With the “official” release of MLB The Show 24 set to hit at midnight EST, I thought it would be helpful to post some of the early impressions from the community during the early access window. I’ll chime in with some of my own thoughts throughout, but I started playing it at the same time so I’m on the same level as everyone else.
I’ll put the impressions in some of the standard buckets you would expect at this point, so let’s get to it.
Gameplay
Starting with gameplay seems logical, and SDS was pretty clear about the focus being more on pitching and fielding than the hitting, which they felt was in a good spot overall. This was a fair assessment and so far the returns are generally positive on the forums with the gameplay.
On the improvements side, with the AI it begins and ends with strikeouts. As much as MLB has had an uptick in strikeouts, there were just too many in last year’s game. Most folks seem to believe this has been remedied overall and I agree so far. There’s a balance to strike here between being slapped in the face with nonstop fouled balls and just making hitters whiff every at-bat, and it’s in a much better spot overall.
On top of that, a small change that might not be noticed by many but is also true is CPU pitchers throwing more balls on Rookie and Veteran difficulties. All-Star and above is where the majority of vocal folks on the forum end up, but with Rookie/Veteran it was nearly impossible to draw walks, and now the difficulty levels are more balanced on that front.
One other note is that the new animations are being felt the most with stuff like tags and the general fielder urgency improvements. To add on to this, it does feel like the ball itself is more “alive” and I’m seeing a lot of new wild pitches and the ball ending up in sort of wacky spots that feel unique versus the last couple versions.
Here is one example of a swiped tag where the catcher loses the ball that comes from the community to highlight that a bit:
On the negative side of things, the most common complaint is that some feel hitting doesn’t feel different enough, which is a usual complaint for gameplay in most sports games by some. On the legacy issue side of things, we’ll need to see how bullpen usage plays out and if the AI can manage their bullpens better in general (it does seem like at least the AI is using all of their bullpen over a series).
Presentation/Graphics
Early on, presentation actually gets more discussion than most anything because it’s a component that’s immediately going to stand out even more than nuanced gameplay changes. Again, I would say the impressions overall are positive, but it’s easier to find negatives within the community so far as well if I compare it to the gameplay side of things.
The menus and look of some of the in-game UI have been the most common negatives called out thus far. The bright white menus are definitely causing some discomfort to an extent. Beyond that, the graphics overall have been the most discussed topic. It was a big talking point before the game was even out so this makes sense. To not spend too much time on the graphics, basically the overall view is the lighting changes do add a lot, but stuff like the dirt and grass really stands out as feeling last-gen. If there’s an area where the consensus is more or less “it doesn’t quite feel current-gen” the graphics would be it.
On the positive side of things, people love the hair physics — love, love them. And it’s fair, the hair physics really do add a ton to the feel of the game.
Still, the hair is not perfect and it seems like some players still have “stiff” hair while others have those flowing locks as they should. For example, community members have pointed out it’s weird that Elly De La Cruz has very stiff hair, and some others would go in this bucket as well.
Either way, the hair is a big success and the new face scans are also a big success — but that comes with caveats. It’s clear SDS just did not get access to certain teams. For example, a team like the Giants is woefully under-represented on the scans front. I don’t know how flexible SDS is about getting new scans in the game throughout the year (versus a game like Madden), but it would be nice if they’re able to add throughout the season.
On the audio side of things, the crowds are also a big hit overall. This game-tying home run that OS user bcruise posted is one of the various mentions by folks as how the crowd swells and the excitement of the fans is shining through in various spots.
That same excitement is also getting called out as a negative at times as the team chants are excessive and going on too long. For example, a “let’s go Marlins!” chant in the first inning of the game was called out by one user as feeling like it went on for minutes nonstop. I’m not sure SDS is quite at the level of making each crowd fully unique, but this is likely not something that’s happening at many regular season Marlins games at any point.
With commentary, while people like that the minors got a different feel, people don’t love the new voice of the minors because he does not seem to have as much audio and so there’s a lot of him saying numbers rather than names (for example). It also doesn’t feel as cleanly cut together — it sounds more like how things used to cut together overall in The Show years back.
Beyond that, there’s the usual complaints about repetitive commentary, and overall people think Boog just fits better and sounds more natural than Singleton does in most situations. In a broad sense, people don’t feel that sense of “connectivity” that the crowd and other parts of the presentation are starting to really nail. It’s not that it’s missing specifically a sideline reporter or any one thing, but commentary here has that issue that most sports games have where everything still feels too confined to the moment. There’s not enough sense of what’s playing out over the course of the game or mentioning what’s happening around the league today and so on (if you’re in franchise mode or RTTS).
On the unique touches front, the most common thing called out was the “siren” that does happen at real Yankees games on 2-out, 2-strike pitches also happening in The Show. It’s very loud and has apparently scared multiple people, which I find very funny. Another unique one called out is the “Finish Him!” sound at KC games.
On the “that’s a shame” side of things, Edwin Diaz still has his unique bullpen entrance, but because The Show does not have the Narcos license anymore, they don’t have his song. Since Diaz was out all last year, we kind of missed out on them tying into each other, but it also points out how amazing it would be to get more of those “unique” moments into this game — we miss you Sounds of the Show.
Overall, the new scoreboard videos (the “flexing” video has been called out multiple times), and stuff like the player portraits for pitchers warming up in the bullpen are nice touches that have been mentioned by various posters.
With the broadcast themes and presentation touches, most believe the Regional theme is just better than The Show theme this year. Part of this is due to how the UI looks for certain screens, but part of it seems to be that people just like the updates made to the Regional theme more than some of the tweaks to The Show theme.
Finally, early returns on the Jeter Storylines are also very positive on the presentation front. I wrote about how the mode itself would come down to Jeter himself and his ability to tell a story, and it seems like that’s worked out. I have not personally scoped out that mode yet so I don’t have any thoughts of my own.
Franchise Mode
We’ll have more here as the community gets more time with the modes, but I did want to mention a couple small “wins” here for franchise mode since it was something that didn’t get tons of coverage pre-release. These are relatively “in the weeds” mentions, so you might not even understand if you don’t play the mode a good amount.
-You can now sort prospects by organization and position — in addition to viewing the full top 100.
-If you have Universal DH in franchise, you will not see a “no DH” lineup in the franchise menu.
-Uniform selection seems to be mostly ironed out and so teams will wear the “right” uniforms on specific days — last year you had to manually choose them most of the time.
-There’s a lot of prospect updates across the league in the scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen that will also mention whether it’s AA or AAA stats.
-I’ll also slide this in here that with RTTS being decoupled from Diamond Dynasty, we get to have our 5-foot-1, 105 pound players if we want them.
-The “Custom Game Entry” and “player highlights” elements were touted pre-release, and they are absolutely unique in terms of the control you have of drop-in moments. I’ll let OS user bcruise sign us off with thoughts on this:
As we’ve already seen, you can set the conditions for entering a simmed game (mostly focused on inning, score and the presence of runners on base), but it also allows you to drop back out into sim if those conditions become “not met”. So even if you choose the 1st inning for the earliest inning you want to play, you might still swap between playing and simming several times in the game, depending on how many big moments come up and what your situation importance setting is.
The Player Highlights option is also notable for being able to drop you into big individual moments like 2 Homer games, late game complete games or no hitters, cycle attempts, that kind of thing.
We’ll have so much more in the week ahead, but as always a big thanks go out to everyone for all their impressions. Feel free to join the conversation.
