Over the last few years, sports sims have started to make strides towards not just being accurate recreations of professional athletics, but playable documentaries that examine the legacies of star players and historic moments. Of the big annual sports franchises, Sony San Diego Studio’s MLB The Show is rapidly becoming the most interesting — the studio is following up its tremendous Storylines mode about baseball’s Negro Leagues with a new career mode centered on women.
Called Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way, the mode is effectively a second Road to the Show campaign, with all of the career mode’s features in addition to “a unique-to-women storyline following a lifelong friendship as it develops in professional baseball.”
That last bit, according to narrative designer Mollie Braley, is important. It’s not enough, she argues in a promo interview at the PlayStation Blog, to merely add women to The Show’s career mode, but to illustrate “the immense importance of community and support amongst the small but ever-growing group of women in baseball.”
To that end, the women players create in the mode will have a buddy character named Mia Lewis, a childhood friend and fellow baseball player who will function as “a sounding board, a support system, and a competitive player in her own right, and your relationship with her in-game will grow and evolve throughout your career.”
In addition to Women Pave Their Way, MLB The Show 24 will also bring a second season of its Storylines mode featuring the Negro Leagues that will include “The Trailblazer” Toni Stone — “the first woman to play professional baseball regularly in a major men’s professional baseball league.”
While they still aren’t getting the massive marketing push that their male counterparts have received in annual sports games for decades, women are increasingly becoming a core part of the sports sim experience. NBA 2K and FIFA follow-up franchise EA FC both feature women in their games, and 2K’s last three
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