In recent years, sports simulations have continued to make strides toward not only accurate recreations of professional athletics, but also playable documentaries that explore the legacies of star players and historical moments. Of the major annual sports franchises, Sony San Diego Studio’s MLB The Show is quickly becoming the most interesting: the studio is following up its great Storylines mode about baseball’s Negro leagues with a new career mode that focuses on women.
The mode is called Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way and is essentially a second Road to the Show campaign, with all the features of the career mode, in addition to “a storyline unique to women that follows a lifelong friendship that develops in the professional world. basketball.”
The latter is important, according to narrative designer Mollie Braley. It’s not enough, she argues in a promo interview on the PlayStation Blogjust to add women to it The show‘s career mode, but to illustrate “the immense importance of community and support among the small but ever-growing group of women in baseball.”
Image: San Diego Studio/PlayStation
To that end, the female players who 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 the game will grow and evolve throughout your career.
In addition to women paving their way, MLB The Show 24 will also bring a second season of the Storylines mode featuring the Negro Leagues will include “The Trailblazer” Toni Stone – “the first woman to regularly play professional baseball in a major men’s professional baseball league.”
While they still don’t get the huge marketing push that their male counterparts have been getting in the annual sports games for decades, women are increasingly becoming an important part of the sports simulation experience. NBA 2K and FIFA sequel franchise EA FC both feature women in their games, and 2K’s last three releases have featured alternate WNBA cover stars. MLB The Show 24however, feels unique in the deliberate and thoughtful way it begins to round out its excellent baseball simulation with narrative modes that deal with both the past and future of the sport.