A Whole New Ballgame

Operation Sports had the opportunity to discuss the new MVP™ 06 NCAA® Baseball game with Trey Smith, a member of the game's production team. This new product by EA SPORTS™ was developed by EA Canada in Burnaby, British Columbia, and the team has worked hard to create the ultimate college baseball experience.

While NCAA baseball may not be as familiar to many gamers as Major League Baseball is, MVP 06 NCAA Baseball provides a great introduction to the sport, as well as an exciting and innovative game for baseball fans everywhere.

Trey: First off, thanks to Shawn, Xbox.com, and the Xbox.com community for letting me yap about our game on your site. It's been one of my favorites for a long time.

Operation Sports: It's my pleasure, believe me! What were the challenges in changing the direction of MVP Baseball from the big leagues to the college game?

Trey: Well, for those of you that have played MVP, you know that we're big on attention to detail, so we knew we had some serious work ahead of us to keep our fans and fans of NCAA baseball happy. We knew going in that some gamers were expecting us to just slap an NCAA wrapper on MVP 05 and call it a day. We also knew there are a lot of college baseball fans that have been waiting for this game for a long time, and we needed to do everything in our power to make it worth the wait.

Capturing the college baseball experience.

So, our first priority was to deliver as authentic a college baseball experience as possible. We adjusted playing rules, substitution logic, character models, physics, A.I., schedules, tournament structures, and completely revamped our Dynasty Mode to include year-round recruiting—to name a few of the things we worked on. To give you a couple of examples as to the extent of our attention, we found out that BYU's baseball team doesn't play on Sundays. In our game, they don't play on Sundays.

And in "real life" recruiting, each team is allotted 11.7 scholarships total. As tempting as it was to round up to 12 to make things easier, it's just not the MVP way, and we went with 11.7. Stuff like that. We read the boards and know that if we leave out even the most minor of details that you guys will flame us for it. We're confident that we came out of the box with a very solid NCAA baseball experience.

I think the toughest challenge was narrowing the field down to 128 teams and 19 authentic stadiums, but we knew that was the only way we could do each justice. If we happened to leave your favorite team and/or stadium out, we worked really hard on our new Creation Zone (Create a player, team, and ballpark) to give you the tools to create them yourself. Create-A-Ballpark is a team favorite. You can do some pretty cool things with the walls in there.

We also studied lots of tape to get the "feel" of what it's like to watch and play NCAA baseball. We talked to players that have gone on to Omaha and came back as National Champions. Ben (Brinkman, our Line Producer) and I got an email one day from a colleague of ours down at Redwood Shores in the Bay Area. We're up in Vancouver. He mentioned that he used to play college ball and offered to give us some feedback on the game. So, we jumped on his offer and flew him up here.

On the day he was to arrive, I hopped on the internet and Googled him. Doug Robbins—Two-time National Champion catcher for the Stanford Cardinal and gold medalist in the Seoul Olympics. Needless to say, Ben and I had lots of questions for him, and we were relieved when he sat down and really liked where we were going with the game.

Time for the suicide squeeze?

There was one answer to a question in particular that has stuck with me. When we asked Robbins what was cooler, winning back-to-back NCAA Championships or a gold medal at the Olympics, Robbins answered, "Omaha, hands down. My teammates were my family. We lived together, went to class together, partied together, practiced together, and played together. We won it together."

That just about sums up our findings of what separates college ball from professional ball. You play each game as a member of the team first, and as an individual second, and you play each game like it's your last. Hearing this gave me faith that there is still hope for baseball. I hope that our game helps to promote baseball in its purest form. If you haven't been to a college game, check it out. You won't be disappointed. Anyway, we also did some extensive mo-cap sessions to try and re-create the "electricity" that is present on the field at Rosenblatt. I'm still recovering from an elbow I took during take six of "Dog Pile #4."

So, back to challenges—yeah, there were some, but we did our best and we are proud of the game that's on the shelves. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

OS: How has the NCAA worked with you or supported you in this endeavor? Have individual universities or equipment manufacturers contributed, as well?

Trey: Absolutely! Working with the NCAA and all of the schools has been great! They've been wanting an NCAA baseball game as long as we have. They've been a big help with invaluable feedback, attention to detail, and getting assets, approvals, etc. We hope that as our relationship with them gets stronger, we'll be able to work together and pass on more NCAA goodness to MVP.

Be alert on the mound.

Equipment manufacturers—this is something we're also really psyched about. When I was just a wee lad, I sold lots of baseball cards, cleaned lots of pools, and scooped lots of dog and horse droppings to save up for my Rawlings "Heart of the Hide" first baseman's mitt. It took me three months to break in before she was ready for a game, and another three months of massaging her with shaving cream and glove oil before she was just right.

I slept with her under my pillow. I remember thinking back then, "I wish I could play Baseball Stars with it." Well, we pulled it off. While some teams have their own "sponsored" equipment with them by default, you start Dynasty Mode with EA gear and must perform to unlock equipment sponsors, via challenges that appear four to six times a year. We've got Rawlings, Worth, Easton, Louisville, and TPX, to name a few. It's all very exciting for us, and the equipment manufacturers have all come back to say how impressed they were with how good their products looked in our game. Cool stuff.

OS: Could you explain how the new ESPN integration enhances the MVP Baseball experience?

Trey: Of course! MVP 06 is the first EA Sports game that gets to reap the many benefits of our new relationship with ESPN. The no-brainer was bringing in "The Ticker." The cool thing is that you don't have to be playing someone online to see it. We have Online Everywhere this year, which means that once you log on, you get to see the ticker even if you're dinking around in Dynasty Mode all by your lonesome.

We also have an the ESPN Radio Update that pops on every 20 minutes, 24/7, that will give you a brief, up to the minute, broadcast-style update on everything that's going on in the world of sports. We're happy with what we got in, but it will give you guys a good idea of what's to come with EA and ESPN.

Will Rice make it all the way to Omaha?

OS: How do you feel that the new right thumbstick controls change the game for the better?

Trey: Well, if it's okay, I'd like to break this one into two categories. First: Load and Fire Batting. This is something that has been on the radar for years and was something that we didn't want to do until we felt we could nail it. On the surface, using the right-stick to swing is just more "organic" than just hitting a button to swing. I use the word "organic" a lot, and thankfully, no one has asked me to give a proper definition.

Well, for you, Shawn, and Xbox.com, I'll give it a shot. "Organic," to me, means that it is something that I have total control over. It just "feels" more natural. I'm sure Webster has other definitions, but that's where I'm going with it. Okay? Anyway, we've always felt that something was missing when batting in baseball games. Hitting the ball where it's pitched (inside=pull, outside=opposite field) needed to be more than just timing-based.

Our Classic controls incorporated guessing the location of the pitch, but there was still that lack of control that we feel Load and Fire brings. Another addition to Load and Fire is the fact that you have three different swing types to use by way of holding the triggers or not holding the triggers down while using the thumbstick to swing. For those of you that have played ball, you know that each at-bat has a different "goal" to accomplish. And you use different swings, such as choking up with two strikes.

It's not all about dingers. If no one is on base, you can use the "normal" swing to try and pick a good pitch and hit it hard into the gap. If there is a runner on first, you'll want to pull the right trigger to use a "contact" swing and put the ball on the ground behind the runner to more him over. If you've got a runner on third and you need to hit a deep sac fly to bring him in, pull the left trigger to use a "power swing" and you have a better shot at hitting it deep, but the window for making quality contact gets smaller.

We took great care in making sure that these swing modifiers did not make the game too arcade-like. We wanted realism, and I feel we did a good job. There is a bit of a learning curve, but with some practice, we feel you will grow to love Load and Fire batting as we have. As gamers and as ballplayers, once you get the hang of it and accomplish what it is you're trying to do at the plate, it feels so good. Load and Fire took us three months to implement and six months to tune. We wanted to create the most realistic hitting mechanic in a video game ever.

Now on to Precision Throw Control. Gone are the days of hitting a button to throw to the corresponding base—unless you choose to use our Classic controls, of course. The cool thing about "PTC" is that if you make an error, it's not because of a dice roll that happens "under the hood." You make an error because you executed your throw poorly. Use the right thumbstick to choose which base to throw to (right for first base, up for second base, and so on). Once you push the stick to the base you want to throw to—regardless of where your player is on the field—a meter appears beneath him. Once you fill the meter to the "Green Zone," let go of the stick and your player throws to the desired base.

Release the ball too early, and your throw will be high. Hang on to the ball too long, and it'll be low. Push to the left of the base, and you'll throw left of your target. Right, right. Right? This one kind of crept up on us, and ended up being a really strong feature. After countless iterations and some serious tweaking by Ben (Brinkman) and our gameplay programmers, this turned into something I think y'all are really going to dig.

OS: What are your goals and hopes for the exciting new co-op mode?

Trey: Wow, exciting! It better be good now, huh?

OS: Well, it is. It's tense—you're trying harder to avoid making mistakes when you have a teammate.

Trey: Yeah. This is also something that was a stretch goal for us and ended up making it into the game—and really being fun! I guess our main goal was to make MVP more of a social experience. If you've got friends around while you're playing Dynasty Mode, they can hop into a game and help you out, or in some cases hurt you, depending on their MVP skills.

Either way, it's much more fun to win together than alone. As far as losing together, just get used to saying, "Sorry, dude." Whenever I'm playing co-op, I know I take things a lot more seriously. I'm not as prone to try and make that diving catch or stretch that single into a double, that's for sure. And successfully pulling off a co-op hit-and-run or squeeze play is pure bliss.

I'm also excited that my girl and I are going to kick my little brother and his girl's collective tails back in Arizona thanks to Xbox Live®. The trash talk has already begun. And I have a secret wish that there are some fathers—and maybe some mothers—out there that will team up with their kids and play. I know I would've loved it if my Dad and I teamed up in Dynasty Mode or online. Here's hoping.

OS: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today, Trey! I'm sure this week's release is very exciting for you and the MVP team.

Trey: Well, thanks Shawn, Xbox.com, and the Xbox community for your interest in our game. And thanks for reading this! Thanks also to the MVP fans that have allowed us the opportunity to make this game. We blew the doors off of this one and in my opinion, for $30, it's worth every penny. We're really proud of this game and hope you give MVP 06 NCAA Baseball a go. Thanks, gang!

Article by Shawn Drotar, Managing Editor, OperationSports.com