With the help of our readers and EA Sports, we had an opportunity to interview Trey Smith, Producer of MVP 07 NCAA Baseball. They have included four exclusive screenshots to go along with it.

Operation Sports: Why isn’t the game shipping for the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 this year? Do you plan on releasing a Next Gen version next year?

Trey Smith: Last year we tested the college baseball market with MVP 06 NCAA baseball.  The game was very well receive on the PS2 by the user and media alike, that we have decided to bring it back for another year.   We focused our development for MVP Baseball this year on the PS2, which allowed us to really push the limits of the hardware and continue to innovate on the best baseball gameplay engine on the market.  We have not yet made a decision on future platforms for the franchise. 

Operation Sports: It was stated last year, in a few interviews, that the hope was to include every DI team in this year’s version. Only 2 more conferences have been added, from what we’ve seen. What were some of the biggest obstacles to adding more teams and conferences this year?

Trey Smith: Yeah, that was me in the interview.  And we had every intention of trying to add every D1 team in the game, but unfortunately we were not able to accomplish this goal.  The biggest obstacle in adding more teams and conferences is scope.  We had a lot on our plate this year, adding Rock and Fire pitching. If we had invested the time it would’ve taken us to add even more teams and conferences, we would have had to cut something.  We did up our grand total of playable teams to over 150.  It was a tough decision to make, but we felt that our audience would prefer that we spend more time tuning and polishing gameplay features like Rock and Fire, Load and Fire, Precision Throw control, and the New Rock and Fire Mini-games, than adding those teams. I apologize if your favorite team didn’t make the cut, but that is why we have Creation Zone and our Create a school feature.

Operation Sports: Have more lines been added for the announcers?

Trey Smith: Yup. We had both Kyle and Mike in for additional voice sessions.  Mike has added, among other things, more color, team intros, and stadium intros.  Kyle did the same and he recorded all of the audio for our new “Ask Kyle” feature where he gives you advice on what type of pitch to throw and where. Similar to “Ask Madden” for play calling.  It ended up being a really cool feature.

Operation Sports: Have the graphics been improved?

Trey Smith: Focusing on just the PS2 has allowed us to do a bunch of new things.  We added new grass textures, re-lit all of our existing stadiums, and updated several textures that we felt stood out.  The biggest improvement we made was improving our “dynamic sky” feature from last year, where as the game progresses, the sky and weather changes.  We even got to add some clouds, something that the PS2 of MVP didn’t have last year.  I like to start games right around sunset and then end up finishing the game under the lights.  If you put MVP 07 right up next to MVP 06, you will notice a significant graphical improvement across the board.

Operation Sports: What improvements have been made in Dynasty mode?

Trey Smith: This is actually a pretty neat story.  We have a very strong community following with MVP, and we listen to them very closely.  There is a new feature this year that a member of our MVP community thought up last year, and voice it to us.  It’s something we are calling Draft Buzz.  Essentially, some of the Baseball America Top 100 recruits are flagged as having Draft Buzz, meaning it is possible that the player may be drafted at the end of the year and will be unavailable to sign with your program.  It adds a little strategy when you’re looking to fill the holes in your roster from year to year.  If you choose to gamble on a recruit with Draft Buzz, you could end up spending 1,000’s of precious recruiting points on a player that is not there for you to sign at the end of the recruiting calendar.

Operation Sports: Create-a-Team and Stadium were selling points for a lot of people, is it still included and if so, how much has it been improved from last year?

Trey Smith: Our Creation Zone is still all in the game, but not much has changed.  With being able to create a team, player and stadium, what else could you ask for?

Operation Sports: Can you choose weather conditions and time; right before dynasty games like you could last year?

Trey Smith: Yes, that is back in there, just like last year.

Operation Sports: Can you give us some more details about the Rock and Fire pitching?

Trey Smith: I’d be happy to.  As I’m sure you’ve heard, we have now mapped the pitching mechanic to the right analog stick, similar to what we did with Load and Fire batting last year.  This is how it works.  First, select your pitch type.  Each pitch type corresponds to a different button on the controller pad.  You then use the Left analog stick to pick your desired pitch location.  While holding the Left analog stick in your desired pitch location, pull Down on the Right analog stick to being your wind up.  You can either follow the pitchers animation or the pitch meter in the bottom right hand corner, but the way to get the maximum effectiveness on a pitch is to press Up on the Right analog stick just as the pitcher reaches his “balance point” to deliver the pitch.  If you are watching the meter, it’s right when the ball icon enters the center of the “Green zone.” You will notice that when you are trying to work the corners of the plate, the left/right ball icon in the pitch meter moves to the side of the plate you’re trying to throw at.  This is when you’ll need to “follow through” and move the Right analog stick Up and in the direction you wish to throw.  Ideally, you want to match the ball icons in the pitch meter to throw a “perfectly” accurate pitch.  The further away the ball icons end up after releasing the ball, the less accurate your pitch is.  Where the ball ends up depends on which pitch you throw and how bad you mis-throw it.  Pitching the ball down the pipe is relatively simple, and you will continue to be punished if you do so, but now it’s going to be a bit more difficult to paint the corners.  And just for the record, you can still hop in and play with the “Classic pitching” but we hope that once you give Rock and Fire a chance, you won’t want to go back.

Operation Sports: Has load and fire batting been worked on at all?

Trey Smith: We have tweaked Load and Fire batting a little bit, to make it a little more fluid, but the batting mechanic as a whole has stayed the same.  We were very pleased with the innovation, and felt that this was the new direction in baseball games.

Operation Sports: Did the first baseman get the proper glove yet?

Trey Smith: Ha-ha, yeah this is still a touchy subject around here.  Long story short is, we were going to add First base mitts last year but couldn’t have both base coaches and first base mitts due to our limited amount of in-game memory.  The limited amount of memory we freed up this year was used to improve our dynamic sky.   So unfortunately no, we they do not the proper glove yet. 

Operation Sports: Any work done with scoring errors and hits properly?

Trey Smith: First off, I think you’ll find that MVP scores hits and error just as good, if not better, than the other baseball games out there.  There were a couple of instances that we flagged early on and we addressed them.  I remember one in particular that involved shots down the line being ruled as an error on the 3^rd baseman, even if it was clearly a base hit.

Operation Sports: Do the teams have more than their home and away jersey? Any type of alternates put in?

Trey Smith: We were going to add alternative jerseys but the number of schools that requested to update last year’s jerseys ended up taking up a lot more of our resources than we anticipated.  We ended up having to update over 50 existing jerseys and creating another 50+ for our new teams.  Many college baseball teams like to change their jerseys year to year.  Good to know.

Operation Sports: Are custom schedules and a complete list of schools in the works for 08?

Trey Smith: Unfortunately I can not release any details for 08.  Sorry guys. 

Operation Sports: Will we be able to control more than 1 team in dynasty mode?

Trey Smith: This is something that is brought to the table every year by a small but very vocal group.  It is a lot more difficult to implement than it sounds.  At the end of the day, we chose to focus our attention on other features that the vast majority of our audience would use.

Operation Sports: What has been added to recruiting besides draft buzz? Is there more talent in numbers & speed?

Trey Smith: The majority of the feedback we received on our recruiting mechanic was that other than the cream of the crop, the rest of the players sucked.  We went in and tuned the recruiting database to even things out a bit and boosted certain stats that we felt needed it, for example Speed.

Operation Sports: Will there be better roster management by CPU controlled teams? In particular, how about the recruiting? Will they adjust their lineups accordingly throughout the season? Will they change a player's position?

Trey Smith: We’re actually very pleased with our CPU logic and felt that our attention would be better served elsewhere in the game.  We did however tweak the Player Happiness logic for pitchers in Dynasty which was a major request on the boards.

Operation Sports: Will there be an all player’s option for roster browsing? For example, a way to sort who is the fastest or who hits with the most contact in the game, etc.?

Trey Smith: We felt that the time it would take to add the ability to browse rosters and add sorting options would be better spent elsewhere.  The significant change in regards to Rosters this year is the option to play with pre-made rosters that cater to your specific playing style in Play Now and Exhibition.  If you like the long ball, you can play with the Sluggers roster.  If you like to manufacture runs, you’ve got the Small Ball roster. This is a feature that works really well when you’re playing with a couple of friends on the couch.

Operation Sports: When playing online, can you adjust lineups/pitchers before the game?

Trey Smith: Our approach to taking MVP online was to make it as simple as possible to get into a game.  Adding these types of options to the online pre-game flow would be couter intuitive to this approach.  And it also opens up a can of worms when it comes to someone taking 5 minutes to get everything exactly where they want while their opponent waits patiently.  Not much fun for the dude waiting.

Operation Sports: We would like to thank you for your time with this interview, is there anything else you would like to add?

Trey Smith: Thanks for the support and we hope you dig the game.