MLB 2K7 was almost great. The problem is that in this business “almost” can sink a game faster than a Titanic sized iceberg. Ben Brinkman, the man in charge of MLB 2K’s development, took a lot of heat from gamers (not as much from the media) when he said the series was on a three year plan to get it where the company wanted it to be.
In a sense, Brinkman is dead-on accurate – to really turn a meandering franchise around takes more than a single ten month development cycle – it takes years to get things right. Of course, gamers see a $60 price tag and want results. It’s really a no win situation for Brinkman and the 2K team because of the restraints specific to sports game development. But we’re now entering year two of the ‘plan’ and based on the conference call that the media had with Brinkman over the phone Friday evening, strides are being made, at least in theory, to work out the issues of 2K7 while adding more features to the roster.
There were a few key issues with 2K7 which kept it from being the baseball game of choice over Sony’s The Show. Weak base running and fielding AI; terrible CPU roster management, skewed physics—and stat bugs. If these items alone could be ironed out for 2K8, 2K could get back in the game, so to speak.
The good news is that all of these areas have at least received attention. We haven’t actually played the game yet but if you believe Brinkman – everything should work as intended.
That means no more station to station running – you will now be able to score from second on a base hit and with a fast runner score from first base on a double. For a baseball man this sounds like extremely basic stuff, but it was a major issue with MLB 2K7. During the call Brinkman stressed that this was no longer an issue due to more realistic ball and player speed.
In addition, he claims that the game has an almost unlimited number of hit types. If true, this would be a huge boon as predictable ball paths off the bat can ruin a baseball game – but if the hit variety is kept high it keeps players on their toes and adds unlimited replay value to the game as a whole. If this works as good as advertised it should help the game immeasurably; to see slow rollers, Texas Leaguers, pop outs to the catcher, looping hits that catch the chalk and rattle around in the corner…the possibilities here are endless.
Continuing to run down the “fix list” the CPU AI has been given a shot in the arm so hopefully we won’t see players rotting on the Disabled List or a trade made for a player like Ichiro only to see the CPU place him in AA for a month. Again, we’ll have to wait and see but apparently this should all work as it was meant in 2K8. Speaking of AI, the batting and pitching AI has been “re-written from the ground up” so we’ll have to see how that changes the flow of the games, as well.
