MLB The Show 24 Paying for Past Decisions

Coming out of a jam-packed feature premiere last night, there’s lots of takeaways you could pull from it, but one thing that really stood out to me was how MLB The Show 24 was being framed as a turning point for the series. However, it seems this shift in philosophy is at least in part due to past decisions.

Around the 23-minute mark SDS developer Steve Merka goes out of his way to mention that Diamond Dynasty and Road to the Show are totally separate modes and that the RTTS offline mode is “sacred” as an experience. He then goes on to state, “we did this as a means to help us set up for the future when we can do a lot more.” I also found it interesting that the past connection between DD and RTTS was framed as SDS trying something out — and without outright saying it didn’t work — they’re now pivoting to a new direction for how these two modes should (not) interact.

As the title of this article states, I said “past decisions” not “past mistakes” because I don’t want this to come off as too harsh of an article. After all, both the community and our writers gave MLB The Show 23 its game of the year award (in admittedly a down year for sports games). On top of that, separating DD and RTTS is a good thing, probably a great thing! RTTS is a mode that has been about being offline, creative, and it should not be concerned with being balanced for online play or anything like that. If SDS wants to make an online version of RTTS down the line, fair enough, but at least then they’ll be balancing it specifically for that experience.

SDS is not unique in this regard either in terms of wanting to try and tie modes together. Multiple games made the bet on trying to tie all their modes together. For example, EA did the same with its franchise mode and career mode in Madden, and it’s always been an odd fit since that change occurred with Connected Franchise Mode becoming a thing in Madden 13.

That said, the comments by SDS did then make me start thinking back through the last number of years of MLB The Show’s development and how things have gone.

Starting with the next-gen transition in MLB The Show 21, we lost year-to-year saves, Sounds of the Show, and this generation as a whole for most sports games has felt like a generation of stagnation. Everything from game modes to graphics has been sort of disappointing on the whole. The biggest generational change has been most sports games gaining some sort of cross-platform play, which is good for unifying ecosystems but not exactly something to hang your hat on for an entire generation of sports games.

Speaking more specifically about The Show, not all of the major losses are on SDS. Sounds of the Show being gone is on Sony and how the PS5 is designed (music sharing is more or less a non-starter). When it comes to year-to-year saves, we were told it was due to the franchise mode infrastructure changing so much they could not make the new and old systems co-exist. I have no idea how true any of that is, but I also don’t think it has much to do with the point being made here. After all, March to October existed years before this change in franchise mode, and Diamond Dynasty existed as well.

Regardless, March to October was created and then also tied to Diamond Dynasty in some regards, creating this XP fusion between RTTS, MTO, and Diamond Dynasty. If we’re removing RTTS from the mix, are we then getting closer to a point where MTO is also removed? It seems less likely considering there were still mentions about earning DD XP and such through MTO this year, but it’s fair to point out it doesn’t really make sense to tie DD to MTO as they really have nothing in common.

What’s less arguable to me is that clearly MTO was given some extra love over franchise mode, and in part that was probably due to integrating it with DD. I have no doubt metrics showed that MTO and DD gained in popularity and franchise mode dipped in popularity as well. However, I won’t argue against the merits of MTO, rather I’d simply point out that if you want to tie modes together, obviously MTO and franchise mode are the ones that should have been fused into either a singular mode or play off each other in order to funnel resources to a concentrated spot.

And resources is really what I do want to call out the most. Time is the most valuable thing for sports games. The development cycle is short and if part of your time is spent “fixing” old things you created, then you’re not adding new stuff that you can actually talk about and share with all of us. If SDS had to spend time disconnecting the “wires” that connected RTTS and DD, that was time that could not be spent elsewhere. If down the line, SDS has to do the same with MTO and DD, the same rules apply — albeit that’s probably a quicker fix.

Again, I’m not calling these things mistakes. Video game development in and of itself is about fixing one mistake and moving to the next. On top of that, I think DD is looking great this year in part because of the (questionable) decisions they made last year and how they’re learning from them. They took some risks, many didn’t end up working out, but they also learned what did work from them and I’m bullish on that feature for ’24. The same is possible for RTTS, franchise mode, and so on down the line.

The issue is of course the lost time. Folks who feel like they’ve been waiting for big meals and getting breadcrumbs are not necessarily excited to hear they’ll be satiated 12 months from now. The hunger pangs have already hit. On top of that, when you fall behind, it’s hard to catch back up. MLB The Show’s own presentation improvements show it is possible, but it’s a multi-year process. Franchise modes like the ones in The Show or Madden are years behind what something like NBA 2K is doing. It will take a massive and efficient effort to close that gap in a somewhat timely manner, so any time potentially spent recreating siloed experiences down the line to pull that off is ultimately time that is being wasted to reach that goal.