Baseball is back! With Spring Training and the World Baseball Classic finally getting underway, MLB fans around the world are feeling confident about their team's chances this year. Though, give it a month or so and about half of those teams will start to come back down to earth. Fortunately, what doesn't happen in real life, can always occur in Franchise Mode, which makes its expected, but still welcome return to MLB The Show 17.
Today, an all-new trailer showing off the mode was released on the official PlayStation YouTube channel, and by and large, it looks like a lot of the same features are returning. There are, however, a few all-new ways to play games that the series hasn't seen before. The first of those ways is a mode called Critical Situations, which plays almost identically to Madden's "Play the Moments" mode. The basic idea is that the game will throw you into a crucial juncture of the match, and it's up to you to come through for your team or end up as the scapegoat.
The second new feature is something called Player Lock, which works somewhat similarly to the gameplay in Road to the Show. This mode lets you play 9 Inning games exclusively as the player of your choice, so you jump in every time they go to bat or get a chance to field.
There's also a new feature called Quick Manage, which is a text-based simulation of a game that lets you get through the action at an accelerated pace. The best part about this is that, if you ever want to jump into the game and get more hands on, you can. In fact, you can drop in and out as many times as you want just to change things up.
MLB The Show 17 releases on PlayStation 4 on March 28th, 2017.
Sources: [PlayStation YouTube, PlayStation Blog]
