Producer Brent Nielsen has returned with part 2 of our special on EA Sports’ MVP Baseball 2004 – part 1 can be found here – and we’ve got an insanely detailed explanation of the new “Pure Swing System”, along with other new features for this year. Take it away, Brent….

Gaming Age: The pitching model in last year's version was great - it provided a real sense of how pitchers set up not only each pitch, but for each batter as well. Will the batting portion of the game receive similar tweaks?
Brent Nielsen: In MVP Baseball 2003 hitting was based on timing and the user could direct the ball by positioning the left stick up for a fly ball, down for a ground ball and either left or right to send the ball to a side of the field. We didn’t feel like it was very realistic because really what it came down to was twitch. If you could push the button you could hit. It’s wasn’t all that challenging.

MVP 2004 features the Pure Swing System. The Pure Swing System is made up if numerous different components that combined determine not only hit contact quality but whether or not you will make contact at all. This year it’s all about hitting the ball where it’s pitched not “directing a hit” or having the skill to line up a cursor.

When we began pre-production the designs for the hitting system were modest. Over time however they evolved into something much bigger and better, something that we believe truly mirrors reality. We believe gamers will really appreciate the depth and challenge MVP 2004 provides on all four skill levels. That’s another thing; there are 4 skill levels this year, up from one last year. We read many message board threads and played the game enough ourselves to know that All-Star difficulty was not tough enough for the experienced gamer. We made All-Star even tougher this year and introduced MVP difficulty – which would be ludicrous speed… err, difficulty.

Here are some of the main factors to determine contact quality and hit types in MVP Baseball 2004:

Batting Factors

Timing – The better your timing the better the chance you have to hit the ball well or at all.

Audio and a new PIP window are used to give timing feedback. The PIP window replays your swing so you gather whether you were early or late, or if you swung over or under the ball.

Left/Right Stick Placement – This is where hitting the ball where it’s pitched applies. If the pitcher throws something hard on the outer half of the plate what should you do?? Try and pull that ball and chances are you’ll roll over on it and hit a weak dribbler to the 3rd baseman. The proper thing to do here is time your swing right and try to hit the ball the other way. The penalty for doing the wrong thing with the left stick is much greater in MVP 2004 but so is the reward when you do the correct thing.

Up/Down Stick Placement – Say you have a groundball pitcher on the mound. If he’s on his game trying to hit the ball in the air will be next to impossible. We are mimicking this in MVP 2004. The key is to hit the pitch as it was intended to be hit. That means if the pitcher is keeping the ball low you should try to push the stick down and hit it on the ground or on a line as opposed to fighting the pitch and trying to hit in the air. All bets are off of course if he throws up a mistake pitch. Swing for the fences!

What you do with the stick also determines where the ball makes contact with the bat. We pride ourselves on the fact that every contact hits the bat and where it hits helps to determine the outcome. As the batter you want to hit it on the sweet spot every time. However, if your timing or left/right or up/down placement is off it will shift the contact point on the bat and at the same time decrease the contact quality. This in effect creates an infinite amount of hit types such as nubbers, choppers, dribblers, pop ups, bloopers, tailing and hooking liners, high fly balls and many, many, many more. Any type of hit you can think of.

Batter Attributes – both contact and power are taken into account separately. This year we use 0-100 for our ratings, as opposed to 36-100 last year in MVP 2003. Of course this means much differentiation between the best and worst players, or in terms of our game it creates a large divide between your AA shortstop and A-Rod.

The contact and power ratings also determine the size of a batter’s timing window. The higher the ratings the larger the window and the better chance he has for high contact quality.

Hot/Cold zones – This is an indication of how a hitter tends to trend in terms of successful hits, over a period of time. With the addition of learning by the CPU hitter, gone are the days of the “cold zone pitching strategy”. Throw the same pitch in the same spot and you will get rocked – hot or cold zone.

Pitcher Factors

Pitch Attributes –The better the pitchers’ pitch the steeper the climb to quality contact. If the pitcher has a 99 rated pitch like a Zito hook, unless the batter has 99 contact rating he’s already starting in a bit of a hole.

Pitch Effectiveness – How far the pitcher fills the pitch meter determines how well the batter sees the ball. The more the meter is filled the more effective the pitch is making the batters job much harder and vice versa. The CPU works the same way. On MVP skill level the pitcher will throw at close to 100% effectiveness and it trickles down on the lower skill levels.

Pitch Accuracy – This is where the pitch was released in the green accuracy zone. The closer to the middle of the green, the better the pitch. Outside the green are mistake pitches and give the batter a boost. The less accurate the pitch the better chance the user has of hitting the ball well.

Pitch Type – This Certain pitches are harder to hit in the air or get around on based upon movement, location or a combination of both.

Pitch Location – Pitch locations also have an effect on the batters intentions. Derek Lowe’s sinkers are much harder to hit in the air than something up in the zone.

So, those are some of the factors that combine to determine contact quality. There are many more things that come into play in batting during a single player game. One example that is new this year is pitcher learning. The pitcher learns your swing and pitches you accordingly. Do you swing at a lot of pitches outside the zone? Swing at a lot of fastball? The CPU figures it out pretty quickly and adjusts on the fly. When you adjust to his adjustments he adjusts again. It’s a game of cat and mouse.

The pitcher also learns based upon what pitches you are having success hitting. If you are tattooing a slurve he will stop throwing it as much and try to get you out with his other pitches. These too will be in flux all game long and are reevaluated on a regular basis. The amount the pitcher learns is based upon his star level. Scrubs don’t learn as quickly as stars. There’s a reason they are scrubs.

Finally, we also enhanced check swings. This year if you check swing on a pitch in the strike zone there’s a chance you’ll make contact and hit an “excuse me” nubber. Also, whether or not you go around on check swings is based upon where the bat is in the zone when you release the swing button. We have a handy PIP window here as well to show the swing and the call from the appropriate umpire.

This is just an overview of the improvements we’ve made to our hitting system in MVP Baseball 2004. In short if you do the right thing you’ll be successful more often than not but do the wrong thing and the pitcher will win. It’s very deep, challenging and fun and we really believe that it’s a winner.