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Extra sports activities video games ought to take a web page from MLB The Present. Final 12 months, the event workforce of the now-comfortably-multiplatform baseball sim launched Storylines, a brand new mode that brilliantly educated gamers about probably the most essential eras within the historical past of the game. It did so in a means that was fascinating from an historic perspective, an audiovisual perspective, and critically for a online game, a gameplay perspective as effectively.
For MLB The Present 24, I met with Sony San Diego designer Ramone Russell, as I’m lucky to get to do yearly, and he walked me by way of Season 2 of Storylines, which can spotlight ten further Negro League legends. 4 shall be accessible at launch on March 19: Josh “The Black Babe Ruth” Gibson, Toni Stone – the primary girl to play in top-tier skilled baseball, longtime MLB residence run king Henry Aaron (who some nonetheless contemplate the true king), and Homestead Grays legend Buck Leonard. The rest shall be added shortly after launch.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum curator Bob Kendrick returns because the narrator for the mode, and similar to final 12 months, Russell advised me that Kendrick is a strolling encyclopedia who’s given no script and offers the Sony San Diego workforce every part they want in a single take. However whereas Bob wanted no updating, the UI has been given a further splash of shade to assist convey the Storylines to life. As well as, the 70-plus-year-old real-life footage included inside Storylines has been cleaned up, each dust and grass within the stadiums have now been color-mapped, new uniforms have been added to symbolize groups not featured final 12 months (like Stone’s Indianapolis Clowns), and customized bat sounds have been added for Gibson after the event workforce’s analysis turned up anecdote after anecdote about his thunderous hits producing a distinct sound than anybody else’s. In brief, all of it seems to be and sounds phenomenal, and it’s simply superior that Sony San Diego is doubling down on spotlighting this significant period of baseball historical past.
I requested Russell if final 12 months’s Season 1 Storylines can be carried over and included in MLB The Present 24, and sadly the reply was no. Nevertheless, not solely did Russell give me a curious look after I requested if it is likely to be added as DLC for this 12 months’s recreation, he definitively acknowledged that all the content material from final 12 months’s mode shall be posted on Sony Photos’ YouTube channel (although clearly you’ll be able to’t expertise the gameplay that means). Each of those are good issues. Each baseball fan ought to see and ideally play these Storylines.
In the meantime, Storylines is branching out past the Negro Leagues this 12 months as effectively, as Derek Jeter will get his personal playable arc that begins together with his debut at The Kingdome in Seattle (a stadium the workforce has needed to recreate and reintroduce to MLB The Present for the primary time in a few years) after which winds its means by way of 5 World Sequence championships and the walk-off single that capped off his Cooperstown-enshrined profession. No phrase but if I, as a Diamondbacks fan, may have an opportunity to step into Luis Gonzalez’s cleats and dump a single simply over Jeter’s head in Sport 7 of the basic 2001 World Sequence. However I digress…
MLB The Present has been essentially the most reliably and constantly glorious sports activities sim within the console house, and the 2024 model is unlikely to strike out – particularly when it’s as soon as once more serving up a playable baseball historical past schooling within the type of the improbable Storylines mode.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s government editor of previews and host of each IGN’s weekly Xbox present, Podcast Unlocked, in addition to our month-to-month(-ish) interview present, IGN Unfiltered. He is a North Jersey man, so it is “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
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