Having reviewed the NBA 2K series for the last couple of years, I was interested to ask the producers of NBA 2K18 if they’d made any improvements to some of the areas which I felt needed some work in last year’s game.
Being a fan of the MyCareer mode, I spend quite a bit of time in there trying to level up my MyPlayer character. One thing I thought could be improved was a tightening off off-court responsibilities between actual games — the MyCareer mode continually asks you to perform other tasks like signing endorsement deals or hanging out with teammates. Ben Bishop, Senior Producer of NBA 2K18, had this to say about that criticism.
“One of the key themes for us this year is playing the way that you want to play. There are still all of those other things, you still get endorsement deals — you’re working with your agent on variety of different deals, you still have to go to practice if you want to make your player better, but now you can do it when you want to,” Bishop said.
“We’re not kind of pulling you along; you’re deciding what you want to do. If you just want to play games then you can go into an NBA game and finish that up, and straight from the locker room you can go right into the next one. You can upgrade your player from there so if you feel like, ‘Well I don’t want to go back and wander around the Neighborhood, or I don’t want to go back to practice right now, I just want to play a few more games,’ you can do that.”
I followed up this question asking Bishop about last year’s introduction of player archetypes. And how training drills were not always suited to your players archetypes skill set. You would often fail drills because the game would ask you to perform tasks your player was not specialised in.
“That has changed quite a bit. First of all now you get to create a secondary archetype, and so you can get more specific in terms of what type of player you want to create,” Bishop explained.
“Now what I think is really cool is that first of all no matter where you are playing you’re going to earn towards your badges and toward making your player better within that archetype. Whether it is ProAM games, whether it is MyPark games, or whether it is NBA games.
“I think the second big piece to that is when you do go to practice you get to decide what it is you want to focus on in that practice. So if you’re a sharpshooter and you just want to work on your outside shooting, then you can work on those specific drills. It’s no more ‘Today we’re doing this, and also this – which has nothing to do with your archetype,’ now you get to pick. But at the same time even if you are a sharpshooter, but you want to work on something like your defence then you can do that too. It’s really again going back to the way that you want to play, it’s all in your hands now.”
We’ll have more on NBA 2K18 this week, including what happened after the title’s cover athlete, Kyrie Irving, was traded.
Stevivor was flown to New York to preview NBA 2K18 as a guest of 2K Games.
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