Persevering with To Construct Out a Playable Baseball Museum

Extra sports activities video games ought to take a web page from MLB The Present. Final yr, the event workforce of the now-comfortably-multiplatform baseball sim launched Storylines, a brand new mode that brilliantly educated gamers about one of the necessary eras within the historical past of the game. It did so in a method that was attention-grabbing 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 Season 2 of Storylines, which is able to spotlight ten extra Negro League legends. 4 might be obtainable 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 might be added shortly after launch.

Negro Leagues Baseball Museum curator Bob Kendrick returns because the narrator for the mode, and identical to final yr, Russell informed me that Kendrick is a strolling encyclopedia who’s given no script and offers the Sony San Diego workforce every little thing they want in a single take. However whereas Bob wanted no updating, the UI has been given an extra 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 grime and grass within the stadiums have now been color-mapped, new uniforms have been added to characterize groups not featured final yr (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 special sound than anybody else’s. In brief, all of it seems 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 yr’s Season 1 Storylines could 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 once I requested if it is perhaps added as DLC for this yr’s recreation, he definitively said that the entire content material from final yr’s mode might be posted on Sony Footage’ YouTube channel (although clearly you may’t expertise the gameplay that method). 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 yr 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 workforce has needed to recreate and reintroduce to MLB The Present for the primary time in a few years) after which winds its method by 5 World Collection 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 Collection. However I digress…

MLB The Present has been probably the most reliably and persistently wonderful 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 unbelievable 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.