Article by: William Abner

Sitting in on these press conference calls rarely reveals anything of note. Most of the time all you get is fact sheet regurgitation and what amounts to basically a one hour infomercial about the game in question sprinkled in with asinine questions about why player X was chosen for the cover and other questions designed to waste everyone’s time.

While this was really no different, the 2K10 team did admit that last year was a struggle for them: working with a new code base, working on a shorter than usual development cycle, etc. The result was a game that no one was happy with in the end – both the guys at Visual Concepts and baseball fans alike. Fact is, the better game resided in Sony’s barn.

And everyone knew it.

We hear the phrase “rebuilt from the ground up” a lot in this business. We heard it again on this conference call; apparently the team rebuilt much of the game from scratch – we have no real way of knowing how that’s going to change things, although you can download a demo, but a demo won’t show you the real meat – the nuts and bolts that will bind the game together. That’ll take more time to evaluate.

So MLB 2K10 is a totally new game, if you believe what the team is selling. What’s “new”, exactly? It was nice to hear everyone hammer on the realism of the sport – it certainly sounds as if the development centered around making the franchise more authentic from the detailed scouting reports to the physics model – nothing is set to chance and this should, in theory, provide for a more organic experience which is something this series has needed for a long, long time.