MLB The Show 14: PS4 Early Impressions - Inhocmark's Blog

Inhocmark's Blog

MLB The Show 14: PS4 Early Impressions

Posted on May 1, 2014 at 10:49 AM.

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I will repost this as a blog to avoid duplicate posting in the forums and to allow people to agree/disagree with some or all of what I�m saying.

I just want to put a caveat on all my opinions so that everybody knows where I�m coming from. I�m a sports gaming fan�I buy games for sports that I�m not a hardcore fan of in real life because I love playing them. While I consider myself a baseball fan, I�m not at the level where I�m going to notice is they got the facial hair of Brady Anderson right (or that Brady Anderson retired apparently�psych!

). I�m the guy in your fantasy league that may not realise that his 15th round choice was just put on the DL coming out of Spring Training unless he�s on the Jays. In short�I�ll school you with Soccer or hockey knowledge, but I�m just a typical fan of baseball.

For the minutae of it all, Bayman is uh�The Man. The guy knows his baseball.

That being said, I�m a big baseball game fan and have been since my Intellivision days (the plastic overlay over the 12 number controller that allowed you to select a fielder to go get the ball. Revolutionary!). So I�d hope that as a generalist my opinions would mean something.

Most people here have read anything and everything so nothing I�m saying should be news.

The TL;DR is: I think anybody looking for a generational change between this version and the PS3 version are going to be disappointed. You may need to wait until the PS3 version truly becomes an afterthought before the full power of the PS4 is brought to bear on the game.

I�m not sure I would say this is the game to go out and buy a PS4 for, especially if you�re happy with the PS3 version of the game. But this shouldn�t surprise any sports game fan. The install base of the PS3 vs. PS4 means developers have a bigger profit potential on the current system that they can not afford to truly leave it.

While the graphical updates are modest when put together appear to make a nicer looking game with great look and frame rate, for the most part it plays very similar to last year�s game and feels like a typical year over year improvement vs. a huge leap forward. Fans of the game are going to notice differences, they do exist but most of them are modest cosmetics vs. gameplay. While not entirely accurate, an apt comparison here would be watching a movie on DVD vs. Blu Ray. You will see the differences but it doesn�t really change the content.

While FIFA and Madden (and perhaps NBA 2K) were able to show enhanced AI vs their PS3 counterparts, the struggle a baseball game is going to have is that as a static game the AI improvements are not going to be obvious.

With all that being said, if you have a PS4 and skipped the PS3 version of the Show then have no fear buying it.

So far:

LIKE:

-The new fielding. I love love love love it. The first game I played I lost a ball by playing the wrong path to it (something that would not have happened in MLB 13) and caught another one while getting a later break on it and being completely unsure whether it was going to make it over the fence. It is a small change that adds a ton to the game.

-The new animations for the PS4: While they add nothing really to gameplay, the game looks better and has a more immersive feeling of the world being alive. There�s still some work to go and the majority of the heavy lifting is done in cut scenes, but the crowd looks great as do all the player. You can see the extra power of the PS4 at work here. It�s not a massive leap, but still a leap.

-Advanced Count: This is a great feature that doesn�t appear to take from the integrity of the game or your statistics and allows you to play a game in 20-30 minutes. In the two games I ran, the stats generated by advancing in the count were on par with what you would expect. Pitchers who gave up hits lasted 6-7 innings before hitting the 100 pitch mark so it felt right. A pleasant surprise.

-It plays great: Quibbling aside about what may or may not be there, the game plays extremely well with no graphical issues so far.

MEH:

-Load times. Load times are AWFUL. Unequivocally the WORST on the system of the games I�ve played, certainly the worst of all the sports games (I own them all save for NBA Live). You�re looking at 60-80 seconds from main screen to the �Press Start� and a good 2+ minutes for each game. No other sports game comes close to those load times.

-New hitting camera. I get what its purpose is and it does it well enough, but I feel I�m missing a lot of the game by using it. The action happens on this sort of flat plane so you kind of miss everything that�s going on as the camera slowly moves up from the batter�s box into a position where you see what�s going on in the field. You can see it in the two videos I posted. I think I�ll be finding a new angle once I give it a few more chances.

Edit So more on Load times. In the past few nights, I've been playing a game, quitting so I can edit some video, mess with screen shots or go back to the Flyers game. The load times are long. However, if you start to play more, the PS4 starts to keep assets in the memory so load times go down, in some cases significantly. The second game of a 3 game set, the game loaded up in around 20 seconds. A new team coming into the same ball park and we were up to 40 seconds. A new ballpark and team, one minutes. Playing the rookie stuff in RTTS (a lot less assets to load), there was an initial load in the minute range and after that it was relatively quick.

Overall, this has made me a lot happier about loads and I figured I owed it to everybody to recant.