PSP Games - MLB 09 The Show AI Info

January 21, 2009 - Last week , the PlayStation Blog announced new Franchise Mode details for the upcoming MLB 09 The Show . Yesterday, the PlayStation Blog revealed new details about the AI routines for this year's title, which is supposed to be vastly improved over last year's Game. According to Chris Gill, senior producer of gameplay and animation, the dev team wanted to highlight four separate AI changes that were made because last year's game wasn't as realistic as the team would have liked. The first thing was augmenting the fielder's routes to the ball, eliminating direct routes to balls hit down the line or in the gap. Now, fielders will round off their path to the ball -- cutting them off and playing balls off walls naturally.

The second adjustment was including more Hot Shots, so infielders didn't seem superhuman with their reflexes. If you have a Gold Glove winner, his reflexes will probably be good enough to catch a rocket coming off a bat, but players with poor reAction times or fielding ratings will now make more errors, witness balls taking bad hops off them and even bounce past them into the outfield thanks to a deflection off a glove. The third adjustment was made to trying to make tags on runners, improving the number of animations and ways that players will attempt to tag a runner in the baseline or around the base. Finally, the design team has been hard at work on the Pitcher/Batter duel, and while Gill wasn't willing to talk about the improvements, he did mention that Hall of Fame mode is no longer the highest difficulty level in the game. Veteran players will now have Legend Mode to test their skills and their patience at the plate and on the mound.