Major League Baseball 2K9 Developer Diary: Gameplay

Ř No more meatball – The idea of throwing a bad pitch when you made a poor gesture was good but the way we designated a meatball was definitely too harsh. What we did instead was to identify earlier on in the gesture process the pitch the user is attempting to throw, if they don’t finish the gesture or make a poor gesture we simply affect the way that pitch is thrown. For example, Fastballs will be straighter and slower while Curveballs will have less break on the ball. Naturally, this will make those pitches more hittable without making them “meatballs”.

Ř Removed the “Release Timing” - We felt that the “Release Timing” aspect of throwing a pitch made the game less accessible. After thorough focus testing, we discovered that the aspect of pitching that attributed to the most “meatballs” was the release timing. As a result, we kept “Release timing” as an option to the user but not on the default controls. If a user loved the way it worked last year, they can turn it on from the pause menu.

Ř Inside Edge Data driving the AI – Inside Edge is our exclusive scouting service which is also used by some MLB teams to get reports on players. As in previous years, you can purchase these reports during your franchise to earn an extra advantage when facing the AI opponents. Our pitcher’s decision making is primarily based off Inside Edge data for pitchers and weaknesses. When deciding what pitch to throw where, our pitchers have to take into consideration many different variables most simply broken down into two aspects:
o What does the pitcher want to throw and where?
o What are the hitter’s weaknesses?

Lastly, we implemented zone hitting as an alternate control scheme. Zone hitting is where you have a cursor and you have to put the cursor in the same zone that the ball crosses the plate in addition to your regular swing. Zone hitting works with either the Classic swing (press A button) or Total Control (RStick). We also added a “sweet spot” to the cursor, if you lineup the “sweet spot” of the cursor where the ball crosses the plate, the hitter will get an additional boost to your hit.

Basically, when you have a runner on first base you press LT (L2 on PS3) to take a lead. To steal, hold LT until it vibrates which will indicate that your runner is ready to take off. The runner will now take off when you release the button. Stealing “on the fly” certainly adds a lot of fun to base stealing because now the user is forced to try to get a good jump on the pitcher. If you get a good jump, you will actually take off right before the pitcher starts his delivery and get a perfect steal.
We also added a little more information for pitchers, if you look over at the runner that’s on base, we give you his “steal rating” which indicates how much of a threat he is, so if you have Benji Molina standing at 1^st, his steal rating will be pretty low and you can focus on the hitter.