Extra sports activities video games ought to take a web page from MLB The Present. Final 12 months, the event staff of the now-comfortably-multiplatform baseball sim launched Storylines, a brand new mode that brilliantly educated gamers about some of the necessary eras within the historical past of the game. It did so in a manner 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 is able to spotlight ten extra Negro League legends. 4 can 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 dwelling run king Henry Aaron (who some nonetheless think about the true king), and Homestead Grays legend Buck Leonard. The rest can be added shortly after launch.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum curator Bob Kendrick returns because the narrator for the mode, and identical to final 12 months, Russell informed me that Kendrick is a strolling encyclopedia who’s given no script and offers the Sony San Diego staff all the pieces they want in a single take. However whereas Bob wanted no updating, the UI has been given a further splash of coloration to assist carry the Storylines to life. As well as, the 70-plus-year-old real-life footage included inside Storylines has been cleaned up, each filth and grass within the stadiums have now been color-mapped, new uniforms have been added to signify groups not featured final 12 months (like Stone’s Indianapolis Clowns), and customized bat sounds have been added for Gibson after the event staff’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 important 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 said that all the content material from final 12 months’s mode can be posted on Sony Photos’ YouTube channel (although clearly you may’t expertise the gameplay that manner). 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 along with his debut at The Kingdome in Seattle (a stadium the staff has needed to recreate and reintroduce to MLB The Present for the primary time in a few years) after which winds its manner 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, could 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 persistently wonderful sports activities sim within the console area, 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 training within the type of the implausible 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.
