As the reports of free agent signings and the occasional trade news continue to roll in, it’s no wonder then that fans are already anxiously awaiting any updates about MLB The Show 24.
Even though MLB The Show 23 was enough of a triumph to have it awarded the best sports game of 2023 on this very site, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some areas of the game that are in need of attention and improvement. Ahead of tomorrow cover athlete release, let’s go over some of the aspects of the game that could most benefit from refinement if MLB The Show 24 is going to continue to make significant strides in the right direction.
Road To The Show
As far as career modes go, Road To The Show does a respectable if not spectacular job of having you make the journey from a low-rated minor-league player to a superstar in the majors. The big area where it remains lacking however is in creating an actual narrative with story beats at different stages of your career. There are some talking heads on a podcast at certain intervals that attempt to fill this void, but these are not all that engaging and a poor substitute for actual plot points.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be anything as complex as the NBA 2K series either, which often mistakes the addition of bland cutscenes for what players desire. It’d be nice though to have the different stages of your road feel like real achievements and any of your statistical milestones acknowledged in some meaningful way. The mode could also use another overhaul to how the progression of your player works, allowing you more control over what kind of skills you want to develop with drills that correspond to those skills.
Online Franchise
While franchise mode took some steps forward in MLB The Show 23 with improvements to make the experience more aligned with how a season unfolds in real life, there are still some changes that could make it even better. First and foremost, it would be great to see the return of a proper online franchise that allows you to compete against others over the course of many seasons.
Custom leagues have been a part of the game for the last few years now, but these still only allow you to play just one season before you have to start all over again. That prevents the inclusion of some important franchise features, such as players progressing (and regressing) as they age, drafting young prospects, and keeping track of statistics from past seasons. As it stands now, it can be hard to so much as fill a league since that would mean that some people would have to assume control of weaker teams that have little chance of competing in the short-term. They also have to reconcile with the fact that there’s not really any hope for their team’s future considering there effectively isn’t one within the current custom leagues framework.
Diamond Dynasty
Even though MLB The Show 23‘s Diamond Dynasty continued to be the premier card-collecting mode among sports games thanks to how easy it is to obtain viable players without needing to invest in microtransactions, there were questionable decisions made that elicited some complaints from the community. Perhaps the biggest issue for many was the implementation of seasons throughout the game’s cycle that saw new cards being introduced with each one but, more crucially, prevented you from using cards from previous seasons.
That translated to the mode being more of a grind than before since you were required to level up your squad with the best new cards every couple of months or so whenever a fresh season began. It also created less variety with how people constructed their team for most of the year because so many people understandably plugged the small pool of top cards into their lineup each season. Lastly, with 99s being there at launch, it made a lot of cards feel like duplicates, and that was exasperated by the pool of players not feeling deep enough.
With the inevitable grind starting up again each season, there wasn’t as much time either to collect cards from programs like team affinity as well, meaning that theme teams were harder to build. The introduction of captains to boost the attributes of the rest of your squad was a decent idea in theory, but they clearly weren’t used as much as developers were expecting since they were compelled to make the boosts even more significant not long after the game’s release.
Co-Op
The introduction and subsequent expansion of co-op play within MLB The Show has been a smart move to highlight the fact that baseball is a team sport after all. There’s still some work to do on it though if it’s going to be a mode that players flock to regularly. I might be in the minority in thinking that it would actually be fun to have nine users populating each team just like in real life, so let’s set that aside for the time being on the grounds that it might be a tad boring for most.
Let’s start then with the stability issues that regularly plague co-op play, leading to a frustrating amount of freeze-offs that can derail a tightly contested matchup right in the middle of it. Because co-op play is only present within Diamond Dynasty, it’s a shame that developers haven’t been able to figure out a way to award PxP to any players who are used or to have your performances with those players fulfill stat missions. This can be a huge deterrent to anyone who’s focused on the DD grind when co-op can feel like a waste of time without receiving sufficient rewards for playing it. It might be better then if there was a way to play co-op outside of Diamond Dynasty, perhaps forming teams from real-life rosters or even bringing in Road to the Show players to have you progressing anyone that you’ve created in that mode.
Baserunning/Bullpen Logic
With major league baseball introducing new rules and larger bases that led to a huge spike in stolen bases last season, it’s probably time now that MLB The Show revamped the way that baserunning works to have it feel just a little more dynamic. It’s especially grown stale in the interplay between a pitcher trying to hold a baserunner close to the base while that runner attempts to gain as big a lead as possible. A new mechanic for pitchers that requires them to be quicker and more accurate with pick-off throws would go a long way in trying to recreate the kind of cat-and-mouse game that goes on with runners on base.
On the flip side, runners should be able to be a little more precise about how large a lead they want to take when even a small step can mean the difference between a stolen base and getting thrown out. There should also be some way other than just attributes to separate the truly elite on both sides of this base-stealing battle. This would ideally force users to have lightning-quick reaction speeds within small windows of time if they want to be successful at either getting a great jump for a stolen base or risk being picked off by a pitcher with great controller input on any throws over to the bag.
Beyond that, bullpen logic (specifically AI bullpen logic) has been a tricky issue for years, and it remained wonky in ’23. In short, the AI is good when it’s up late in a high-leverage situation, but it starts to fall off from there, and really struggles with things like late-inning tie games and and most low-leverage situations. There’s not really much to say about fixing it beyond saying “make it realistic” but it’s been an issue for so long that folks on OS come up with new workarounds each season and thus needs to be mentioned here.
