Extra Time
Thursday, September 10, 2009
After writing one of our most-discussed features last year on the problems that kept NBA 2K9 from being a truly great game of basketball, I thought I should take this opportunity to say something about where the NBA 2K series seems headed after trying out Draft Combine, so here are the impressions that we couldn't fit into the roundtable:
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I look at Visual Concepts' NBA 2K10: Draft Combine as a sort of extended "rental" that lets people preview the game for more than month before the retail release actually hits stores.
In that light, NBA 2K10: Draft Combine is a great value at $5 -- even if it lacks any sort of long-term re-playability -- because players are definitely getting a good, long look at how NBA 2K10 is going to play this October.
Problem is, as someone who's hated the direction the series has taken since NBA 2K7 (more animations, less player control), I'm still not convinced that NBA 2K10 is recommitted to giving gamers that feeling like they are actually controlling their player instead of fighting the game's gratuitous animations every step of the way.
On one hand, Draft Combine's player-lock camera really helps to solidify the immersion of the new "My Player" mode, as it gives you a nice, angled view of the court that's got just the right amount of distance and doesn't obscure too much of the court. But on the other hand, simply moving your player where you want him to on that court remains a huge frustration for the series.
Take Draft Combine's familiar "shooting" drill, for instance: while this event should be all about nailing the timing of your player's jump shot, the real challenge comes from fighting the game's awkward dribbling animations as you try to position your player so that his feet are firmly behind the three point line but still close enough to create a makeable shot.
The footwork issues in Draft Combine's "shooting" drill point towards a central problem in the recent direction of the NBA 2K series: while the games have captured a lot of the sport's glitz (the beautiful shooting and dunking animations), 2K still has a lot of work to do when it comes to representing basketball's core fundamentals.
For instance, I'm still extremely bothered by the lack of basic, pass catching animations in Draft Combine. Ten years later, players in NBA 2K still cannot do something as simple as catching a pass in stride and continuing along their established path; instead, the game reuses the same awkward animations where players come to a complete stop after catching a pass or take an extra two or three steps away from the basket. As smooth as some of the new passing animations are, it amazes me that 2K's developers still haven't figured out how to animate the whole "catching" part of pass equation the properly.
Another thing that continues to bug me about 2K basketball is how much of the on-court action is automated by the CPU. On both sides of the ball, the CPU frequently jerks your player around the court instead of leaving him entirely under your command (try setting the controller down for a second on defense and notice how the CPU takes over and plays the game for you); these subtle CPU movements happen anytime you're not pressing a button, and on defense, they can really screw you up since Draft Combine
The left trigger just seems completely broken in seems to lack a functional "face the ball" button, requiring you to play almost exclusively with the analog stick to keep your assignment from blowing right by you. Draft Combine, as it consistently puts your player in bad defensive position with crazy CPU-controlled movements instead of simply doing its job and positioning your player between his man and the ball. 2K even managed to screw up the left trigger when it comes to box outs, as it now automatically pulls your player down below the free throw line if you try to box out a man who's standing along the perimeter.
These issues all speak to aspects of the defensive game that don't seem to be affected by the low player ratings of the Draft Combine players. But what about the game's horrible help defense and bad pick-and-roll logic? These problems have been in the last couple of 2K games, and we still don't know if the low player ratings of Draft Combine are to blame or if the player logic itself is simply as bad as it was last year.
Bottom line is, I hope some of these CPU defensive "assists" can be turned off for NBA 2K10, otherwise, it will (once again) be a major headache to keep your opponent off the score sheet.
If you asked me to rate the quality of basketball being displayed on NBA 2K10: Draft Combine's courts, I'd give it a 7/10. There's definitely some opportunities to tweak the game before it goes gold, but it remains to be seen whether 2K will fix some of the series' nagging issues or we're just going to get another game of "HORSE" that's encumbered by its animations and ships with a number of key defensive issues.
-- Jayson Young
Monday, August 3, 2009
The atrocity that is Ubisoft's upcoming Turtles in Time: Reshelled being a prime example of what's wrong with modern game design philosophy.
Darker =/= better.
Grittier =/= better.
More "realistic" =/= better.
Why can't games be colorful and cartoony anymore? It's like that sort of thing has become a complete taboo in the industry.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Between all the
"MOMMA THERE GOES THAT MAN!"
and
"KNOCKDOWN SHOOTER"
nonsense, these NBA playoff telecasts have felt like ESPN/ABC are just taking the same commentary track and rerunning it every game.
At least Jeff Van Gundy keeps it fresh and relevant with his color work.
Mark Jackson, on the other hand, just recycles the same stupid catchphrases night after night.
ABC/ESPN either needs to tell him to get some new material or just get another color guy who's more than a one-trick pony.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Kellogg's remarks seem to provide no real insight during the games, and all of his comments and enthusiastic remarks seem forced and unnatural; it's like he's trying too hard to develop an on-air "personality."
Kellogg was pretty good as a studio guy, so I don't understand why CBS would bump him out of there and into the lead analyst role next to Jim Nantz.
I miss Billy Packer.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Posted on November 19, 2008 at 09:05 PM.
With today's release of NCAA Basketball '09, the end of the '09 sports season is now officially upon us.
With it, come all the lessons we learned from the success stories (NHL '09) and the unforgettable failures (both EA Football games, NBA 2K9) that made up our year of sports gaming.
So as we think about where the sports genre should go in 2010, and what exactly the members of next year's class need to do to be considered a "success," here are five key areas that could determine which games make the "Dean's list" and which games get sentenced to "academic probation."
1. Turning online leagues into something more than a glorified ladder system
As exciting as watching a live sporting event can be, the thing that makes sports a big enough deal for television stations to cover it 24/7 is the drama that sports create off the field.
The debates over which team's the best, who deserves to go to what bowl, which conference is the toughest, which player deserves the MVP, etc. are all questions that sports fans preoccupy themselves with just as much, if not more, than the games that generate (and answer) those questions.
Though a few recent video games have tried, no developer to date has been able to create the type of off-the-field drama that keeps people immersed in the "real" world of sports for more than just the weekend of the big game.
Here's what's been tried so far:
- EA's NCAA and Madden games on the PS2 and Xbox that had the computer automatically generate newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and radio shows based on what was happening around the league.
- 2K's NFL 2K5 (Xbox/PS2) and College Hoops 2K8 (Xbox 360/PS3) both had virtual versions of real-life sports analysts hosting weekly shows that recapped all the scores and highlights from the games of the week.
While these features were all great starts, it's surprising that the developers at EA and 2K have not tried to take these ideas to the next level in any of their recent sports titles.
In terms of adding a little SportsCenter-style drama into our video games leagues, the best tool we really have right now is 2K's newly renovated league websites, which provide all kind of stats, standings, boxscores, and league news on a professional-looking homepage.
But as nice as 2K's league websites look, they force the users to generate the most interesting types of content themselves by writing articles, uploading videos, and posting content to the league page.
Because leagues that do put in that extra effort to create their own "drama" are rather rare, it would be a huge benefit for online leagues if sports developers could finally program a game that was smart enough to create its own recaps and make its own highlights of the games as they're being played, so that the users could watch daily, weekly, even yearly highlights of their leagues like they would during a "real" season of their favorite sport.
EA has the ESPN license, and 2K has their own set of personalities, so why not make full-use of those likenesses by programming a game that can create "SportsCenter" episodes and cover the drama of our leagues with the same level of detail that we see in a television broadcast?
Imagine:
Watching a virtual College Gameday crew broadcast their weekly show from your campus, then booing a virtual Lee Corso as he slams your mascot's head into the ground and picks the visiting team to win.
2. Making the virtual "us" look more like the real "us"
Nothing excites me more about the future of sports gaming than seeing how franchises like FIFA, NHL, and NBA 2K/NBA Live are finally giving players the option of completely removing the AI from the game and replacing it with human friends or foes.
In fact, I hope that this year was only the beginning of a genre-wide movement that eventually culminates in having entire leagues of human players, with not a single line of AI code in sight.
But as great as it is to have your friends playing alongside you, the experience is often cheapened by the fact that the virtual representation of you and your friends just don't look anything like "the real thing."
That's why I'm expecting next year's crop of sports games to step-up it's level of customization.
With the power of today's consoles, there is no reason why we should still be limited to the same handful of pre-set team logos/arenas/uniforms that we all got used to back in the days of the PS2 and the Xbox.
While a few sports games have made huge strides in specific areas of player/team customization, no single game has yet to pool all of its competitor's ideas together into a single, powerful set of creation tools.
I hope that some member of the 2010 class finally achieves the goal of giving gamers an ultimate player/team builder that lets us create players and teams who really look like us, not just hideous-looking cavemen sporting predetermined uniform/logo combinations so bad that they wouldn't even cut it in the NBDL.
Imagine:
The logo editor of Backbreaker, combined with the uniform editor of All Pro Football 2K8, and the Tiger Woods create-a-player system (complete with face-mapping technology).
3. Extending the possibilities of online team play
With massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft bringing millions of gamers to its online servers, it surprises me that no sports game this year outside of NHL '09 attempted to introduce the concept of "persistent online characters" into the sports genre.
Then again, if EA and 2K's servers can't even handle the traffic of the 100,000 or so people who play games like NHL '09 and NBA 2K9 without frequently crashing, freezing, or causing game-ending network errors, maybe there's a reason why sports games haven't brought the size of their game worlds up to par with Warcraft just yet.
Still, if the sports developers could actually get their servers to handle the weight of a hundred-thousand or so connections, I feel like the potential for a Warcraft-like level of success is certainly there.
Just replace "guilds" with "teams," "mages" and "warriors" with "point guards" and "power forwards," and I have no doubt that the players would start flocking to the servers and join together to start the quest for "the one (championship) ring."
While I don't think any of us would like to see RPG elements such as having player performance based on how much "gear" you own or how high your "experience level" is, it would be interesting to have players competing in a "fictional marketplace" for things like salaries and endorsements.
Now that would give us a reason to bring back the "Crib" feature.
Bottom line: EA Canada's NHL '09 has set the standard for online team play, now it's up to all members of our 2010 class to raise their game to NHL '09's level.
Imagine:
Beating out 150 other players for the NBA scoring title, out-hitting 15 other safeties and earning a trip to the Pro Bowl, becoming the highest paid shortstop in the league and being the first guy to install an Olympic-sized swimming pool in your backyard.
4. Pre- and post-release support for games via developer interaction with customers
It is undeniable that, in the business of gaming, both the companies and the customers benefit from bouncing ideas off each other.
The recent entries into EA series like Madden and NBA Live, are all great examples of games that improved (in terms of quality and sales) because the developers tweaked their products in response to the issues that their customers were having.
This type of interaction not only results in a greater product for the customers, but it also helps the company build its reputation with those customers, as it makes the customers feel like they have a say in how the games they play ultimately pan out.
The problem sports gamers are experiencing right now is that:
a) not all developers are on board with this plan
b) the developers that are directly involved with the customers often have limits on the amount of changes they can "afford" to make to their products on a yearly basis.
Imagine:
Developers that actually update and re-balance their games on a weekly basis like Valve or Blizzard do for their PC games.
5. Games that actually work as advertised
As great as it is for developers to be improving their games year-round via patches and updates, game companies really need to stop leaning so heavily on their customers to act as their “beta testers.”
Games should always be playable from day one, and not have to be patched a month or two later before the games actually work as advertised.
Reason being, as important as having a great game with great features is, none of that actually matters if the game or the features within the game don’t actually work like they're supposed to (you hear that, NBA 2K9?).
This year in particular, it seemed like none of the major sports games shipped without having some sort of critical technical issues that brought the enjoyment of the game down a couple levels, if not completely.
Just to name a few of the chief culprits:
NCAA '09
- Broken sliders
- Numerous bugs related to roster editing/sharing
- Online dynasties crashing
Madden '09
- No CPU sliders
- Direct-snap glitch that temporarily ruined the game’s competitive balance online
- Frequent freezing/crashing in franchise mode
- Broken player progression in franchise mode
- An absurd amount of minor bugs/glitches ranging from frustrating to hilarious
NHL '09
- the “dirty disc” error that could only be “sometimes” fixed by clearing your cache
- constant freezing in community lobbies
- frequent difficulty connecting to opponents during EASHL club games
- the now-infamous “face-off glitch” that causes online games to lock up (a holdover from last year’s game)
NBA 2K9
- a number of broken, non-functional cameras, including the series’ signature “2K cam.”
- new 5 vs. 5 mode unplayable because of lag
- free-throw glitch that makes timing the first free-throw a total guessing game (back from NBA 2K8, even though it was eventually patched in that game)
- servers still prone to game-ending network errors and frequent down-time (2K games have been doing this since the Dreamcast days)
- lots of issues with rosters, including an inability to save them, certain rosters causing the game to freeze, etc.
The sad thing is that the issues I've listed here are limited strictly to technical errors, and when developers have to spend their time stamping out technical bugs, the important stuff like gameplay exploits never even gets to be addressed in the limited "two patches per game" cycle that most sports developers seem to follow.
Imagine:
Paying $60 for a game that actually works out of the box.
That's what I'm looking for in 2010; what about you?
Sound off in the space below, and let everyone know exactly what it is that you've got your eyes on in 2010.
-- Jayson Young
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