It’s MLB The Show 23 announcements season
The MLB The Show 23 tech test is out this week for free download. I downloaded it on PS5 and Switch and played a few games. Unfortunately the screen is covered in username watermarks as if this were a secret internal beta, and the native recording system on PlayStation is blocked. So I decided my footage of it wasn’t worth uploading, and it was a little tough to enjoy playing as well.
Thankfully San Diego Studio have announced the gameplay changes worth worrying about, which can be read about in some detail here. To summarize:
- The Clutch attribute now has a huge-sounding role: When runners are in scoring position, a pitcher’s H/9 attribute is effectively replaced by his Clutch. And a hitter’s Contact attribute is replaced by Clutch as well.
I’ve never understood how San Diego Studio decide what a real-life hitter’s Clutch attribute should be. I wonder if this will end up basically flattening every player’s performance with RISP since I suspect Clutch varies less than Contact and H/9 between players. Maybe they’ll change that now that it matters? I’m dubious on this one. - It sounds like Quirks are now what they always should have been: Specific abilities not otherwise captured in Attributes. Like “good in the 1st inning” or “Pick off artist.” Before, in my experience most Quirks were vague or redundant.
- The “good throw” part of the throwing accuracy meter on defense is now in a random spot rather than always in the same spot, keeping you on your toes a little.
- In order to increase strikeouts and decrease fly balls in online play, the outer “vision” swing ring thing is now half as big as it used to be in the Competitive mode of the game. Seems like a big change!
- The swing feedback window has been changed so that swing timing and PCI (swing ring thing) feedback are shown side-by-side, with timing on the left to stress its primacy and importance. Speaking of which…
A medium-sized rant about swing feedback in The Show
So swing feedback is a little window that shows how good your timing and cursor placement was after a swing on offense. San Diego Studio keeps improving it every year, giving better information on what happened and why. It’s a vital part of the game now. But it shouldn’t be.
Swing feedback has always been a Band-Aid for a weakness that’s been at the core of this series for forever: It is hard to tell if, or when, or why you’re playing the game well.
Feedback used to be really, really poor for hitting. Why did I miss that pitch? Was I early, or late? Did my cursor miss it? Is it just because I’m playing as Joey Gallo and his Contact attribute is low?
Adding the swing feedback window made some parts of it worse: Unfortunately the game wouldn’t show feedback for balls in play, once upon a time, so that weak pop-up to center that you thought you crushed went unexplained. And arguably the most common complaint about recent versions of The Show is when the swing feedback says you made Perfect/Perfect contact (perfect placement, perfect timing) only to result in a flyout or a hard groundball right at somebody. Maybe realistic for a baseball simulation, but generally it’s inexcusable for a game to say you did everything right and still failed.
Feedback is still poor on the pitching side, though thankfully against the CPU it’s easy enough to pitch that it’s not too frustrating. Super Mega Baseball handles this much better. It tells you when the CPU anticipated a pitch or was fooled, so you get a sense of how to pitch sequence against it.
In The Show selecting a pitch feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book where all the choices lead to the same page. It seems like sliders against opposite-handed hitters get crushed, but there’s no sense of surprising a hitter, or upsetting his timing, or changing his eye level. I suspect those things are accounted for in the game, but they’re totally invisible.
Feedback should be instant and obvious: Take at-bats in Power Pros or Pro Yakyuu Spirits and you will know immediately if you made good contact without the need for a pitch feedback window. Pitching feedback isn’t so strong in either of those series, though Pro Yakyuu Spirits used to have a gauge showing a hitter’s ability to time different pitch speeds which was helpful.
It would be a major change to fix these things. And Pinpoint Pitching was a step in the right direction in terms of seeing some connection between how well you used your controls and how good your pitch is. I suspect they know about these things and would love to change them, but the cat is out of the bag and the rabbit is out of the hat.
Until they figure out a new system, I will dutifully switch to Batter Zoom camera so I can sort of see where the pitch went, check out swing feedback to get a sense of why my swing missed, and pitch whatever the CPU catcher tells me to pitch so I know my sequencing is okay. Just like Sony intended.
WBSC eBaseball Power Pros Discord
If you’re interested in joining a community of people playing and talking about the new Power Pros game, this is the place. A tournament is starting there soon with a couple dozen participants so far. Come join if you’re enjoying the new game.