Last year’s MLB The Show finally found a switch in my brain and flicked it on. For more than a decade, I played the single-player Road to the Show career almost exclusively, and as a pitcher, at that. Last year, RTTS’ brilliantly executed two-way player story, along with the freedom to bring that star to the Diamond Dynasty mode, opened up a world of gameplay and content that I had previously neglected.
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Thus, it took much longer than the typical review period to understand MLB The Show 21’s best qualities last year, particularly pinpoint pitching — which finally clicked for me after a teeth-gritting couple of weeks in which I forced myself to adapt to the new control scheme. I’m not sure I’ll reach a similar revelatory point in MLB 2022, where everything just clicks, but it looks like it will at least be occupying a good chunk of my time; even if its two biggest modes — Road to the Show and Diamond Dynasty — are largely the same.
A good candidate for breakout feature is March to October, which debuted in 2019 as a half-hearted, lite-mode Franchise. SIE San Diego Studio has grappled, for years, with the fact that baseball’s 162-game season simply overwhelms most video game players, no matter their appetite for the sport. March to October, by playing only key moments of key games over a single season (the current real-world one) has been an attempt to address that.
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