RTTS/Franchise Player Rant

[Patrico523_PSN]

I want to preface this with the fact that I have purchased The Show every year since 2008. I specifically bought a PlayStation over an Xbox because of The Show. It has consistently been the best baseball game every year it's been made, albeit they haven't had much competition since 2K stopped making baseball games.

However, as someone who does not give a **** about Diamond Dynasty and all the card collecting, the PS5 era of this game has been very disappointing. I gave them a pass last year since they were moving to the PS5 (and expanding to other consoles) and development largely took place during a pandemic. I imagine that was very challenging, and maybe there are some residual effects of that still. San Diego Studios has a 4.1 employee rating on Glassdoor, so I will assume they don't run their developers into the ground, which is something to be commended for these days.

However, some features I enjoyed about The Show are still missing that were in previous versions:

1. Year-to-Year saves - I assume there is a technical reason for this, but it's really frustrating and kind of pointless to buy a new version of a game if I can't continue my RTTS/Franchise with the new features and improvements.

2. Sounds of the Show - Was this cut for technical reasons or just low player usage? I figure this feature wasn't widely used, but I used it every year. It broke up the monotony of listening to the same songs over and over, and also added immersion during games.

3. Ohtani - While this wasn't in previous games, he's the GD cover athlete, and you can't pitch and hit with him in the same game. There was an interview with Ramone Russell in February saying you would be able to do this, and was a huge reason I decided to go ahead and buy this year's release. I saw a post saying removing Ohtani from the #1 pitcher in the rotation would fix this, but that didn't work for me. Maybe they will patch this, but this should have been a key feature for this year's release.

Pros

1. The Commentary - I like Jon Schiambi and Chris Singleton, so I have some bias here. I saw some posts bemoaning the change, but I like it and the conversation seems more organic. I'm sure that will fade as you keep playing since it will become repetitive, but that's the nature of commentary in sports games.

2. Interface Changes - I appreciate the effort to keep refreshing the game overlays to keep them modern-looking and not just recycle them every year.

3. Fielding - The animations for fielding are improved. There are still some issues when a player makes a catch near the wall, but for a series that already had great fielding animations, they continue to improve them.

I don't like going on a forum and having a b**** fit about something as trivial as a video game. But, I really enjoy this game and have for a long time. I hope these issues are addressed, or at least publicly commented on for their state/exclusion beyond just saying, "Year-to-Year saves are not available." Maybe these have been publicly addressed, but I haven't seen them.