This Year’s Most Significant Changes
With an annual sports title, the biggest question consumers have from year to year is ‘what’s new?’ For anyone that has been following NBA 2K over the years, the team has been able to steadily build from year to year, culminating in last year’s excellent NBA 2K9. While the typical improvements and tweaks have been made to gameplay and graphics, this year’s biggest change is in the presentation and that is a direct result of something known as NBA Today.
The most important feature of NBA Today is its ability to gather real life information from an internet connection and translate that into dynamic and timely commentary. NBA 2K9 featured a good commentary pair in Kevin Harlan and Clark Kellogg, but the dialogue was far too repetitive. In effort to not only improve that but take sports game commentary to the next level, NBA 2K10 will be the first game to ever be able to dynamically generate commentary based on the previous night’s real life (NBA) events. We were assured that the back end system behind this feature would be updated nightly, providing fresh commentary for your NBA experience every day.
The dynamic commentary system as a whole is new, but it borrows from their MLB commentary system which is able to generate commentary without awkward inflections and tone changes. That’s good to know as there is nothing quite as grating as commentary that sounds canned or computerized. NBA Today also brings in all of the real world news and stats to your finger tips and based on this information, alters the presentation in other subtle ways, too.
Obviously this is a pretty big feature and that brought up the question about how far in advance the developers have to decide what features will make the cut for the current development cycle and which ones would have to wait until another year. In response, Rob told us that they’re already working on NBA 2K11, which I found surprising.
In regards to how Kobe influenced this year’s game, he’s more than just the cover athlete and co-star of a promo video on 2K Sport’s website. We were told he also spent time with the developers to further help them understand the intricacies of professional basketball, ideas and information that you can’t get from reading books or watching video. In regards to that, when asked what was missing from the already well established and polished series, Rob said he is still trying to find a way to really bring the feeling of playing basketball to the gamer. He talked about how in current games, players have a bird’s eye view of the court and can see so much of the action at once. While he does not want a first person perspective or a vision-cone, he indicated he’s still trying to discover the best way to present that intense feeling and adrenaline of basketball to the gamer.
While the change to the game’s presentation is the most notable difference this year, the AI has also been adjusted in an ever evolving effort to bring the most realistic experience possible. This year, AI players are said to have a much more complex and granular AI scheme allowing them to take more factors into account to adjust their behavior. The AI is said to be more capable of dealing with players who like to double and triple team the ball handler by passing out a shot to an open teammate, as an example. On defense, the AI has been tuned to where they are more about running actual defensive plays, utilizing rotations and switching instead of just running under a “general” defensive posture.
Another major change lies in the controls, something I was pleased to hear. While the fundamental controls work great, NBA 2K features a ton of complicated and intricate maneuvers that are just a bear to pull off consistently, if at all. To help alleviate this, the ISO Motion control scheme has been changed. Whereas previous versions had players doing both ISO Motion moves with turbo at the same time, the new scheme separates the two. ISO Motion moves are now executed by first holding down the Left Trigger. This separation of control should help in allowing players to do exactly what they want.
Yet another interesting change that was brought up was somewhat of a bug fix to 2K9. The developers admitted that point guards were able to throw the ball into the paint for easy scores with too much speed and accuracy in NBA 2K9. This issue has been addressed by increasing the number of inaccurate passes and making tweaks to the steal system.
If you’ve played enough of 2K9, you may have noticed that some animation sequences take a while to break out of. I can’t say I found too much fault with this myself, but the developers must have as they have introduced a new system that allows players to break out of an animation quicker. Hopefully this doesn’t result in unrealistic breaks in animation or unrealistic moves, but we’ll see. Before, players could only pass out the ball or whatever at certain points, but now, as soon as the player touches the ball, they’re able to break out of the animation to change the play.
“Crews” is the new name for the 5-on-5 online mode that first started with NBA 2K9. This mode has been improved and expanded making the entire online experience a little more seamless and enjoyable. Teams have numerous customization options for team name, colors, and uniform logo, and leaderboards help keep track of which crew plays the best ball.
The My Player mode this year is said to be far more involved than EA’s Be A Pro mode. Gamers who use this mode will start their NBA career in a summer league, then enter the draft and go from there. The recently released NBA Draft Combine download gave players a taste of this.
This year marks the first year of a Wii version of NBA 2K as well. Nintendo actually approached 2K Sports to ask for a solid sim basketball title and 2K believes they have delivered. Interestingly enough, the Wii version doesn’t feature any mini-games, so hopefully it’s just a good solid port with a few consistent motion controls. The PC version will receive its second iteration of NBA 2K this year, too.
Other notable changes that were mentioned during this call include support from 82games.com. I hadn’t heard of this website before, but they keep a tremendous amount of NBA related stats, more so than the league itself. Their contribution has helped tweak player ratings and tendencies. A fix was also implemented for the Franchise mode whereby players would demand too much money, causing a snowball effect of money related problems. This year, player demands are more realistic. Two other neat features this year include the ability to upload a replay to 2K to share with others by just pressing a couple of buttons instead of having to go to through the reel-maker process. Also interesting is the ability for 360 players to be able to edit the songs that play in the arena during games. Not only can you edit the 2K Beats tracks, which are said to be more varied and less mainstream than in years past, but 360 players can also use their own music from their hard drive to include in the game.
Summary
If all of these changes pan out as I suspect they will, it’s hard to imagine how NBA 2K10 won’t repeat as the best NBA game around. We’ll find out soon enough though, so check back for our full review in the coming days.