NBA 2K18 Gameplay Blog
1 HOUR AGO · PUBLIC
Hey, 2K fans! It’s been another very busy year for us over here at Visual Concepts but we’re so excited to finally be able to share some of the upgrades to gameplay that you can expect next month when you pick up NBA 2K18. Let’s go!
THE FEEL OF THE GAME
The first thing we looked at after we wrapped NBA 2K17 was movement. From the original NBA 2K until NBA 2K17, we’ve always had an “animation-driven” motion system. So the feel of the game was largely dictated by the types of animations we captured and which animations fired off for a given input or context. This approach has served us well over the years but has also presented some significant challenges as well. Player differential, precise & consistent movement, general responsiveness, and an “animation-heavy” feel were some of those challenges in past games. Sometimes you’d want to take a step to the side but end up taking two. Sometimes your player would explode on a first step, sometimes he’d slowly ramp up depending on which animation triggered. Sometimes a slower player could gain an advantage against a faster player just because he had a favorable animation. These were the kinds of problems we knew we wanted to address this year.
Some of our top engineers spent the entire dev cycle working on a new motion engine and it turned out to be a huge game changer. To put it simply, movement is no longer driven by animations in NBA 2K18. Now, the stick input and a player’s attributes are the sole components driving how your character moves around the court. This gave us the ability to control exactly how quickly a given player can accelerate, decelerate, cut, and turn, as well as his speeds for different states (walking, running, shuffling, sprinting, etc.) simply based on his attributes. The new motion engine then takes this data and dynamically finds and stitches together the animations it needs, in real time, to animate the character. Nothing is canned, nothing pre-determined, everything is done on the fly. The results are night and day and something you’ll notice as soon as you pick up the sticks this year. Movement with and without the ball is way more consistent and predictable, which impacts the play on the court in just about every facet on both offense and defense. We’ve even implemented new movement sliders, so you guys can customize acceleration and speed of the ball handler or offball players if you prefer a quicker or slower paced game.
Nothing is canned, nothing pre-determined, everything is done on the fly.
In fact, if I had to pick one word to describe what we wanted to achieve from a high-level with gameplay this year, it would be: FEEL. It started with movement but we also took a hard look at every aspect of the on-court play and did our best to fix any issues we could find in which the gamer felt out of control or that his player was doing something he didn’t ask for. For the most part, it was cleaning up legacy issues, plugging holes in some of our features, and adding polish. But I think 2K vets will notice the difference this year and appreciate how far we’ve come in one short year to put the control back in your hands.
SKILLS STILL MATTER
Last year I mentioned how much we focused on the skill of the gamer being king in deciding who wins and who loses. With NBA 2K18, that focus remained but definitely evolved from last year. I think the main course of the evolution was defining what “skill” meant. Last year, NBA 2K17 put a very large focus on stick skills. And while that focus was good, it also took away from some of the aspects that traditionally make 2K gameplay so great.
With shooting for example, last year we introduced shot aiming and put a heavy emphasis on shot timing deciding makes and misses. The unfortunate side effects to some of these changes were that it became very difficult for us to balance the “stick skill gap” between new users and pro gamers, as well as across the various archetypes. So in many ways, it ended up de-valuing player attributes, defensive impact, and all of the other factors that go into shot success. So we took a step back and looked at the pros and cons of NBA 2K17’s shooting system compared to how we’ve done things in past games and married the best ideas together to create a new system for 2K18. This year I think we’ve struck a great balance between the importance of stick skills and basketball IQ. Now more than ever, it’s important to take high percentage shots with the right types of players, while also mastering your player’s release. We removed shot aiming, implemented a new shot meter positioned vertically near your player’s upper body to improve visibility, and added improved Shot Feedback information that shows your release timing and the coverage of your shot (Smothered, Heavily Contested, Lightly Contested, Open, Wide Open.) Green releases are still in the game but aren’t solely based on release timing. Without going into detail on how everything works under the hood, I’ll just say that the design for Excellent Releases is much smarter than before and can say with confidence that “Green hunting” won’t be a problem this year… something our focus groups and playtests have confirmed. And yes, as you may have heard, you can customize the fill color of your shot meter (White, Team Color, Black, Gray, Red, Yellow, Cyan, Blue, or Magenta.) And as some of you requested, you can also access the Jump Shot Creator for NBA players this year for more customization over the league.
We removed shot aiming, implemented a new shot meter positioned vertically near your player’s upper body to improve visibility, and added improved Shot Feedback information that shows your release timing and the coverage of your shot (Smothered, Heavily Contested, Lightly Contested, Open, Wide Open.) Green releases are still in the game but aren’t solely based on release timing.
Staying on the skills topic, let’s talk about some of the other new tools at your disposal on offense.
A few more really nice additions to shooting. We got feedback from the community gameplay dev session that “load ups” were too heavy when trying to get up quickly for jump shots. It took us a bit to figure out exactly what they were talking about, but right after the dev session, we labbed a bit and made some significant changes to how we do pull-up jumpers. Pulling up off the dribble or shooting off the catch now feels WAY more responsive. So big shout out and thanks to DmanUnt2014, MarioHTXX, and DayBoyDimez for bringing that to our attention. We also augmented the pull-up jumper game with some new shot types. This year when you hold Sprint and move the Pro Stick in the same direction of your movement when driving laterally, you’ll get these really nice (and explosive) hop jumpers. Holding in the opposite direction of your drive will trigger these cool snatchback jumpers. You can also do both of these shots by tapping the Shot Button and holding your Left Stick in the proper direction. And one of my favorite additions to the layup system is control over driving cradle layups. I don’t know why I like them so much. Maybe because it was one of Jimmy Butler’s go to moves (yes, I’m crying inside.) Anyway, to do cradle layups, drive to the basket and hold the Pro Stick back and away toward your ball hand (or double tap the Shot Button while holding the Left Stick back and away toward your ball hand.) They’re great for knifing through traffic and protecting yourself from getting stripped. One last note about layups, the layup packages were reworked a bit as well. Now you can equip the following packages:
- Circus: Kyrie Irving type “jelly” layups.
- Crafty: Steph Curry scoop layups, around the back finish, etc.
Euro Specialist: The perfect package for Dwyane Wade & Tank: Modeled after strong athletic finishers like LeBron.
- Euro Specialist: The perfect package for Dwyane Wade.
- Explosive: Designed for long jumpers who can explode off of a Launchpad like Russell Westbrook.
- Floater Specialist: Lots of nice quick teardrops a la Tony Parker or D-Rose.
- Long Athlete: Great for long swings like the Giannis “Greek Freak” Antetokounmpo.
- Tank: Modeled after strong athletic finishers like LeBron.
- Unathletic Small: Don’t want to name names, but we all know the kinds of guys that deserve this package.
- Then of course the traditional default smalls, swings, and bigs packages.
shyt looked realistic.
....im still waiting to see wat they gonna do with park 
