On Friday, the folks at 2K Sports invited us to a conference call about the newest offering of their industry-leading basketball sim series, NBA 2K8. The gameplay design team of Rob Jones, Mike Wang, and Erick Boenisch fielded questions and detailed what they changed and added this year. While they were happy with their progress in the gameplay department last time, they wanted to keep that momentum of tuning and improvement going into 2K8. On the technical side, they focused on polishing the graphics and animation to maintain their industry advantage.
In this year’s edition, the highlighted new feature is the Slam Dunk competition, which is part of the NBA Blacktop mode. This mode targets the more casual players who might just want a quick and arcadey pick-up game rather than play out a full-blown sim. With possible series novices in mind, the design team also streamlined the controls to make it easier to play for the first time.
On the other hand, every year the hardcore fans out there expect more and more realism -- the 2K Sports team worked to improve this in several areas. Graphically, they added new Signature Style animations to make the players move just like their real-life counterparts. Where the previous version mainly focused on their shooting animations, this year brings signature dunks, post moves, dribbling, and more. Last year had some jerkiness in the animation and some unrealistic physics (like players turning on a dime), but this year they tried to get a more organic feeling of real momentum and movement.
Each NBA team has been programmed to possess the strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of their real-life counterparts. Players in the game should also run real team plays and react accordingly to the defenses you throw at it. The Spurs will try to dump it in to Duncan often, for example, but then try to pass out of it when he’s double teamed. They also emphasized help defense this year and patched up some of the AI bugs for things like defensive switches. Hopefully, your center will no longer end up at the top of the key guarding the point guard. The computer should be better this year at playing active defense as well, picking the right time to try to strip the ball from you and staying in front of you to prevent easy dribble drives. A major defensive addition this year is the Lock-On D feature, where you can hold down a trigger when facing up the ball-handler man-to-man with a decent defender. When activated, the defender automatically side-steps to stay in front of the dribbler -- a great feature for blunting dribble-drives.
The post game is reworked this year, as it has felt sluggish for a while to the designers. They tried to address that this year by allowing multiple approaches to post offense. It’s not necessarily all about Shaq-like power shoving now, as those with more quickness or inside moves can also get it in the basket using their skills. On the defensive side, they patched up some of the glitchy things that made it difficult to defend down low, like how swatting at the ball automatically allowed the ball handler to blow right by you.
Last year there was a noticeable gap between the 360 and PS3 versions, which was mostly caused by the team’s unfamiliarity with the PS3. This year’s versions should be much closer in performance, and the frame rate should be noticeably improved across the board for all platforms, whether online or not. The online play this year will support the maximum amount of players each platform allows per game: 10 for PS3 and 8 for Xbox 360. You can play co-operatively online too, so you can share the thrill of victory with your friends.
In this year’s Association franchise mode, they have added the concept of "playable injuries" where you can try to activate players who are partially healed. Want to try to get Oden back in action this year? Go right ahead, but you’ll risk re-injury. In the off-season, there is now a bidding war for free agents instead of just picking them from a pool, and there will also be more contract options to negotiate, like no-trade clauses. Another new feature is the concept of Franchise Goals, where you earn points to buff up your team by meeting criteria like "winning the division".
For those times you want to sim that game against the Bobcats instead of playing it out, there’s the Hoopcast Simulator, where you can control your sim through an interface similar to sports websites’ gamecasts. Player personalities will also come into play in the Association mode. If the starters don’t get their burn, their morale will drop, and they will even start playing worse if their pouting goes on long enough. It can even affect your team’s chemistry and morale as a whole. When that happens, maybe it’s time to give Isiah Thomas a call.
One of the more interesting discussions during the meeting involved how the development team tries to balance the sim aspects of the game with the desires of casual players. You can’t have every trip down the court end in crowd-pleasing dunks, but you can’t have all lay-ups either; most NBA games don’t have that many dunks at all. To try to follow a middle path pleasing all camps, they try to make each game of 2K8 have more highlight-reel moments than your run-of-the-mill game in real life, but not excessively so. We’ll get to see how well they balanced things this week for ourselves, when NBA 2K8 comes out for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
