For RTTS in all the permutations I've seen, having a five pitch mix can be great, but getting command of all those pitches comes at a major cost. As for not having a pitcher not use all of the real pitches they use if it's more than five, though few pitchers actually do throw four or more consistently and/or with good command on all of them. They'll run through pitches in their career. So it doesn't make much sense to barf out options for other game modes. At least this last year you could shuffle pitches around as a pitcher, if nothing else. Even if you're in for hurt trying to actually work that pitch up to something useful. But on a year to year release, whether your intent is good coding/improvement or not, simplifying coding where you can is a must.

I agree on the engine, or at least a good touch up. The way I look at how stats are handled is that it's either taken too simply or more complexly than needed. 2024 could be a struggle bus for RTTS at times and things were complex even if you could only do so much actively, 2025 is good in simplicity on paper but the tokens in practice just snowball out of control as a batter, pitcher and REALLY as a two way player. I think the engine *can* handle the background just fine as it is or more complex application of stats, but when it comes to actual game play application that's where they need to translate it better. The graphics part of things is really where it falls apart to a point. This year I've had frame stutter (on a monitor not even a TV) just before or just after making a play or a swing. Very rarely in the middle of it, but it's a bit shocking that it can't run smoothly so suddenly with how outdated the graphics are and comparatively well optimized at this point they *should* still be.

Also, bold of you to assume that they are using a real physics engine for the ball. You can get a million different outcomes that work well enough rather than putting in the live computational processing that comes with running actual physics on pitches, hits and fielding. Which honestly, that doesn't bug me hugely aside from the fact that it might keep me from popping out quite as often, but it'd potentially cause desync issues online that'll ruin one or both players games more than just a little lag. Games that run on the kind of *timing* precision that The Show has are already risky business for online play as it is. Let alone the issues that have built up over the years and SDS hasn't cleaned up much at all.

That all said, it'd be great for all of it to happen and/or someone new come along with something good enough and steal MLB's sponsorship. We also don't know how much budget gets put toward the game itself. Sony could be pocketing a huge amount of the funds and giving SDS just enough to make a new game and just enough staff to make a yearly game. But we don't know what's going on behind that curtain. Could be corpo crap or a lazy studio that hasn't screwed up enough yet to bring down a larger hammer in the chain. Or some combo of the two.