Understand that this was just a simple shoot around tech demo with a motion captured Kyrie Irving, but the feel of Irving’s motions in the game was about as natural as natural could get for basketball. As I was told by the dev helping me out, by pressing the right thumb stick in certain directions, the ball would be dribbled that direction. For example, if I pressed the right thumbstick to the bottom right corner, Irving would start a behind the back dribble on his right and pass it over to his left hand. Pick up your gaming control right now (if it’s available) and imagine that happening. If you have an imagination, and aren’t a robot, then you can understand the natural motion to this flip of the thumbstick. I was also shown that the ball can be chained together to produce a nasty cross-over, which is Irving’s signature move. All of it was simple and it made complete sense in terms of controls.
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To put this to the test in a real game environment, I simply moved Irving in a smooth motion towards the basket, did a behind the back dribble, then stuttered-stepped, crossed-over towards the basket before pulling back and doing a fadeaway jumper. FLAWLESS, folks. FREAKING FLAWLESS.
It felt natural in terms of dribbling and it also felt like I had complete control of Irving himself, as there was literally no ‘stiffness’ to the motion or controls. Please understand that I’m from Kentucky, I’ve played basketball a good portion of my life and I fully understand what these motions are supposed to feel like (not to mention the smoothness to them). The tech demo felt like how you’re supposed to play the game of basketball. Speaking of which, one reason I don’t fully enjoy 2K’s NBA game because in my opinion it has never felt like a natural fluid motion of basketball — and yes, I was there for the first NBA 2K release on the DC (Steven Spielberg was gaming next to me at the Sega booth that year).
I was also told that EA currently has 40+ players motion captured, so that each one will have their own sets of motions and dribbles. I asked the idiotic question about people trying to do this as a center on a team and the good dev laughed a bit and said “Uh, no.” I had to ask the stupid question because I know some of you goobers are wondering. Okay, maybe just me.
Anyway, if EA Sports can pull this off then I firmly believe that 2K is in a load of trouble. Controlling Irving in the tech demo was probably the closest I’ve felt to actually playing real basketball on a video game system. It was impressive.