And that
Ramone Russell happens not only to be a veteran of the series, but is also officially titled
San Diego Studios' Product Development Communications and Brand Strategist. Which is a fancy way of saying he gets to not only work on
MLB The Show, but to also nerd out about baseball, videogames and bringing those two things together.
And that last statement is even truer with
MLB The Show 21, which is not only coming to
PlayStation this year -- its traditional home, but also to the
Xbox family of devices. Here's a snippet from our in-depth interview with Ramone on all things baseball and gaming:
AusGamers: Okay. We'll shift gears, can you talk a little bit about the expanded approach to multi-platform development this time around?
Ramone: Right. So we're going from only shipping a game on PlayStation for the last few years to now PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. So four platforms but what we've also worked on is we have cross-platform play and cross progression. So it doesn't matter what platform you're on. You'll take all of your stuff to the other platform. And if you're playing on PlayStation, you can play against people on Xbox.
AusGamers: Did you come across any hurdles having never done this before?
Ramone: Yes. Everything was a hurdle. Yeah. All everything in videogame development is a hurdle but our graphics team and our programming team and engineering team, they attacked it head on and we're really happy to be shipping all four games on April 20th.
AusGamers: Okay. I guess the other question to that side then is, I guess when you're building a game that is cross-platform in a sense that you are still working with the barriers of last-gen versus, like, the open power of the new-gen -- was it hard to reign in any of the whiteboard dreams? Like big moments that you kind of thought, “well let's go all out because we can with the new systems”? Or was everything pretty much just that you could dial it up a little bit more on the new consoles versus the last-gen?
Ramone: Yeah. Every feature and everything that we wanted to do year one on the next-gen platforms, we were able to do it. That main focus was 4K, 60 frames per-second [and] let's make the stadium creator the baddest thing anybody's ever seen. I've actually been working on it for over two years. And we're just so excited to finally put this feature in the player's hands.
Click here for our in-depth Ramone Russel MLB The Show 21 interview.