Preview: MLB 2k11

A MLB licensed baseball simulation video game published by 2K Sports. Cy Young Award winner Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies has been announced as the MLB 2K11 cover athlete, replacing Evan Longoria from MLB 2K10.

Release Date: March 8, 2011
MSRP: $49.99
Also on: PSP, DS, PS2, PS3, PC, Xbox 360
E for Everyone: No Descriptors
Genre: Sports 
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive 

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Game Development:
Like many people, The entire design team loves to play MLB Today games. Thanks to the MLB Today feature in MLB 2K10, for the first time, we were participating in the real MLB season with our favorite teams and players, but something still didn’t feel quite right. As last year’s MLB season progressed we quickly came to realize that, while the MLB Today was doing a great job of keeping us up to date with the standings and stats for all the teams and players, the players themselves didn’t really change. Team watched last year as June rolled around and Derek Jeter started his epic slump. Jeter’s batting average was down almost 50 points, but when loaded into a game against the Yankees he was close to the same Derek Jeter that I played against the month before. That’s not what wanted to see, team wanted to play against the Yankees with Jeter struggling through his slump. That would have been closer to the real MLB Today.

 Developers wanted the players in the game to play like they are currently playing in the real world. Baseball players don’t bat their average 162 games a year; sometimes they are on a hot steak and sometimes they are cold and struggle at the plate. Each new season is a continually changing landscape of player performance. This is what causes lineups to change and how teams discover that unexpected bat which helps lift them into the Postseason. We wanted to play the Postseason with the Giants, a team not known for their bats, and come up to bat with a hot Cody Ross and Buster Posey as they were in the 2010 Postseason. They wanted to play with the unlikely heroes and struggling greats. That’s baseball. This became our new inspiration: make the players in our game play like their real-life counterparts are currently playing. The team also wanted to extend this notion into our Franchise and My Player modes to make those seasons more dynamic and interesting to play through. So let’s get into the details of the Dynamic Player Rating system and look at how the system made our desire become reality.