OS Weekly Wrap Up, Getting You Caught Up on Sports Gaming News (Mar. 15 - Mar. 21, 2020)

Developers poured a ton of time and energy into creating a hitting engine that would accurately reflect exactly what tendencies Major League Baseball brought to the table. The beta unveiled a very high offensive environment. Swings with perfect timing and perfect PCI placement resulted in an .833 batting average. Moreover, 32.3 percent of “perfect-perfect” swings resulted in home runs. Those are the types of figures gamers wanted to see.

We’ve been playing MLB The Show 20 for close to a week now, but for those picking up the game tomorrow (or hopefully getting it delivered or downloaded digitally instead to be socially conscious!), we’re going to give you some heads up about the new content you’ll see when you head into Diamond Dynasty. This starts first and foremost with the Diamond Dynasty First Inning Program overview. This includes a look at the missions, Showdown challenge, Conquest map and various other items.

The structure of events in the past was you play until you get X number of wins to get the reward player, and then you stop unless you want to keep trying to get 12 wins to get a diamond player. That structure is still in place for the most part, but the developers have focused on trying to keep people playing events for longer so they’re using a structure they started to use at the end of last year by providing more short and long-term rewards. So this means you still care about individual entries as well as your runs as a whole because there are separate goals for each, but the cumulative rewards go on for a longer period now.

Something new I’m going to try and do with sports games is sort of an aggregation of some of the biggest bugs and issues I’m seeing in the community both here and beyond. I want to start with MLB The Show 20 bugs on the gameplay front because that’s the area that’s easiest to get a feel for so far. I’ll most likely do one on the modes as well, but I want to give people a little more time to dig in there first.

Free agents in a normal offseason are available for a reason. This is not a normal offseason, but since we’re talking about MLB The Show 20 free agency, we can pretend here. In that case, there could be a multitude of reasons these players are still waiting to sign with MLB teams. There could be a salary restriction, an age issue, or they just don’t have the strength across the board to be an everyday player. Now, this does not mean the players do not have reasonable strengths to benefit your team. They have a variety of specific strengths. The key to effectively signing the right one for your team means you will need to analyze one or two areas these players are still strong.

Master League mode still defines the PES franchise. For those of you not familiar with Master League, in a nutshell it’s PES’ version of a franchise mode. Players can choose to start up with real clubs or the default fake Master League players. It doesn’t matter which option you choose because either way you’ll eventually be faced with one of the most robust and detailed player progression systems in all of the sports video game genre.

For the record, I never really even wanted to be the commissioner of a Madden league. All I wanted was to join an online franchise in Madden 20 — like I do pretty much every year — play my games in a timely fashion and be a functioning cog in a well-oiled machine as we progressed through the seasons. But sometimes fate has bigger ideas for us. Some of us are born into greatness and some of us have greatness thrust upon us. When the situation called for someone to step up and take the reins of the league, I did what came naturally. Now, based on my own personal experience, I can offer some Madden commissioner tips so you can keep your leagues running smoothly.