Ben Brinkman's Unfinished Sports Games Are More Interesting Than Other Designer's Unfinished Sports Games
MLB2K7 (360) is a superb early beta.Superb.
With another six to eight weeks of development, this might well have been the greatest baseball game ever made.
Unfortunately, though, it didn't get those six to eight weeks. So what we get, instead of the greatest baseball game ever made, is a game that is both astonishing as well as vomit-stained, often within seconds of each other. And this is a difficult game to write about, because the good is so good and the bad is so bad.
I've said this before, but all sports games, because of their complexity, have flaws. It's guaranteed. Great sports games overcome those flaws. And a great sports game has a way of building immersion without breaking it.
Let's look at on-the-field play first and discuss immersion. There are many great moments, some of which I've never seen in a baseball game before--tiny bits of nuance that are just tremendous.
One example is the pitcher's interaction with the rubber. It looks real, and I mean totally real. Pitching motions in general are superb.
Oh, and watch how the pitcher actually grips the ball in the glove before he starts his wind-up--it's beautiful.
Batters have different swings depending on the location of the pitch, and the way they swing awkwardly when they've been fooled is outstanding. Between-pitch motions of batters look totally real as well.
Umpires look and move extremely well, with the home plate umpire, in particular, worthy of mention. And fully-functioning base coaches are fantastic.
Day games, quite often, look photorealistic in high-definition. It's nothing short of remarkable.
Around that on-field action, the presentation and commentary are absolutely first-rate. Anyone who listened to a game would believe they were listening to a real game.
There's more. The option to have the catcher call the game is a brilliant option, and it's designed extremely well. "Payoff pitches" in clutch situations can increase a pitch rating (or decrease it if you miss), and that kind of dynamic adjustment during a game is a great idea that mirrors pitchers having good days and bad days.
As a summary, the on-field "good" consists of many moments that are photorealistic and essentially indistinguishable from reality.
The bad? Moments that are so jarringly non-realistic it's hard to believe that you're playing the same game. Most importantly, there's the ball. It doesn't always move in a realistic manner, even when pitching. And it doesn't always look real either. It's hard to describe, really, but there are times when the ball seems to lack depth.
And once the ball's hit, it's too small. Not by a huge amount, but it's noticeable. It's too small and it's not easy enough to pick up visually.
No excuse for that, really. Of all things that need to look and move in a realistic manner, the ball should be #1.
And it gets worse. Pitcher and batter animations always seem to be at entirely appropriate speeds, but fielder and runner animations are plagued by frequent speed up/slow down problems that makes them look, well, crappy. On replays, they look fine, so I'm guessing it's an engine optimization issue. Regardless, when it happens, particularly on plays involving outfielders, it looks like crap.
Ah, outfielders. They jog when they should be running, or they're accelerating in totally unbelievable fashion, or they're catching balls without the inconvenience of actually looking at them. Nasty, nasty business.
With exactly ONE fielding camera, and two options for that camera, it's even worse. Other 2K Sports games have huge number of camera options, but not here (I suspect framerate issues are the cause).
Here's the worst moment for the fielding camera. There's nothing like watching a guy run toward a wall as the announcers say a home run has been hit, and you can't see the ball. You don't get to see it go into the stands (although you might, if you're lucky, on the replay). It's a big play and it's totally flat because you can't see what's happening.
On the other hand, there's one great camera angle (in certain situations) after you hit the ball, a "wire" camera that follows you down the first-base line while still generally keeping the ball in view. It's brilliant, and it looks very, very real.
Here's an example of the good and bad, all in one position: the catcher. The catcher animations are great--uncanny, really--but he'll also (all too frequently) set up for a pitch where his damn glove is at the batter's chest or above. That doesn't happen, and it's jarring, because he's practically standing straight up. And while his animations look great, the little hops and jumps the ball sometimes makes to get into his glove aren't.
All of the on-field problems are representative of an early beta, and they're all fixable. Or, they all could have been fixed.
Now, though, we have to talk about A.I., and here's where it gets very, very ugly. In almost every games I've played, something incredibly stupid has happened--for instance, in the game I just played, I saw a guy get easily doubled off first base on a high, lazy fly to right field. There's just no excuse for that.
It seems like most of the really spectacular gaffes on the field involve baserunning. Well, and pinch-hitting. And sometimes--fielding. The number of stupid plays is very representative of, and I hate to say it again--an early beta.
If you want more detail on brain-dead moments during games, take a look at the Blog for the Sportsgamer, particularly here and here. Bill's talking about the game in the context of comparing it against High Heat (I have no nostalgia for High Heat--I thought the PSP version of The Show buried it last year), but you'll get plenty of specific details there.
Then we must go to Franchise mode.
Oh, the humanity.
It's a shame, really, that the Franchise A.I. is so damned stupid, because the design is wonderful. There's a "Windows"-type interface with drop-down menus that is very clean and exceptionally easy to use (with one exception, which I'll get to later). The screen is also divided into four information windows on the main Franchise screen, and you can toggle what information you want displayed in some of them--a very nice touch. Also, and this deserves special mention, the League news that you see displayed daily is actually interesting.
It's also very pleasant to putter around in Franchise mode. You can put players on the trading block and solicit offers. Yes, sometimes you get offered a trade that's just too good, but it doesn't happen all the time and as picky as I am, I didn't think it was egregious. And it's too easy to sign young players to long, long deals for less money than you should have to pay, but again, I've seen much worse.
Plus, there are some very nice touches in franchise--scouts finding prospects for you to sign, free agents demanding less (or more) because of your manager's personality, and dynamic attendance (which also looks great on-field as well).
All right, there is one incredibly stupid piece of design--to get to the league transactions screen, you apparently have to go to an injury notification e-mail (not just any injury notification e-mail, either--it appears to be Superstar injury notifications only) and press a button from that e-mail to go to the league transactions screen. And if you turn off injuries in your franchise, as far as I can tell, you just can't get to that screen, period.
If you can, they made it so obtuse and non-intuitive that I can't find it, and apparently, neither can anyone else.
The interface and look-and-feel of most of the Franchise screens, though, are so good and so friendly to use that it's easy to overlook some of the less-than-stellar moments.
Some, however, just can't be overlooked, and these are gamekillers. CPU teams trading away the cornerstones of their franchies (Blue Shift had this fixed four years ago by designating certain stars as untouchables, which was an excellent piece of design). Tons of valuable free agents remaining unsigned. Players not getting recalled to the majors after coming off the DL (which happens often enough to be classified as a major bug). Clearly superior players rotting in the minors, even at the beginning of the season (so it can't be part of the DL bug).
Player progression? After ten years of a franchise, half the teams in the league had batting averages of .300 or higher. A single team has had a batting average of .300 for a season exactly zero times in the history of baseball. Oops. [update: actually, oops to me. Bill Abner correctly points out that five teams, all in the years 1927-1929, had batting averages of .300 or higher. It's been over seventy-five years, though, and the average team batting average last year was .270.]
How far would that trend go? I assume it would get worse for about another five to eight years, then stabilize. And this is a signature of Brinkman's baseball games (all three versions of MVP and now MLB2K7)--lousy, unfinished player progression. It was poor in every version of MVP, and it's poor here.
What makes this so excruciatingly painful is that it's all UNNECESSARY. Here's a thought--put in a few sliders for player progression and simulated games. They'd just function as a simple amplifier, with 1-10 settings or something like that. But give us the option to work on progression, because clearly, the developers aren't going to finish it themselves.
I will say this, though--I think this player progression algorithm, even though it fails in the batting average category, is better than anything in any version of MVP. Some statistical categories continue to look decent, even ten years into a franchise.
Well, actually that's kind of hard to determine, since the game doesn't properly score earned runs (a problem with walks, as far as I can tell, although there may be other issues as well). Oops. Another bug.
That's all a tangled mess, isn't it? An extremely well-designed game with some absolutely brilliant moments, undone by the developers not finishing the game. And because I am hopelessly naive, I wonder how many fixes could be put into the game along with the Opening Day roster download. Certainly, all of the problems in Franchise mode could be fixed, and probably some of the on-field engine optimization issues as well.
Will we see that? Well, I'm not holding my breath. Let's see just how committed Ben Brinkman is to the game. If he says "this is year one of three," then I'm going to bash my head against the wall.
In the meantime, though, thanks to Gamefly, I didn't pay $60 for a beta. If Kush makes a serious effort to patch these problems, I'll be first in line to buy a copy.
If they don't, then good luck with year two of the three-year plan, Ben.
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