If you've never played MLB10 before, please read this. MLB10 is the most visually impressive baseball game I have ever seen. The AI is very sophisticated and I was even impressed by the announcers. What I dislike, however, is that even at the very lowest level of difficulty, hitting is frustratingly difficult.
Even at 'rookie' level and even with the incredible lineup of Golden Age legends, I still have great difficulty scoring more than a couple runs per game. I have probably played 30-40 games now, but I have a feeling I will remain stuck at the rookie level for a very, very long time. It seems to me that the entire point of having multiple difficulty levels is to enable the users to amp up the realism and challenge as they improve their skill level. Unfortunately, the game is quite inaccessible for a beginning hitter. There should have been a "novice" difficulty level right below rookie, so someone who has never hit before could play some actual games without being totally frustrated by the cpu adeptly nicking corners with breaking balls, fooling you with curves in the dirt, and pretty much annoying the hell out of you. At least that has been my experience so far... My pitching, fielding, and baserunning have been much quicker to come along, however. From what I have read, this seems to be a consistent theme with beginners.
There are other problems as well. When I am pitching and I have two strikes, the CPU will often foul off pitch after pitch after pitch, leading to some marathon at-bats, which occur way too often to feel realistic. I also notice that there are way too many dropped third strikes. Additionally, on weak grounders right to the pitcher, the game will often select an infielder other than the pitcher to field the ball, which makes no sense and leads to unrealistic infield singles. Another thing I see occasionally is the cpu fielder "freezing" in place, motionless, for several seconds for no apparent reason. This has actually led to base hits which probably would have been outs, since the cpu stands there catatonic as the ball sails by. Very odd. One other minor issue that bugs me is the failure to properly simulate some of the legends. Ty Cobb is given way more power than he actually had, and there is the obvious issue with Mike Schmidt's 'crowd the plate' batting stance, which is not at all realistic. Schmidt copied Roberto Clemente's stance, and stood much further back in the box. Lastly, more research should also have been done on the pitchers, as their pitch repertoires often don't match reality.
Clearly this game was catered more for experienced MLB08 and 09 players than for neophytes, but being realistic for veteran players and being accessible for beginners are NOT mutually exclusive goals, and with multiple difficulty levels done properly, the designers could have achieved this. For all its merits, MLB10 falls short in this respect. My advice for beginners: if you have never played MLB10 before, and you really want to try it, I'd suggest renting it first and doing the following: set the difficulty to rookie, and begin with batting practice. Do this many times in a row until you can kind of get the gist of it. Then play an exhibition game. Choose a minor league team as your opponent, choose the Golden Age or Silver Age legends as your team, set baserunning to 'auto', and set the difficulty level for both hitting and pitching to 'rookie.' Feel free to comment here and let me know how it goes for you.
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