MLB 2K11 Developer Diary #4 - Revamped Fielding System, Animations, Sliders & Videos

Throw Accuracy – Modifies the difficulty of the throw meter when fielding.

Gather error frequency – Increases the slider to see more gather errors and decrease to see less gather errors.

Throwing error frequency – Modifies the frequency of throwing errors by the CPU or when putting the meter into the red.

Outfield & Infield Throw Speed modifier – Tunes the throw speed of the outfielders and infielders separately.

Outfield & Infield Run Speed modifier – Adjusts the running speed of the outfielders and infielders separately.

Baserunner speed – Tunes the running speed of the baserunners.

Catcher Arm Strength and Accuracy – Tunes how hard and accurate the catchers will throw on steal attempts.
All sliders can be adjusted separately for the user and CPU.

No more “football catches” – Playing MLB 2K10, we cringed every time we saw a shortstop run backwards and make what we called “football catches”. We knew that we wanted to address that issue by adding new animations. We added animation coverage that has the fielder turn around while the ball is in midair in order to catch it. These animations look very smooth and make our game look more authentic.

Sliding catches – We have a good database of diving catches already, but we didn’t have many catches where the outfielders are sliding in to catch the ball. You see this frequently in real baseball when an outfielder is charging a ball and, instead of diving head first, they slide feet first. We added quite a few animations to add variety and refresh our diving catches.

Barehand queue ups – Last year, we introduced the ability to preload a throw and the fielders could trigger these smooth catch-and-throw animations. This year, we took that a step further by adding the same kind of plays from barehand gathers. That means that if a ball is hit into the gap and the ball stops at the foot of the outfield wall, if you queue up a throw, your outfielder should be able to just pick up the ball and fire it into the infield in one smooth animation. These animations are my personal favorite when they appear.

Restricting animations by ratings and weight – We wanted to continue to add to our realism and get rid of as many “that player wouldn’t do that in real life” moments as we could. We did a couple of very interesting things to limit that in the field this year. The first thing we did is limit animations to different ratings, so certain animations won’t trigger unless your glove rating is greater than 90, etc. We also limited animations by height and weight so that, even if a player has a good glove or arm rating, you won’t see bigger players make amazingly athletic plays.