What Does MLB 13 The Show Need to do Next Year to Satisfy Your Baseball Gaming Needs?

Support Online Multiplayer or Get Rid of It

If it's the only option for baseball next year, then MLB the Show's straight-up unplayability online, for years now, will become an even more glaring weakness. It may be that baseball, a game of timing, is simply impossible to recreate meaningfully given the current state of the art of networking in the U.S. and all of the variables it contains. Just look at the strikeout totals in the multiplayer leaderboards. A baseball video game that is enjoyable online on the day of release would be a landmark achievement and sales driver, because 2K couldn't deliver that either. If Sony can't get this game to that state, it should jettison online multiplayer altogether and stop wasting money on the servers. I have given up on it and suspect many others have, too.

Bring Life to the Broadcast Booth

Your long slog through your career in Road to the Show makes the game's threadbare commentary painfully apparent. I think the world of Matt Vasgersian but he is shackled to an outdated commentary engine given to repetition and dead air. Dave Campbell's dialogue library is really showing its age, and a majority of his work sounds like Dave Campbell playing Dave Campbell. Eric Karros should be thanked for his service and sent home. The Show has world class visuals and a smooth, if minimalist, broadcast presentation. The commentary supporting it has not pulled its weight in years.

If You Promise Something, Deliver It

The Show's biggest embarrassment, perhaps overshadowed because it affects a smaller population of users, is the broken state of its cross-platform play with the PS Vita. Naturally, this must not happen again next year. But The Show also led gamers to believe they'd have an Online Home Run Derby—a baseball mode that would actually work online because the pitching and hitting could be done entirely on the hitter's console. If undelivered promises like these happen next year, Sony and The Show can expect to be ripped for it, regardless of how many people use the feature.

Do Something Revolutionary to the Sports Genre

That's a tall expectation but not impossible. If you look at the across-the-board unfulfilled wishes of sports video gamers, probably the top one is career-mode importation across release years. Nowhere is this more necessary than in baseball, where a player's career lasts longer on average and a Hall of Famer's—ostensibly the goal of Road to the Show—averages about 17 seasons. That's a hell of a lot of work to put in each year. I've never done it, and I've always started over.
It would drive sales of an annual sports title if a gamer knew he could continue his long-playing career—either as a single player, or as a franchise owner or season general manager—in the next title, with all of its upgrades and refinements. Sony San Diego told me two years ago they had seriously looked at this, but warned there are developmental challenges the average gamer may not readily grasp. They still need to make this happen, not just for what it would do for The Show, but also for the goodwill it would return in setting that as an expectation of sports video games, pushing other developers to adopt it.
Baseball does change year to year, but that's mostly in personnel. While the Rays and A's have plans for a new stadium, there are no certain dates of their arrival. No expansion is planned. The postseason format was changed this year. Even if there are future structural changes to the league—franchise moves, new stadiums, playoff changes—gamers would accept them as a retcon without complaint. This is the best time to pry the roster file out of Road to the Show, Franchise and Season, and make it importable into a future version of MLB the Show. I do realize that is much easier said than done.

Steal MLB Today and Make It Better

There are a couple of things MLB 2K did well that The Show couldn't do without incurring the bad will of straight up copying an inferior competitor (or a legal action). But there's no copyright or software patent on facts, and a team's projected lineups and starting pitchers are published every day. MLB Today, especially with its "Season" addition this year, should have been an improvement. Instead, it was a broken, barely supported mess.
In the right hands, this is a great concept, especially when given the "rewrite history" context of MLB Today Season. But that mode, in MLB 2K12 only lets you play the current game on the calendar, a painfully limiting aspect. What I want to be able to do is play today's game and then play forward from that on my terms; or go back to a pivotal game, replay it, and alter my favorite club's fortunes that way.
I don't think gamers want to play alongside a 162-game season in real-time as much as they would want to jump into the middle of one and take it from there, or in September—six months after release—use it as wish fulfillment when their team starts to fade. That type of functionality would properly differentiate this from MLB Today, and turn it into a pick-up-and-play season mode that can deliver the full context of a pennant race.