Early Impressions of MLB The Show 17

[RaychelSnr]

As it is with the dawn of every baseball season, the launch of the newest MLB The Show game brings about the usual sources of excitement that we’ve come to expect over the years from playing the series: a bunch of new and promising features waiting to be explored, loads of welcome tweaks to an already solid core of gameplay and — of course — a flurry of people logging on at midnight when the game's officially released, causing the overwhelmed servers to quickly become unstable.

Okay, that last one is probably more of a continued source of frustration than excitement, but at least we can say the servers have been a little better than they were last year.

With only limited time to play the game since its release on Tuesday, here are a few stray observations on what has stood out to me so far, besides the inconsistent online gameplay...

Read More - Early Impressions of MLB The Show 17

[ozcore]

for me as well Ball Physics and Humanity AI are the biggest additions this year. yesterday i hit a flyball with a.j. pollock which i thought would never leave the park and it did

[theu715]

My opinion on similar stuff. I'll say I've only gotten to play one game, but watched a few online.

Ball physics - Stellar! Hit variety was noticed immediately when playing. Seeing a line drive clear an OF is nice, but even better was a line drive hit to CF towards the gap that tailed back towards the CF. Looked incredible!

Human AI - Jury is still out. In one game I had Ellsbury (CPU) hit a nubber to Chris Archer. He fields it, looks at the ball in his glove, and proceeds to do a soft toss to first. Ellsbury beats it out by two steps solid and a run scores. Later in the game, grounder up the middle the SS fields for me and goes into a throwing animation instead of flip to second. Runner safe at second, but thrown out at first. I want this to be better, but honestly didn't expect it to be. OF did seem better on throws but still saw too many guys get "sucked" into the wall before being able to regather and throw it in. Infielders also feel like they're much slower to react than in previous years. This may be able to be tweaked. Again, I've played one game, but not impressed at all in this area.

Commentary - Night and day better! Great job here!

Retro mode - Total waste of time. Stopped three innings in, just not fun. I'd rather play my old baseball games on SNES if I want a "retro" feel. Wish this time spent would've been on something like Online Franchise for instance.

[MrArlingtonBeach]

Quote: Originally Posted by theu715

Retro mode - Total waste of time. Stopped three innings in, just not fun. I'd rather play my old baseball games on SNES if I want a "retro" feel. Wish this time spent would've been on something like Online Franchise for instance.

SDS said in a stream that it took them just a single day to bring Retro Mode from concept to creation. I don't think it took any time away from other areas of the game's development.

[GrandMaster B]

Better to just turn the commentators off after a week and listen to the stands and the sounds of the ballpark while playing instead.

[RobbieMacc]

Of course Humanity AI and ball physics are huge, one small thing that goes a long way with me are live the batter/pitcher match-up stats. I'm not sure if this is tied to Inside Edge or not but I would assume so. Well done dev team, well done.

[batflip666]

Quote: Originally Posted by ozcore

for me as well Ball Physics and Humanity AI are the biggest additions this year. yesterday i hit a flyball with a.j. pollock which i thought would never leave the park and it did

So amazing, they've out done themselve loving the hell out of the game.

Now if I was a DD player instead of an offline franchise mode guy I'm be seriously depressed with the servers but even they seem to be working now.

[tessl]

Ball physics are good except for the grade 4 hurricane on each foul line blowing balls foul. IRL balls do not curve remotely as much as what they have implemented.

That's one thing which needs to be addressed in a patch.