MLB 2K10 My Player Mode Part II

"As I discussed in Part I, one of the main goals for the mode was to separate the experience of playing through the mode when you are in the Minors from the experience of playing through the mode as a big leaguer. Below are some of the features of the mode that you will experience in your career once you make it to the big leagues.

Key Games and Clutch Moments
You will see two very cool things that happen right away once you are in the Majors: Key Games and Clutch Moments. If you are simming on the Schedule, we will drop you into the important games and the clutch moments that you are involved in. This way, you can play through your full 15 year career without having to feel like you might miss any of the vital events of your player’s career in simmed games. As an added bonus, skill points earned in Key Games and Clutch Moments will be worth more than skill points earned in regular games.

In keeping with the theme of not wanting you to miss big events in your career, once you get to the Majors, you will also be prompted with game, season, and career milestones in simmed games. So if you are a triple short of the cycle in a game that you simmed from the Schedule screen (as I was in one of my careers, then went into the game and heard commentary about “the triple being the toughest leg to get in the cycle”), you will be given the chance to enter that game and try and complete the milestone. Milestone notifications are an on/off option in the My Player setup, so if you don’t want these notifications, you can turn them off at any point during your career. But if you want to make sure that you have a chance to go into game and hit the 500th home run of your career, you will want to get these notifications. 

 
Key Games are the most important games that your team will play during the season. There are a few different types of Key Games: rivalry games, games versus another star at your position, award race games (where you play against a player who is in contention for an award with your player, like the MVP award or Cy Young), and Pennant Race games late in the season. If you don’t have time to play every game on the schedule, you can sim through and just play the Key Games and late inning Clutch Moments that you encounter throughout the season.

In one My Player career as a starting pitcher, I was called up by the Dodgers and my second start was against the Giants. I squared off against Tim Lincecum in a Key Game versus another star at my position (And yes, I fared about as well as you would expect any rookie pitcher matching up with Lincecum would).

 
You get a taste of what clutch moments are like in the first Minor League game you are dropped into at the start of the mode, but you won’t see them again until you get to the Majors. Clutch moments are late inning situations with the game on the line where you have a chance to impact the outcome of the game. In your clutch moments, you will get different high leverage goals than the goals you will see in regular game situations. Rather than just being asked to “Get a base hit” or “Get ahead in the count,” in most cases you will get more specific goals like “Drive in the tying run” or “Get a walkoff hit.” The better you do in your clutch moments, the more you are able to help your team. 

Season Goals
Once you are in the Majors, you will get Player Season Goals and Team Season Goals, as well as Short Term Bonus Goals. You will earn skill points for each goal you pass. Skill Points earned for accomplishing goals are awarded to each of the skill point categories, so they are a great way to improve your player by earning points in all categories. 

Season goals are accomplishments like “Hit 40 or more home runs and steal 40 or more bases.” There are different tiers of goals and you will be able to pick your goal at the start of each season. Each of these goals is worth bonus skill points with the tougher goals, such as the one mentioned above, being worth the most skill points.

 
Team goals are assigned to you based on how your team has done the previous few seasons. So if your team had a really bad season the previous year, you might get a goal like “Win 5 more games than last year.” If your team made the Postseason but got knocked out in the first round in the previous year, you might get a goal like “Win the Championship Series.”

 
You will also have short term bonus goals that are series based goals (or appearance based goals for pitchers) that you will get when you play a team in your division. These are smaller bonus goals, like “Hit 2 home runs in the series,” that will give you a chance to earn a few extra skill points throughout the season. 

Hall of Fame
Key Games and Clutch Moments are fun to play through, but just like every real life big leaguer, making the Hall of Fame is the ultimate goal for your player. Once you have been called up to the big leagues and have started accomplishing Season Goals and Team Goals, you will start to build your Hall of Fame resume. There are three different types of goals that you have to accomplish to make it into the Hall of Fame: Season Goals, Team Goals, and Career Milestones.

 
Some of the Hall of Fame Season Goals for hitters are “Win a Batting Title,” and “Win the MVP Award.” A couple of the Hall of Fame Team Goals are “Make the Postseason,” and “Make the World Series.” A couple of the Career Milestones for hitters are “Get 2000 Hits,” and “Be named an All-Star 5 times.”

 
To make the Hall of Fame you need to accomplish 5 of the Season Goals, 2 of the Team Goals, and 5 of the Career Milestones. Even if you have a couple of monster seasons early in your career and achieve all of the required Season and Team Goals right away, you will still need to have a long and successful career to reach enough Career Milestones to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. 

 
The most important and most challenging aspect of making the Hall of Fame is passing the Career Milestones. We still wanted to have Season Goals and Team Goals play a small part in making the Hall of Fame, but ultimately making the Hall of Fame comes down to how good of a total career you have, not just how well you do in a few select seasons.

Career Decisions
In the Career Decisions menu, you will have the ability to make a few decisions that will affect your career and your team. At any point in your career, you can request a trade or change your position. 

When you reach a certain “star” status level (defined by getting your overall rating to certain level) you will be able to request which player your team goes after in the Free Agency period during the offseason. I like to think of this as the Derek Jeter or Albert Pujols feature. Players like Jeter and Pujols have so much clout and are so important to their teams that if they want to, they can have some influence on players that their team goes after. Your team won’t always be able to sign the player you select, but they will always make an offer for him. Also, once you have reached the “star” status level as a hitter, you will have the ability to pick the spot in the batting order you want to hit. 

 
A few other things worth mentioning; full gameplay sliders are available within the mode, you can turn CPU trading on/off in the mode, along with getting trade and injury notifications for your organization. You can make and play in the Futures Game with your player when you are in the Minors and you can also make and play in the All Star Game and Home Run Derby once you are in the Majors. 

Conclusion
 
We are looking forward to hearing about your careers and seeing how many of you will be able to reach the ultimate goal of making the Hall of Fame! Since this is the last in the series of Developer Insights that I will be writing, I want to close this out by thanking the community for supporting us. We have a game that we are proud of this year and we really think you guys are going to have a lot of fun playing it. "