If you watched the SDS stream or caught it on YouTube after it was over, you might have missed the Franchise Mode discussion which happens for about 9 minutes.
Their focus is on Play Your Style which basically assumes that you aren’t going to play all 162 game and you will sim at some point. Fair enough – guilty as charged. This basically lets you set up and customize your critical moment opportunities. They continue to push the narrative that most fans want a faster experience. While I don’t mind the option, I believe the mode is suffering from something else entirely. I will get to that in a moment.
They also made some improvements to the amateur draft and implemented the Prospect Promotion Incentive (which is a fantastic addition to the – KUDOS TO SDS on this one!). I am still hoping that they track original draft teams in player cards and history of players with some narratives on transaction tracking.
The last addition is loading rosters with current injuries.
Starting with injuries vs starting on a custom date with proper injuries. The timing of an injury is as important (perhaps more important) than the injury itself.
If Ohtani gets tendinitis in late September in real life and I decide to start a new franchise mode from Opening Day with real injuries it will just mean that my season starts with him injured and plenty of time to recoup from potential losses. However, if he is hurt going into the playoffs that’s a different can of worms.
Madden and NBA 2K have the ability to start from specific dates. When will they be able to relate rosters and injuries to these dates? With baseball, I understand that the rosters are huge. We should have the ability as a community to create injured rosters with Franchise Start Dates.
Here are my suggestions going forward if SDS decides to jump into my little corner of the internet.
Trade Logic Fix Ideas
Commish Veto Setting – Users should have the option to approve or veto trades by the CPU. This would keep the CPU from making some of the more egregious trades like top prospects for middling veterans. If we were able to also edit these trades for fairness that would be helpful as well.
I would love to see AI developed to help the CPU learn where value lives and what makes certain trades fair (or perhaps more importantly, unfair) is the best way to do this.
As games are becoming more focused on being ‘always online’ one way to make this community driven is to have an option of submitting trades and trade scenarios for votes and selectable reasons for why it’s fair or not. A fair trade might not be as simple as equal overall ratings. If a team is in a pennant race and they need a relief pitcher, a new ace, or a power bat they’ve been missing, they might have to include a prized prospect to make that happen. Sometimes, that could be justified, other times it’s a non-starter.
A top prospect that struggles in the minors should lose value and see a decline in their effected ratings the longer they struggle. If a team wants to take a chance that they find the next Josh Hamilton (from top prospect to bust and back to all star – it was a great story at the time).
I just want more focus on the under the hood aspects of player and budget management. I doubt they have changed or updated any of the UI or visuals for contracts let alone any sort of budget fixes.
The game is coming out in the next few weeks. I plan on playing Franchise Mode almost exclusively as Diamond Dynasty is a grind-to-win/pay-to-win experience and RTTS continues to be boring.
NoobTubeTV 