The two big mistakes of NBA2k23 - spinoff's Blog

spinoff's Blog

The two big mistakes of NBA2k23

Posted on September 16, 2022 at 01:13 PM.

It was in 1999, I was leaving high school to go to the new video game store. And there it was, the DreamCast with this game that had particularly marked me by its choice of a camera and its desire to be a very realistic game: NBA2k. It's been more than 20 years and I still play NBA2k. The new features of NBA2k23 excited me so much that I wanted to get more involved. I bought it as a pre-order and went back to the Operationsport forum to talk to the community and report bugs... a lot of bugs... (more than 15) This is the first problem. But while browsing the Operationsport forum, I understood that there was another problem.

The community split in two.

During the years 2000-2015, the game was evolving very fast from year to year and this didn't shock the community, on the contrary we were all excited to see if the limits of the game were pushed. We didn't all agree on the developers' choices, but we all wanted to have the most complete and realistic basketball game possible. And for the casual player, would you say? There were two distinct modes based on sliders: Arcade and simulation. Today, I make a completely different observation. There are two communities that are not looking for the same thing. And what about the casual gamers? They don't even have an arcade mode anymore. And that's the major problem with NBA2k, it's trying to satisfy 3 audiences at the same time with the same gameplay: it's impossible.

The best demonstration is the shot timing. In the last few years, great features were thought to make the shooting authentic and very interesting. Unfortunately, this year everything has disappeared and I find myself with an ultra basic system and robotic ball animations : I know in advance if the ball goes into the basket or not, because the curves are always the same: a deep regression. What a waste of time. The MyPlayer mode is to blame. This mode has made balancing the shot timing very difficult. Very difficult? No. Impossible... some gamers will play more than 100 hours with the same shooting animation, while other gamers play 100 hours with several different teams: how could you think that it was possible to make a single shooting system for 2 totally different experiences? How?! But this is not the only problem.
When you waste your time changing the shooting system every year, it is time that is not going to develop something else.

The mode myERA reveals many technical bugs.

myERA is clearly the game mode that makes NBA2k23 unique. The game mode that brings back the first NBA2k players is now almost 40 years old. The problem is that 2k developers have forgotten what the "simulation" community is all about. The "simulation" community is not going to search for hours for the best animation for their player, they are going to be more interested in the offensive and defensive tactics and the numerous controls offered by the game. However, the offensive tactics menus are either incomprehensible or completely broken. There are 3 menus to change tactics, but the 3 menus are not even able to work properly together. Concerning the game controls, there are also many bugs. It's good the double throws but there are bugs, animations that don't trigger. I will not even talk about the graphical bugs or the bugs in myNBA. By highlighting the myERA mode, 2k has revealed the many features left behind in favor of myplayer. The offensive tactics worked better in the opuses of 3-4 years ago.[/u]

So what I would like to say to 2k is that they may be trying the impossible.
You have to create 2 gameplay modes: arcade and simulation (using sliders like before).

You have to create 2 systems of shooting/layup control: one system when you control a team and another system when you control only one player.

Stop XXL content. STOP. Go back to quality and fix those bugs that sometimes are several years old... even your new right stick shooting system, it's excellent, but I see bugs, latency or inconsistencies every day.

Fix the offensive tactics quickly. You can't leave NBA2k23 like this, not the year of the launching of myERA. It would ruin this beautiful mode. And please, can we have successful shots with more varied curves?

And one last but not least thing from a first time fan.... Make me skateboard? Seriously?...

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Comments

# 1 spinoff @ Sep 16

I don't know how to write English or even speak it. I tried to write this blog despite my poor knowledge and with the help of software. It was a difficult exercise for me, I hope that I am understandable and that I will be read.