World Series Baseball Designer Diary #3

Entry #3 - 05/07/02

There are several members of our development team who are always trying to cram more realism into the game. They want passed balls, wild pitches, realistic pitch speeds, more hit variety, cutoff men, and other features. In their minds, the single most important thing in making a baseball game is representing every nook and cranny of the game in the most exacting detail.

World Series Baseball features a number of realistic improvements.

There is a lot to be said for that design direction, except when a proposed feature doesn't play particularly well, and I am here to tell you that not all realism is created equal--some of it is fun, and some of it is not.

Take the subject of errors. As simple as it is to make a ball kick off a player's shin, you always have to examine if the user will perceive your implementation of a feature as realistic, comic, frustrating, or enjoyable. What we found while testing this feature was that it generally made people angry when their player committed an error, because they felt like they were not in control of the action. The error was inflicted upon them. In an attempt to balance the fact that errors are a part of baseball, but frustrating, we lowered the frequency of errors below the Major League norm. While that is not quite realistic, it's a lot more fun than a realistic implementation would be. It's a small thing, but the game you ship is made up of hundreds of small decisions like that one. Our general rule is that we will make the game as realistic as we can, while keeping in mind that it is a video game whose primary purpose is to be a blast to play.

Here is the direction we took on a few other realistic baseball features:

• Cutoff Men - Real, fun, and a little difficult to make intuitive, but definitely worth putting in the game.
• More Hit Variety - You want the right number of singles, doubles, and home runs. You also want slightly more than your fair share of hits to necessitate a dive, because making a diving catch is fun! Keeping those two things firmly in mind, we added a lot more hit variety while engineering things so that there would be roughly the right number hit types and enough balls that are just far enough away from the fielder that a diving catch is possible, but not inevitable.
• Passed Balls/Wild Pitches - They are in the game, but they happen less frequently than they do in the major leagues.

One of the biggest tuning decisions we were faced with on this game was whether to have realistic pitch speeds. The first thing you have to know is that you can't even see a 100mph fastball in a video game, let alone hit one. If real pitch speeds were put in the game, all you could do is smash the button and pray. Once one discovers how unhittable, and therefore un-fun, real pitch speeds are, it's easy to decide to slow them down. The problem is, how much do you slow them down? That's a subject that everyone has a different opinion about, which led us to providing three different pitch speeds in our game, so every player could sample the alternatives and find the setting that best suited his or her taste.