If you haven’t followed the news, SDS started up their Feature Premieres for MLB The Show 25 last week. First up on the docket was gameplay (as it should be). They released a trailer last Tuesday and then did a deep dive stream on Thursday. I don’t want to hit on every single thing mentioned in the videos (watch the videos for that, I’ll be linking them below), but I did want to distill the 60+ minutes of talk and footage down to some more bite-sized impressions. Below I’ll be giving some positives and negatives that have been rattling around in the ol’ noggin over the weekend.

MLB The Show 25 Gameplay Thoughts

Ambush Hitting = Guess Pitch?

No — or at least mostly no.

It’s easy to be cynical about this stuff, and since Valentine’s Day was last week, I’m going to go out on a limb here and compare it to how we sometimes talk about love, as explained by my good friend Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) in an underrated rom-com called What If.

It’s very easy to see Ambush Hitting and just say “lol SDS is doing an EA” by re-branding Guess Pitch and pretending it’s a new feature. You can get some high fives from the message board homies and enjoy the dopamine kick that entails. I’m not here to police that sort of thing, but I don’t think you really remember Guess Pitch if you think these two features are the same.

There may have been a time many years ago when Guess Pitch worked a certain different way, but the Guess Pitch we’ve had in The Show for years now is all risk-reward. It’s also a feature nearly no one uses anymore. You get locked into certain quadrants of the zone by using it, you need to guess both parts right to get a major payoff, and if you’re wrong you’re usually hosed. It’s not well balanced, and arguably it shouldn’t be well balanced because you’re totally selling out to try and figure out a very specific spot and pitch.

On the other side of things, Ambush Hitting is clearly something they hope you use more often. It still has risk-reward so maybe you only use it on the first pitch or when ahead in the count, but the point of it clearly seems to be to add another decision point to your pre-pitch thought process. I’ve long been a believer that the pitcher-batter duel is both the most important and most perfect “video game” concept in any sports game. Your real sport either has good video game concepts or not — you can only change so much about the real sport in the video game after all — but there’s really nothing that is quite as good as a quality pitcher-batter duel.

It’s a fighting game, strategy game, and memory game all in one. If the AI sucks, of course that hurts it the most, but in head-to-head situations against another human it’s unmatched as a one-off concept. To me, Ambush Hitting seems like it will be additive to this one-on-one showdown while still being something you can completely ignore if you want. Some people will treat it like a power swing and never use it (I haven’t used power swing in years), and that’s totally okay and probably the sign of a good gameplay feature these days.

(After all, how many times have you heard people begging for seismic gameplay shifts, and yet how many people have you also seen already saying Ambush Hitting is going to wildly imbalance the game. The process of serving an audience that is so locked in year to year is quite challenging on the gameplay front. On top of that, I’m not sure how many “revolutionary” concepts there really are to make to the actual controls anymore. Maybe we want to give the QB Vision Cone another go at some point, but I think most sports games have a core gameplay loop that makes sense at this point. Anything you do that tweaks that flow needs to be good, but at the same time it probably can’t be too disruptive.)

Now, if you want to make a good case for Guess Pitch, it worked in more batting styles than Ambush Hitting will. Ambush Hitting is only for Zone hitting as you’re guessing a side of the plate before the pitch, which will shrink/enlarge your PCI depending on the side picked. Those components don’t matter to all the hitting styles. Of course, a vast majority of people play with Zone hitting, so it makes sense to focus the feature on that type of hitting.

The risk/reward seems logical as well. There’s more risk than reward, but if you want to sit inside every pitch and basically go “down” a difficulty level, I think it’s a viable way to give yourself a chance against inside fastballs/sinkers if you’ve been overmatched much of the time. It seems like it could be a tactical option as much as it is a “guess” option.

On the top of hitting, I wish we had heard more about extreme pull hitters vs. slap hitters and if anything is being done there (both in terms of adding depth and making sure these archetypes are accurate for everyone). The “spray” styles of hitters in The Show do matter, but it feels like it favors extreme pull hitters vs. the spray hitters. I think one evolution that still remains for this series is really getting more involved in the concept of what “style” of hitter you are that goes beyond the simple contact/power concepts.

We also did not hear much about swing and miss percentages. Creating the right balance between fouling too many pitches off and always whiffing is a tricky thing to find, but there probably needs to be a better way to separate the online and offline folks in these regards. Fouling pitches off is still too overpowered online, but offline it’s not always easy to find that balance so the CPU isn’t whiffing on too many pitches.

Quality Of Life Tweaks

We’re also getting more ways to set the PCI anchor so it’s more “set it and forget it” if you will (damn you Ronco!):

I use a mostly clean screen (both online and offline) so I turn my PCI visuals off, but this should be a really nice quality of life feature for many.

We’re also getting the “sweeper” pitch type, and the big thing is it’s not replacing anything. The slider and slurve are both sticking around, we just get a sweeper on top of things. The “sweeper” discourse has been hot and heavy for a couple years now, and it’s something we talked about as community on OS last March if you want some of the old takes on how we thought it should be implemented. It seems like 150+ pitchers will have the sweeper — basically the game should accurately reflect all the real MLB pitchers using it.

There’s also a new GOAT difficulty coming into ‘25. It will plant itself above Legend difficulty and be available in most modes. This was a focus for online play in the videos, but I think it’s potentially a big deal for offline users as well. Pitching on Legend with default sliders is not that challenging in comparison to hitting on Legend, especially offline. There was some initial confusion about whether GOAT difficulty mattered for pitching at all, but it does. Your PAR (that big ol’ circle that is there after you select a pitch) grows a bit more, and you will also have to do the pitch gesturing with more accuracy on GOAT difficulty. It remains to be seen how the AI will approach at-bats — if they still chase too often it’s a bit moot — but this could enrich the offline experience as well (rather than just the .001 percent of people who even make it to GOAT difficulty in online head to head).

A quick note to end this section is we obviously didn’t get a full presentation breakdown this week, but we did get to see a new “no doubt” home run presentation package:

It looks to be a mix of the newer “no doubt” package (which I consider to be bad), and the older “no doubt” presentation package (which I mostly liked). I still think should be an option to turn off the “no doubt” package if you don’t want that sharp/immediate cut to behind the batter, but I like this twist on the presentation package for the most part.

Defense Matters…Or So They Say

If you do want to be cynical, we have heard SDS say “this is the year defense matters” for many years at this point. And it’s not that it’s ever been totally false in the past when they’ve said it, but they are saying it again this year. Like with most things, the more years you say it, the less impactful it feels.

My diagnosis of why this phrase ends up feeling hollow at times is because while the changes are helpful, the we as gamers either end up being better than SDS expects, or we just turn off certain features (throw meter etc.) because they don’t work like we want them to or we don’t want that “challenge” for fielding — we just want it to be close to “sim” as possible.

The issue with chasing “sim” when it comes to MLB fielders is that rarely is there a fielder who is terrible. Some guys might be terrible by MLB standards, but you’re not going to make it as anything but a DH if you’re not at least passable, which is pretty damn good by MLB standards.

SDS seems to recognize that and spent a healthy amount of time explaining the dilemma of fun vs. realism. They unveiled three different “levels” of how you will get jumps on the ball this year (bad, good, perfect). I don’t think is very realistic — just like no fielder is so perfect they get the best jump every time. If you’re at that bottom level and getting awful jumps all the time and thus have terrible range, you’re not getting reps in the field. And if you’re so good you get a perfect jump every time, you’re a cyborg and need to be banned from MLB.

Regardless, I prefer this style over the totally “sim” style of clumping most everyone together in a small bucket with .0001 millisecond differences to their reaction times. And if you’re asking “didn’t reaction time for fielders already matter for this?” that’s a good question, and it did. The reaction time attribute impacted how instantaneously the fielder would react once the ball hit the bat. The problem seems to be there really was no difference between an 80 reaction time and 90 reaction time. Plus, the animation itself wasn’t different because the same animations played, it was just when they started playing that would slightly change (this is specific to infielders because obviously outfielders do sometimes start out running the wrong way when judging fly balls).

What this new adjustment does is tie animation branches into the equation. In essence, you now get the “slower” reaction animation a lot of the time when your ratings are garbage. Other times you will get the “decent” animation. If you’re a 99 overall in reaction time, you never get anything but the “perfect” jump animation.

These same principles are being applied in some ways to the arm accuracy ratings and tweaks to the throw meter:

The big change here is moving the “perfect” blue area to right before the red area rather than being between two portions of the green area. This introduces more risk-reward and puts the pressure on you to nail your throw or potentially end up with a throwing error. This is another one of those smart changes that in hindsight makes you realize this is how it should have been in the first place. At the same time, even Mario Strikers used something closer to the old style used in The Show, so even Nintendo missed a bit on this.

This change stems from SDS realizing we had gotten too good at “perfecting” throws, and too often we were unfairly being thrown out on the basepaths. I think in part we get thrown out too often because the players vs. the size of the field is slightly wrong. However, that’s just a theory of mine, but it’s one I’ve kicked around before with NBA 2K as well — a game where the players were definitely too big for the court at various times, which made spreading the floor more of a challenge than it should have been. Still, I think this should be a good change, and we shouldn’t have to worry as much about getting nailed on perfect throws all the time because they won’t be as prevalent (though I still think they’ll happen more often than SDS is expecting).

Lastly, the “robbing” of home runs has been overhauled:

It’s not the sexiest use of on-screen indicators, but I think the changes should help make the animations themselves look better. What’s happening now in ‘25 is you want to press the jump button once the meter gets into the green. The animations will vary based on how far you are from the wall and the angle you take to the ball.

If you press the jump button when you’re further away from the wall, that’s okay, you’ll just automatically go into a “slowing down/gather” animation before scaling the wall. If you get back to the wall, come to a stop, then press the jump button, that’s going to trigger a different type of animation. If you come into the wall from a sharp angle — or are dealing with a weird outfield wall angle at a specific park (like the LF notch at PNC) — then those trigger another set of animations.

In other words, if you time the button press correctly, everything else is context-based and taken care of by the game based on your angle/distance from the wall. I’m sure there will still be some weird looking animations, but this should be a chance for SDS to better showcase some sick animations because the game is automatically handling more of the heavy lifting now.

What I Missed

There’s more I didn’t cover, specifically a long section on first-person fielding and more defensive play variety for Road to the Show, but I honestly don’t play much RttS or care about first-person fielding very much. I’m not a big fan of VR, but I think it’s the only way I might care about anything first person in my sports games, and that is not supported here.

…And before you ask why there’s no first-person hitting or first-person pitching, I think you are probably underestimating how jarring most of that is outside of a VR environment. Pitching probably isn’t too crazy to imagine or implement for RttS in the future, but you’d really need a way to “ground” yourself in a first-person view at the plate because you need to remember how restricted your POV is in a non-VR environment. You probably start with a “slowdown” system or a color-coded system for the pitches (like the old MVP games), but I think it’s a real development challenge to get there and make it fun.