Ideally, a good baseball video game has clearly understood game mechanics with developers providing as much detail as possible - formulas, code, philosophy. Player ability, however, would be more ambiguous and mysterious. Is player A faster than player B? Let's find out. Have a time trial feature that shows and saves players' 40 times. Then, the speed rating you see in the game would match up to how the player ran that day. Maybe he was having an off day - maybe he's hurt. Who knows, but the number would be variable and would change only when scouts / coaches / players provide us updates, manually or automatically requested. Imagine right before your game, your star comes to you and says, "hey man, my knee is barking today, can I get the day off?" I know the game warns you when players are tired and suggests substitutions, but how are these determined? How accurate are these suggestions?
That's just one example, but there's countless others. Instead of seeing exactly how confident a pitcher is in his fastball, maybe we could actually watch the pitcher before the game, with the pitching coach giving us hints about his status. "Great control today, I like what I see." Or, "he's taking something off his fastball, maybe he's hurt." Then, you could talk to your trainer, who could perform a physical on the pitcher or run other tests to make sure he's OK. Suppose the final conclusion is that your starter has a sore shoulder, but it's not too bad. Expect less control, velocity, and pitches today." We could even add a pitching limit that would alert us when the pitcher is approaching his limit.
This approach takes the emphasis off of numbers and puts it onto our eyes and our coaches' broad, vague notes. And of course, the accuracy of those notes is contingent on your coaches' / scouts' ratings. Of course, the scouts and coaches should have hard ratings. I mean, we can't have scouts scouting scouts! But their ratings could go up and down based on various factors.
This is more like real baseball. From my experience, the only video game that came close to what I'm talking about is All-Star 2003, which gave players A-F ratings as opposed to 1-100 numbers. It seems more cryptic yet more realistic, too.
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That's all fantasy, of course. The reality is that we spend more time trying to unravel the mysteries behind game mechanics and far less time evaluating players. I don't know about you, but that's backwards and far from ideal. In a moment's time, a developer could send us the formula for how injuries and in-game ratings work. They could tell us, "shoulder injuries cause pitcher velocity to drop by x points". That way, we could understand better how the game actually functions. Instead, you and I have to spend hours, days, weeks, or longer testing just to figure out how injuries relate to on-field performance. And that's just one example.
In the future, it'd be nice to see a transition away from gamers having to figure out the mysteries behind game mechanics to a more realistic, player-focused mystery.
That's just one example, but there's countless others. Instead of seeing exactly how confident a pitcher is in his fastball, maybe we could actually watch the pitcher before the game, with the pitching coach giving us hints about his status. "Great control today, I like what I see." Or, "he's taking something off his fastball, maybe he's hurt." Then, you could talk to your trainer, who could perform a physical on the pitcher or run other tests to make sure he's OK. Suppose the final conclusion is that your starter has a sore shoulder, but it's not too bad. Expect less control, velocity, and pitches today." We could even add a pitching limit that would alert us when the pitcher is approaching his limit.
This approach takes the emphasis off of numbers and puts it onto our eyes and our coaches' broad, vague notes. And of course, the accuracy of those notes is contingent on your coaches' / scouts' ratings. Of course, the scouts and coaches should have hard ratings. I mean, we can't have scouts scouting scouts! But their ratings could go up and down based on various factors.
This is more like real baseball. From my experience, the only video game that came close to what I'm talking about is All-Star 2003, which gave players A-F ratings as opposed to 1-100 numbers. It seems more cryptic yet more realistic, too.
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That's all fantasy, of course. The reality is that we spend more time trying to unravel the mysteries behind game mechanics and far less time evaluating players. I don't know about you, but that's backwards and far from ideal. In a moment's time, a developer could send us the formula for how injuries and in-game ratings work. They could tell us, "shoulder injuries cause pitcher velocity to drop by x points". That way, we could understand better how the game actually functions. Instead, you and I have to spend hours, days, weeks, or longer testing just to figure out how injuries relate to on-field performance. And that's just one example.
In the future, it'd be nice to see a transition away from gamers having to figure out the mysteries behind game mechanics to a more realistic, player-focused mystery.
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