New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

[Rob_NYY]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

Do you want a GAME that no matter what you do, stats are 100% predictable? I want to make the swing that lets that 2 hr a year player hit his 20th of the year, I want to take that lifetime 5.00 era pitcher to his best career ERA ever. Maybe that's just me, but it's a fine line to have a mix of both arcade and sim.

It's about me playing and hitting 82 HR's with A-Rod in a season on the hardest difficulty and adjusted sliders. I don't want to go 26-2 with Andy Pettitte. I don't want to hit 56 HR's with Bobby Abreu. It's just stupid to me how they dumb the game down to make it "easier for the casual game to pick up and play." That's why I liked to play 2K7 against humans, it was much more of a challenge. One of the reasons I love The Show so much is because I actually lose games to the computer. I go on multiple game losing streaks. That just doesn't happen in 2K because it's too arcadey, way too easy.

Yes, The Show is much more up my alley because it's a lot more like real baseball. But I love 2K's sig styles, I love day to night progression, I love how the new pitching and fielding looks. But it just doesn't play enough like real baseball, which is the whole point of a sim! It's not about taking Scott Podsednik and turning him into a 20HR player, that's not a simulation. That's The Bigs.

[MizzouRah]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

It's about me playing and hitting 82 HR's with A-Rod in a season on the hardest difficulty and adjusted sliders. I don't want to go 26-2 with Andy Pettitte. I don't want to hit 56 HR's with Bobby Abreu. It's just stupid to me how they dumb the game down to make it "easier for the casual game to pick up and play." That's why I liked to play 2K7 against humans, it was much more of a challenge. One of the reasons I love The Show so much is because I actually lose games to the computer. I go on multiple game losing streaks. That just doesn't happen in 2K because it's too arcadey, way too easy.

Yes, The Show is much more up my alley because it's a lot more like real baseball. But I love 2K's sig styles, I love day to night progression, I love how the new pitching and fielding looks. But it just doesn't play enough like real baseball, which is the whole point of a sim! It's not about taking Scott Podsednik and turning him into a 20HR player, that's not a simulation. That's The Bigs.

You need a tune file!

With sliders, I lost plenty of games in 2k7... but I also liked hitting 30+ hrs with Chris Duncan, and having Mulder find his control again. 2k7 gave me "believeable" stats.. that's all I could ask for.. plus it was fun to play.

From what I've read, they've really worked hard on the whole hitting/pitching/fielding this year and that's what I wanted more so than anything else. It seems like it's heading in the right direction.

If not, I'll be the first to post my displeasure.

[KushGamer]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

Well, that's good to hear. I guess I may be mistaken. You worked on the game so you know a lot more than I do.

But, I don't know. I guess it was BB's "out of the box, I don't want to take pitches comment". I understand it's pro level. There is just something that tells me you guys want to make a certain game. But, the powers that be (time, technology, the bottom line, etc...), have certain influences where you guys have to make compromises.

I'm still a day one buyer. I have to have the game for my collection. And I liked a lot of what I heard about the game play. But, for some reason I think eventually sales are going to determine if this game is a success, not what we here at OS have to say about game.

Yeah, Ben doesnt like to take pitches. valuable information when you're facing him one-on-one.

Sales do to a point. It seems like the higher-ups are mostly concerned about review scores. How did we rate overall compared to last year and how do we rate compared to The Show? But that's because those scores play a pretty decent role in sales and it also gives you a good idea of the general reception of the game. Also, most reveiwers tend not to be hardcore sim baseball fans.

It was surprising when I realized how few of us there are. I thought there would be all sorts of competition for my job. Turned out there really wasn't. I was like, "I can't be the ONLY hardcore fan of sim baseball games, lives and breathes baseball growing up, and then got a comp sci degree to help chase my dream of working on baseball game. We've gotta be a dime a dozen. Everyone must want in." Turned out I'm either one of the only ones or one of the few that actually went for it. When you think of that fact that there are a handful of the job I had in the country - literally about 5 between 2K and Sony - it just seemed to me, when I was on the outside, that there would be more people clamoring to get in. There aren't.

So yes, in order to sell many copies, there has to be some appeal to the masses. We are hoping that making a very realistic game of baseball (that moves at a decent pace - i dont think keeping games under an hour is a bad thing when you need to play 162 to get through a season) will be appealling enough. Hey, we almost broke even last year. Hopefully 2K will actually make a profit on this game this year, so my buddies who are still there will have some job security (plus it would make me feel good to know that people liked what I worked so hard on). They can't rely on GTA to pay their salaries when they keep pushing back the release. Good thing BioShock came up big.

[KushGamer]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

But it just doesn't play enough like real baseball

You haven't played 2K8 yet. 2K has admitted as much about 2K7 and we've been saying from the first release of 2K8 info that the main goal for 2K8 was realism.

[Rob_NYY]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

You haven't played 2K8 yet. 2K has admitted as much about 2K7 and we've been saying from the first release of 2K8 info that the main goal for 2K8 was realism.

The problem is I heard all this last year, the same exact stuff about less HR's, more real baseball, ect. I'd love nothing more than for it to be true, but like I said before, I'll believe it when I see it.

[a4reak]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

The problem is I heard all this last year, the same exact stuff about less HR's, more real baseball, ect. I'd love nothing more than for it to be true, but like I said before, I'll believe it when I see it.

ditto. We never hear about all these issues the developers know about until after the game is released, After my money is in your pockets you guys are up in arms and just as mad as we are about game breaking issues you never saw

[KushGamer]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

The problem is I heard all this last year, the same exact stuff about less HR's, more real baseball, ect. I'd love nothing more than for it to be true, but like I said before, I'll believe it when I see it.

OK, well then please dont say or suggest that it isnt true either until you've seen it.

Believe me, no one was more embarassed or frustrated than Ben last year when right at the end of the project someone broke something and all of a sudden pitchers are hitting homers. He spent countless hours tuning that system, but the system was flawed and too breakable. I really think he probably did some private crying, because he was pretty damn dejected. It's an entirely new system this year, so just give it a shot before publicly writing it off as the same old BS. No one even had a solid understanding of how the old system worked because much of the code was originally written by Blue Shift and then "improvements" had been made by several other programmers year after year since going to 2K. There is so much turnover in this industry, that after many years of many different people working in the same code, unless you have superb documentation, eventually there is no one left that knows the big picture of a system. There are just programmers that know parts of pieces of the system. Ripping the whole thing out and starting over allowed us to design it in a very logical way, that we could easily tune and we knew how every little thing would affect every other thing. I'm sure whoever works on it next year will begin its bastardization and 5 years from now someone will be scratching their head on how the whole thing works and decide to start from scratch. It's the curse of the one-year sports dev cycle. Too much crap too cram in in a year.

[bigfnjoe96]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

People will never be satisfied no matter how honest Brinkman was in this interview. Yeah I know "If I'm spending my $ I WANT THE GAME TO PLAY LIKE THIS________" attitude people have but I mean come-on let's be realistic here, he took over a franchise that wasn't appealing to most due to all it's problems & has slowly tried to change this Franchise.

Change happens during a period of time, not all in 1 shot.. Personally I'm glad he's been honest about the crap that plague this franchise over the last 3 years & his willingness to change-it. I'm mean moving to an ALL ANALOG Control Scheme IMO it's a terrific move & if implemented correctly will change how we play Baseball Games forever.

Those who have played Baseball Games that used the 12 frame mechanic know how beautiful & rewarding hitting was. This has now been added. I doubt it will be flawless out of the box, but them making the change is encouraging...

This game has no choice but to be better than last year & with all the changes talked about by Brinkman & Kush Gamer, I really believe we will have a game that plays like baseball with a little bit of arcade in their, but hopefully not too much arcade & more baseball

[KushGamer]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

ditto. We never hear about all these issues the developers kow about until after the game is released

Well in reference to his comment about 2K saying there would be less HR's in 2K7, there actually were less. As I just stated in my last post, someone broke something right at the end and Ben almost jumped out a window when pitchers were hitting HRs. Months of his hard work and promises down the drain.

Unfortunately this stuff happens. We had superb wall interaction, smoothly transitioning into throws, but it broke late in the project and was never high priority enough again to fix. Eventually you run out of time. So now, we're seeing OFs skating along the walls again after making warning track catches. That almost made me cry, but at least it wasnt as bad as pitchers hitting HRs.

The problem with all complex software is that when you fix one thing, it almost always breaks something else. So the game is always kind of in this shifting state and what gets released to the public is a slice in time where bugs are minimized. It is never the exact game we envisioned and hoped to release - at least those of us working on games with hard release dates that can't be pushed back months or years.

[therizing02]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

I'm just starting to get into this forum again and I can say that I'm very optimistic that this will be a great game.

2K has done something this year that I've always stated that EA and other companies should do and that's leaving the lower levels to the arcade folk and higher levels to the more sim minded people. Why it took so long for someone to figure this out is beyond me.

One thing I don't understand is why people get so worked up over a couple of opinions on the game from people who are not playing a completed version and their playing the game straight out of the box without tweaking the sliders. We all know we'll be looking at the sliders forum for the best set.

Pitcher throwing too many strikes? Adjust the slider.
Too many singles off the wall? Adjust the outfielder and baserunning speeds.
Too many HR's? Adjust the slider.....I did not have this problem in 2k7.

I found that using the "perfect Slider" set for 2k7 I was able to get some pretty good games. Not perfect, but playable. All I remember thinking was that if there were a couple that could be ironed out, 2K8 will be a great game. It sounds to me like they were ironed out.

[Spectre]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

People will never be satisfied no matter how honest Brinkman was in this interview. Yeah I know "If I'm spending my $ I WANT THE GAME TO PLAY LIKE THIS________" attitude people have but I mean come-on let's be realistic here, he took over a franchise that wasn't appealing to most due to all it's problems & has slowly tried to change this Franchise.

Change happens during a period of time, not all in 1 shot.. Personally I'm glad he's been honest about the crap that plague this franchise over the last 3 years & his willingness to change-it. I'm mean moving to an ALL ANALOG Control Scheme IMO it's a terrific move & if implemented correctly will change how we play Baseball Games forever.

Those who have played Baseball Games that used the 12 frame mechanic know how beautiful & rewarding hitting was. This has now been added. I doubt it will be flawless out of the box, but them making the change is encouraging...

This game has no choice but to be better than last year & with all the changes talked about by Brinkman & Kush Gamer, I really believe we will have a game that plays like baseball with a little bit of arcade in their, but hopefully not too much arcade & more baseball

Exactly- and some people are a broken record on those very points. Every thread is plagued with the same replies and frankly its getting tiring.

KG and Brinkman have been brutally honest throughout the process.

[dodgerblue]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

Off topic: Speaking of Baseball Mogul, nothing steams me more than trading a career .270 25 HR guy and he has a monster year for another team. I traded James Loney to Chicago and he hit .330 and 39 HR. It has to be Dodger Stadium.

you traded loney? I hope you got someone good for him!

[Mr.Wednesday]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

you traded loney? I hope you got someone good for him!

Yea, I know it was dumb. But it was 2010 and I had finished 3rd in the division the year before. I needed some more power in the lineup so I signed Prince Fielder to a hugh contract. He hit 41 HR's the year before and ended up w/ 39 for the Dodgers. I think Loney had a year left on his contract so I traded him for minor league prospects with low salaries.

Edit: I finally won the division and WS in 2012. But, losing Loney still bothers me.

[Mr.Wednesday]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

OK, well then please dont say or suggest that it isnt true either until you've seen it.

Believe me, no one was more embarassed or frustrated than Ben last year when right at the end of the project someone broke something and all of a sudden pitchers are hitting homers. He spent countless hours tuning that system, but the system was flawed and too breakable. I really think he probably did some private crying, because he was pretty damn dejected. It's an entirely new system this year, so just give it a shot before publicly writing it off as the same old BS. No one even had a solid understanding of how the old system worked because much of the code was originally written by Blue Shift and then "improvements" had been made by several other programmers year after year since going to 2K. There is so much turnover in this industry, that after many years of many different people working in the same code, unless you have superb documentation, eventually there is no one left that knows the big picture of a system. There are just programmers that know parts of pieces of the system. Ripping the whole thing out and starting over allowed us to design it in a very logical way, that we could easily tune and we knew how every little thing would affect every other thing. I'm sure whoever works on it next year will begin its bastardization and 5 years from now someone will be scratching their head on how the whole thing works and decide to start from scratch. It's the curse of the one-year sports dev cycle. Too much crap too cram in in a year.

Yea, I know what you mean. I was in the military and we were always rotating in and out of Iraq. Every unit does things differently. So eventually the way things started were no longer relevant to the job at hand (different priorities and procedures).
Anyway...

Reading your post, I wanted to ask a personal question. How do you feel leaving you baby (batting) in the hands of someone else? Are you kind of excited that you were able to leave your mark on the game? Do you think in future installments you'll be able to tell someone tweaked it?

[KushGamer]

Re: New interview with Ben Brinkman on The Sports Anomaly.

Yea, I know what you mean. I was in the military and we were always rotating in and out of Iraq. Every unit does things differently. So eventually the way things started were no longer relevant to the job at hand (different priorities and procedures).
Anyway...

Reading your post, I wanted to ask a personal question. How do you feel leaving you baby (batting) in the hands of someone else? Are you kind of excited that you were able to leave your mark on the game? Do you think in future installments you'll be able to tell someone tweaked it?

If they just tweak it a bit, probably not. But I fear they will do more than that. Hopefully, it will be a change for the better. I'm not gonna sit here and say its perfect. But I do think its pretty close - very much on the right track and towards the end I was getting nothing but very positive feedback. At that point, you just kind of lock it down and say, "ok, everyone likes it right now. It may still be little off in a way you can't quite put your finger on, but the sliders work great and everyone should be able to take it that last inch to where it feels perfect for them." I'm really glad to have HR's traveling accurate distances, balls hit to the wall that go over OFs heads, and the hit variety in general. And when you use that swing stick and make contact, the ball just feels like it goes exactly where it should - thats the major difference from 2K7. 2K7 results felt random. 2K8 results feel right.