The past weeks have seen a lot of discussion around game difficulty, accessibility, and what should or shouldn't be available to players. This has spawned a whole Discourse involving designer/artist intent, gatekeeping, the definitions of "difficulty" and "accessibility" and probably a number of other related conversations I haven't seen and don't necessarily care to seek out. While this has largely been driven by one game in particular, I want to share my experiences around difficulty and accessibility as they relate to one of my most played video game franchises, MLB The Show, and how a recent update has brought this issue to the forefront of my thinking.

For years, I played MLB The Show's annual mode spread across two single-player modes: Franchise and Road to the Show. Franchise is your standard sports game, single player, multi-year quest to run your team and manage short term victories like winning a Division title or World Series along with setting your franchise up for extended success by scouting and drafting players, trading, and managing staffing and club financials. Road to the Show is the game's more focused RPG-like-lite mode where you create a player and guide his on-field career from prospect evaluation through minor league development and through (hopefully) a long Major League Baseball career. With last year's entry, MLB The Show 18, I dove into their on-line focused "Diamond Dynasty" mode, which is fairly compared to the more well-known and ubiquitous EA "Ultimate Team" modes. Here, you buy packs of cards with virtual currency to acquire better players to earn more currency to buy more packs, and on and on. And while the mode is heavily focused on on-line play, there was an option to play against CPU opponents. This was how I played 99% of my games, playing against the CPU to complete "programs," which were specific challenges to be completed with a specific player, position, or players from a specific team in your lineup for specific card rewards.

MLB The Show 19 maintains Diamond Dynasty, but has overhauled how players progress to earning some of those card rewards. New to the game this year are March to October and Moments. March to October has the player select a team and challenges them to complete scenarios during a simulated season; win your Opening Day game, mount a comeback in the late innings, play an entire game as a specific player to boost their performance for the rest of the year. Moments is similar, but a more curated collection of these scenarios, presenting a handful of scenarios focusing on a specific player's career (Willie Mays and Babe Ruth through the years), a specific year in a player's history (Bryce Harper's Rookie Season), or a franchise's journey to triumph (The Chicago Cubs from the Bartman game through the 2016 World Series). Each bite-sized mission in these Moments and the March to October journey the player selects has a difficulty associated with it, but a recent patch has made them nearly unplayable for me personally and drastically altered my perception of the game and the "difficulty vs accessibility" discussion.

MLB The Show also has a set of difficulty modifiers called Sliders - this isn't uncommon in sports titles. The Show's sliders let you control things like how fast breaking pitches or fastballs appear coming out of the pitchers' hands, how frequently players get injured, the impact of the wind of ball flight, how often the CPU throws strikes vs balls, and how player contact is treated with batted balls. I've mentioned mostly hitting-specific sliders because, despite almost a decade of playing this franchise, I am what's called "a garbage tier hitter." Successfully hitting a baseball thrown by a Major League Baseball pitcher requires that the batter, in nearly the blink of an eye, recognize the speed, break, and location of the pitch, decide to swing the bat or not, and do so while the ball is in a narrow window where doing so results in solid contact. This is true of real baseball and The Show; I've simplified The Show's mechanics because I can barely perform those tasks on the easiest difficulty, much less add in manipulating the swing plane of the bat with the analogue stick.

An update to the title today removed the ability to influence Moments or March to October gameplay via sliders. One one hand, I understand and respect the decision; these modes offer in-game rewards used in an on-line competitive mode. They also had a set difficulty associated with them the designers seemed to have intended. I also understand the argument that allowing this to continue would have allowed for players to “cheat” or at least “cheese” these modes. But on the other hand, if these options exist for all, where’s the harm? As someone who completed two of the Moments campaigns with varying levels of sliders adjusted, I didn’t feel like I was “cheesing” a challenge, but adapting it to my skill ceiling, which I recognize from nearly a decade of playing the franchise. With certain values adjusted for my known deficiencies, I still had challenges that took me a dozen restarts, and some I attempted multiple times and still failed to finish before the change.

How does this tie into the larger discussion around difficulty and accessibility? I’m not comparing my inability to distinguish between a change-up and a 4 seam fastball to a physical disability, but this does color how I feel about my experience with the game. For roughly a week, I had new, interesting, engaging game modes that offered fun new experiences, collectible rewards, and a fresh way to play a game I loved in a franchise I’ve loved in a new way. Now, the announcement of new Moments to be released tomorrow has as much impact on me as the hypothetical announcement of new DLC for a game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Did you think it WOULDN’T get mentioned here?). I know Souls and Souls-like games aren’t for me. They don’t offer what I’m looking for in a gaming experience, so I avoid them. We’ll see how the new Moments play tomorrow, but I expect to quickly lump one of my favorite franchises in with a game style I actively avoid, and I can’t help but be disappointed. Losing the ability to slightly modify the MLB The Show 19 experience to account for my own shortcomings as a player isn’t a tragedy, but I can’t see myself playing 400+ hours of this year’s installment like I did last year.