very, very accurate,” said Russell. This aligns somewhat with a new three-column approach to the game’s difficulty settings, with one prioritizing stick skills, excluding player ratings, especially for competitive online games.
MLB The Show 21 is released on April 20 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and, in an unusual world-class first time, Xbox One and Xbox Series X – although the stadium’s creator and some other new features will only be on the latest consoles. Major League Baseball, Sony and Microsoft reached an agreement in late 2019 to develop the exclusive MLB multi-platform simulation video game, with a Nintendo Switch version possibly coming in the future.