I need your advice. When you give this advice, please try to be practical as opposed to erring on the side of "just get this game!", because you love it.
I love watching baseball. I love the whole atmosphere of it and everything, and I've been a lifelong Red Sox fan (don't hate me) -- 2003 might have been the most painful thing I've ever experienced, and 2004 might have been the most glorious. I'm _not_ an expert on the game... I know and love the rules, I understand the stats, but I can't, like, tell most pitches one from another from just seeing them thrown. Moreover, I am a COMPLETE noob at baseball sim games.
In 2008, I was seduced by the acclaim of MLB The Show and bought the game for PS3. I was really excited. I set it to, I think, the easiest level and started playing exhibitions. I sucked so so hard. I started getting the hang of pitching eventually, and I may have made contact a couple of times when batting, but I was the absolute worst at base-running. If the ball was in play with 2+ runners on, I just got completely flustered and made idiotic suicidal mistakes. Similarly with fielding... just awfully incompetent.
My problem was that the game's difficulty curve was completely inappropriate for me. I wanted to get better, but there was no tutorial and no easy way to practice the basics. I could have used a mode where I could repeatedly trigger a hit into shallow right field with a runner on 2nd, just so I could practice the base running or the fielding of that play, but there was no such mode. So I had to play real games which was incredibly frustrating. Hell, IIRC, the fucking button mappings weren't even clearly shown, let alone smoothly introduced as in most games. I mean they were probably in the manual, but that's just lame.
I think I quit after a few hours of this torture. I still have the game on my shelf, because I don't sell games, and also to remind me of the experience in case I am tempted to repeat it.
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8 years later, MLB The Show calls to me once again with this apparently stellar 2016 edition. I want to learn and to be good and to play a nice single-player season as a manager or maybe RTTS, or whatever is the in thing these days.
But I am afraid it might be another waste of $60 due to the impenetrability of the game to noobs like me.
So my question is this: Is the game at all noob-friendly nowadays? Is there a fun learning curve for a baseball sim noob (and a not-too-knowledgeable but passionate real baseball fan) like me, in this game here? Or is it still basically for the hardcore people?
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Also, was my impression of the 2008 game accurate? Is it actually considered noob-friendly, and I'm just somehow way out of touch?
I realize this isn't exactly a definitive answer, but... The Show 16 still isn't "noob-friendly", but I think it's definitely making strides.
The biggest difference, compared to the last time you played, is the hitting options. Sony San Diego's approach to finding the best hitting control scheme is more or less, "we're going to support all of the control schemes we can think of, and balance each of them so that none of them are way easier or harder for everyone to use." Most of the options are simple to understand, easy to learn, but hard to master. I prefer zone hitting because I personally think it gives the easiest route to being a competent (not great, but competent) hitter, but all of the schemes are implemented well, and the tutorial options explain the various schemes well. That being said, hitting is not easy, not by a long shot. But it's definitely more accessible than before.
If you're bad at base running, I definitely recommend playing RTTS as your main mode. It's still a great mode, you can play a whole series in something like 30-40 minutes, and playing as one player makes base running so much easier. If you don't like dealing with runners ahead of you, you can set RTTS to skip baserunning scenarios where you aren't the lead runner, which helps a lot.
Going back to hitting - if you want to try zone hitting, I recommend starting with the following approach, which is still my default approach after thousands of plate appearances:
- Never swing at the first pitch. This does a few things for you. One, if you're bad at hitting, it gives the pitcher a chance to throw a ball and help you out. More importantly, it gives you a chance to see a pitch and establish some timing. The easiest way to get into bad counts is to swing at early pitches when you aren't calibrated to the pitcher's delivery or velocity.
- Use guess pitch for both pitch type and zone. I prefer the pitcher's primary fastball (the one he throws the most), looking inside, because that's the easiest pitch to time correctly and hit with pull power, but the key is to look for a specific pitch in a specific spot. What guess pitch does is, if the pitcher is actually throwing a fastball inside, that spot in the zone will glow and the zone will lock on that location - all you have to do is time the swing and you're likely to crush it. This is the exception to the first pitch swing rule - if guess pitch tells you what's coming and it's what you want, swing away, because you probably won't get a better pitch later.
- With less than two strikes, after you set your guess pitch, set up with the zone in a different quadrant of the zone - this is because if guess pitch doesn't lock in, you know the pitch is probably going somewhere else. If you get a pitch in this area and it looks like a strike (and it's not the first pitch), try to hit it; otherwise, lay off.
- With two strikes, you need to be protective, but in general the goal here is to make the pitcher throw you something hittable. To this end, I recommend keeping the same approach as above, but using the contact swing button. In a 0-2 or 1-2 count, assume the pitcher is trying to throw you a ball to get you to chase - this will occasionally leave you late trying to catch up to a fastball in the zone, but for every one of those, you'll see five high fastballs or breaking balls out of the zone.
- Oh, and key to all of this: try to sit in the same spot with relation to the screen. Judging pitches quickly is basically impossible if your perspective is different for each pitch. The angle itself doesn't really matter, but pick one and stick to it.
The goal of all of the above is to encourage practices that lead to better results. Taking the first pitch, and waiting for your pitch in general, means that you see more pitches, and that the ones you do swing at are more likely to be in good hitting locations - and when those pitches do come, they aren't a surprise, because they're the specific pitch you're looking for. And you -will- get that pitch - in a typical game you will almost always get at least one or two fastballs middle-in.
Honestly, I am not a skilled gamer mechanically speaking. The Show is eminently playable as a hitter these days, as long as you commit to thinking like a hitter. Figure out what pitch you want, tailor your approach to getting that pitch and crushing it, and avoid swinging at other stuff as much as possible. Sometimes this will mean taking pitches that would be hittable if only you were looking for something on the other half of the plate; sometimes this will means taking a strike 3 that a more aggressive approach would have swing at. But in the aggregate, discipline leads to good results, even if you don't have great reflexes.
I think the game is worth a shot if you like baseball.
