Major League Baseball 2K10 Developer Insight: Franchise Mode

[Steve_OS]

2K Sports has posted another Major League Baseball 2K10 Developer Insight. This one features Franchise Mode.

Quote:

"So let’s get into it! This year we added 40 Man Rosters/September Call-Ups, Compensation Picks, Spring Training, Trade Finder, Player Finder, Super Sim, Franchise Blogs, Variable Contracts and MLB Today presentation (we’ll also have a lot more about this in an upcoming Insight). I’ll go into a few of these new features in more depth later on in this write-up."

[Jamin23]

I hope this eases peoples tensions about franchise mode. Off to read.

[GrandMaster B]

A very nice read. Love the new features.

[Jamin23]

Quote:

I want to get a quick concern I know many of you had last year out of the way immediately: we have brought back full ability to edit players and their stances/windups, including the ability to give any player any signature stance/windup that we have (this will be available both in Franchise mode and in the front end). This year we also added the ability to play Double-A and Triple-A games in both Franchise and regular exhibition mode. We have nine great looking new stadiums for Minor League teams, including some very cool Double-A and Triple-A Minor League stadiums, and a couple of Spring Training stadiums.

Hope people are happy now.

[kcxiv]

Thank god they brought back full editing. Now i dont have to hear that every thread. wooohooo. I mean this on the 2K sports forums as i moderate there. lol

[bigfnjoe96]

I want to get a quick concern I know many of you had last year out of the way immediately: we have brought back full ability to edit players and their stances/windups, including the ability to give any player any signature stance/windup that we have (this will be available both in Franchise mode and in the front end).



For the first time ever, we now have 40 Man Rosters and September Call-Ups. This was a feature we wanted to add for a long time and we are pretty excited that we were able to make it happen this year. You will be able to use your 40 Man Rosters in Spring Training and in the regular season from September 1st to the start of the postseason. Calling up your top prospects at the end of the season and being able to bring them into meaningful games is pretty cool.



While we expect people will be pretty excited about 40 Man Rosters and September Call-ups, we think the new feature that will have the most impact on how users play through Franchise will be compensation picks. In a lot of Franchise modes (especially in baseball games with the wide payroll ranges between the big market and small market teams) it is very difficult to ever take a team like the Royals, Pirates, or any other low payroll team and turn them into a legitimate contender. Compensation picks can be thought of as something that can help these lower payroll teams to level the playing field against the big market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox.

Compensation picks essentially work like this: if you are unable to re-sign a top player on your team and you lose him to free agency (as is frequently the case with many low payroll teams), you will get compensation in the form of draft picks for losing that player. Depending on how good the player is, you will get either the first round draft pick from the team that signs him and a compensation pick (which occurs in the Supplemental Round of the Amateur Draft) if the player was considered a Type A player or just a compensation pick if the player was considered a Type B player.

In the past if you had a good player on your team who was becoming a free agent and you thought you would have a difficult time re-signing him, you would have either had to try and trade the player before the end of your season, or play out the season with him and let him become a free agent in which case you wouldn’t end up getting anything in return for him. Now if you lose a top player to Free Agency, you will get compensation picks, so you will always get some kind of value back. But this works both ways; if you are a high payroll team and you sign a top free agent, you will give up your top draft picks as compensation picks. This adds quite a bit of risk/reward to the mode and forces players to make the tough decisions that real GMs face of trying to sign top free agents and win now or keeping their teams’ draft picks and building their organization from the ground up .



For the most part we were pretty happy with our sim stats last year, but we spent a good amount of time working on improving them, as well as making our sim logic smarter. We also spent quite a bit of time improving our progression system and our trade logic.

[ExtremeGamer]

If this plays well on the field, I'll be happy, as of now, it has everything I'd want in a baseball game.

[jagsfan82]

"so good luck getting the Diamondbacks to part with a young superstar like Felix Hernandez"

lol, shows how much they know