I don’t think I’d actually, properly experienced next-gen until I played NBA 2K14 on PS4. It was a slow, creeping realisation.
The experience is akin to the first time you watch a Blu-ray or the first time you hook up your consoles via HDMI rather than composite. You don’t immediately notice a massive improvement; in fact, you may even question why people are raving about the increase in quality. Gradually, you become accustomed to the new way and realise that is is indeed light years ahead. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the old way. It served its purpose and served it well… it’s just been surpassed. With NBA 2K14 on next-gen, everything looks, feels and sounds better. After you’ve played it, you’ll really struggle to go back and play it on current-gen. If you can at all.
You see, NBA 2K14 is not simply a port of the current-gen game. It’s been completely rebuilt for next-gen from the ground up. And not just the engine and players.
It’s everything.
I’m told the development team visited every stadium that hosts NBA games in the US and counted each and every light. Not only that, they measured the distance between them, the colour temperature (in kelvins) of them and even went to the trouble of contacting the manufacturers of said lights to ensure all the specs were accurate. What this means is that every stadium will have a different mood and feel simply based on the lighting. As they do in real life.
Going a step further, with the power of next-gen, the scoreboards and other screens and signs are now actually made of individual, virtual LEDs. The team have taken what was once, simply a flat picture-in-picture screen and painstakingly recreated it, as it exists in the real world. Each LED is its own light source, so they too add to the overall lighting and atmosphere of the arena. What’s more, these LED screens will strobe when the camera pans over them, mimicking a real-world telecast. It all comes together to create a very realistic and impressive set of visuals and that’s just the lighting.
In their quest for perfection, Visual Concepts realised that imperfection plays just as important a role. Cameras will contain dirt and smudges depending on their location, backboards will feature scuffs and marks from previous use and even the rim and net will show wear and tear. In previous NBA 2K games, individual artists would create different textures and materials. While it generally came together well enough, Visual Concepts says that to it, it often felt like the game was lacking a cohesive vision.
With the next-gen version of NBA 2K14, a material library was created, ensuring consistency across the board. An absurd amount of detail has gone into creating these materials, be it the court, jerseys, the ball or even telephones behind the media desk. In one screenshot I could see the smudge of a thumbprint on the monitor of a phone, on the media desk, off court. It’s unlikely a player will ever get to see this while playing, but it goes to show the level and attention to detail the development team have put in. It’s all totally consistent across the board and created specifically for next-gen. Due to the new Eco-motion engine, the team found that old art from previous franchise entries simply didn’t cut it.
The team at Visual Concepts revealed that they faced a conundrum during development. After visually capturing the likenesses of some of the players they realised they had come to an all or nothing cross-roads. The captured players simply looked far too superior to their counterparts that it appeared as though PS4 was playing against PS3. With that, the team set off an an arduous task to capture every NBA player in the league. While they admit they fell short, it wasn’t by much with nearly every player having had their face captured and used in the game. It shows too. Players look incredible and thankfully their movements match their looks.
With the new Eco-motion engine, instead of the game playing mo-capped animations exactly as they were recorded, it can instead create a dynamic and unique animation used the mo-capped information as a base and then applying real world physics and the current situation. In a video of Kevin Durant taking 3-point shots under various conditions, he reacted differently to the shot each time . He’d lean back a little more, land on one foot, take a few steps back and more, simply based on how the opposing man was defending him. Every player will react like this, so when playing, gamers won’t see the same animations over and over. The Eco-motion engine will create unique animations to suit every situation.
Eco-motion has been applied to the ball too. In addition to the ball now being a tangible solid object in the game, it also reacts as it would in the real-world. No longer attached to the players hand like a ball in a string, the ball bounces, spins and reacts as it should. It seems like a subtle difference, but it’s a real game changer. As are the changes in the way players move, especially when it comes to foot-planting. In previous games players would seemingly skate or float around the coat. Their legs would approximate their steps, but it was never 1:1 movement. On next-gen this is no longer the case. Players will only ever move their feet and legs in response to where they need to go. When they plant their feet, they feel solid and when they move there are no wasted or extraneous steps. Like the ball, it may not seem like a game changer, but when you see it in motion it’s very impressive and quite realistic.
NBA 2K14 will be available at launch for both PS4 and Xbox One. It supports the PS4 upgrade program, that allows owners of NBA 2K14 on PS3 to upgrade to the PS4 version for a nominal fee.
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