Long story short, this game has been developed year after year to become an arousing and visually stunning experience full of real world references and endorsements. Actual, basketball, gameplay is very marginalized compared to the visual content 2k is adding every year.
This 2k industry is showcasing the NBA brand as a whole. While doing this, they are involving the users in their ownLong story short, this game has been developed year after year to become an arousing and visually stunning experience full of real world references and endorsements. Actual, basketball, gameplay is very marginalized compared to the visual content 2k is adding every year.
This 2k industry is showcasing the NBA brand as a whole. While doing this, they are involving the users in their own social network. This media industry broadcast, ingame, perfectly shot "tv-shows", tries to involve people into their Esport-ish experience, while pulling prizes etcetera.
Being the company mission to sell the NBA brand and to bring more fans and fanatics into the NBA franchise, they have to represent it in a certain way. and they excell in this. Me myself, have started to follow NBA intensively while playing this game over the years.
As i said, the company tries and delivers the best possible visuals a game could deliver in this videogame era. The animations in the game are, nowadays, countless. For each and every little move, they have a huge database of motion capture material. Most of it taken directly from the NBA players to better represent them. This galvanize, and most importantly, spoil the eye.
To link these animations alltogether, yet, is a problem. It's a drawback to the gameplay.
To represent a fadeaway and the d from two different build of players, in a realistic way to the eye, means that the control the player has shall be taken away to a certain degree. Controls in this game are the most unresponsive in ANY sport game to present day.
The problem, with this, is that being the company mission what said above, considering this game is almost a monopoly over the genre, and considering the game entertains the players with the huge amount of visual content... considering all that, the controls being unresponsive is not an issue to the 2k industry. The controls being unresponsive, ITS A FEATURE.
It's the company "guarantee" that what will be shown on the screen it's visually stunning and entertain to watch, as close to "reality" as possible.
THE AI will be the same on any settings, because that's the representation of an NBA game this company wants to show; but most importantly, it's the best they can deliver WHILE fitting the animations alltogether, and all the variables regarding the statistics of every single player potrayed ingame.
To make everything believable, numbers HAS to be shown in a believable way. Statistic shall get close to "reality". While this being almost impossible (and ultimately failing to a certain degree, and most surely to the more exigent players), the player in this big hard equation, is a noisance, a variable that the game engine has to control, to limit, so that it won't break the movie the way it has to be potrayed.
WE ALL HOPE one day they'll solve the franchise problems (listing a few, to represent the most):
-defenders sticking like glue to your player, while snapping magically out of hard d when YOU try to defend them
-defenders stealing the ball from you as soon as the ball collides to ANY other physical model on the court, while completely ignoring this rule when it's the ai attacking.
-passes responding to IQ statistics more than player choice (meaning easy assist are a nono, better to pass to the unreachable teammate behind 4 defenders)
-space-time continuum obliterations in the extraordinary ability of the defenders to leap in the air or to close up crossing all the field in the split of an eye blink just to avoid you to score an easy one.
-teammates that neverever GTFO your free path to the basked (and blocking you when you are trying to defend the paint)
-and so on
BUT, there's no reason to believe this will actyally ever happen.... PROBLEMS WON'T BE SOLVED, for two main reasons:
1- to represent, with endorsements, and with motion capture, and licences and stuff, this big show of the NBA they need HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY. -> to get money they are pushing hard the online competition so that people is pulled down into the BUY TO WIN vc market. while wasting real money on stupid shirts and animations, haircuts etcetera -> since the online competition it's so central to the mission to make this game as eye candy as possible, gameplay can't change too much from one game to the other, because the central rule of an E-SPORT is that the game stays the same over time (or people can't become better at it if the rules change).
2- Being visually stunning and having build this huge money machine (the two things, as we have seen, are deeply but intricately involved), playing this game spoils the eye and the player to the point that ANY COMPETITION will seem awkward and unpolished in comparison, even if the gameplay of these competing games it's actually BETTER and FUNNIER. Being the sole game on the market, means they have no reason to change and tweak their winning horse. Don't buy this game, they don't care about gameplay and only want your money.… Expand
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