So, here's the thing with game reviews: most of the time, the reviewer gets about a week with the game. Which, for most types of games, is just about enough time to experience it in its entirety. But with sports simulations, that is usually still not long enough, because so much of the experience is predicated upon the A.I. of the non-player controlled characters; and if that A.I happens to have some really odd, or even completely insane habits, it can be hard to catch without multiple hours of play-through. So it is that, after over an entire year of playing both the Xbox 360 versions and the Xbox One versions of NBA 2K14, I less-than-humbly submit my humble, but nonetheless correct, opinion.
First off I'll give my grade: 5/10.
Sure they look great and all that, but I don't play a supposed basketball simulation for the presentation of it. I play them for a realistic basketball experience, and sadly that is the one thing which 2KSports' bells and whistles have always failed to deliver. I should mention that I played the MyCareer mode almost exclusively, although I did spend some time with the Current-Gen Xbox One 2k14 building my own rosters and playing with them against a few friends and their own superstar rosters. So I guess I'll start there. Both versions of 2k14 have an annoying dependence upon being connected to 2KSports' terrible servers, which often crash or are simply unavailable for a time. Which means, first, that sometimes when you want to play a game mode - even when it's just an offline game mode, which requires no internet connectivity whatsoever - you can't; unless you want to do so at the cost of losing the ability to ever again accrue VC with that game file. And, since VC is the only currency used to unlock legendary players for use, or gear or shoes or anything that you might want to use, it's not really a feasible option. So you basically just have to wait for their servers to reboot or whatever, even though you're just playing the MyCareer mode against computer-controlled A.I sprites. It's stupid, but great news! They carried the terrible idea over to the next iteration of the game, 2k15! Because, apparently, the ability to annoy their customers on a semi-weekly basis is a trait highly valued by the development team over at 2KSports.
Let's move on to the main differences between the two games, beyond the obvious aesthetic "upgrades", since there are way more similarities, which happen to be at the core of why I furiously hate both games with a maddening passion. The biggest change was the shift from a functional, menu based control system in the MyCareer mode. If you wanted to talk to the GM, you went to the menu and chose the option to speak with the GM. It then showed you sit down in his office, and you had a number of options over which you twain might discuss; from expressing displeasure with the coach, to hyping teammates that you really enjoyed playing with. Occasionally, the game would dictate a few options for you - provided that you were an important enough element to the team's success - and the GM would come to you and ask for suggestions about which free agents they should sign or what players they should trade for. All of this worked very well, and allowed you to have a significant impact on the team's roster, even if you weren't actually going out and making the deals yourself.
But with the Xbox One version, they wanted to go in a different direction and tell the story of a rivalry between two competing rookies: your own character, and a fictional player named Jackson Ellis. I enjoyed most elements of this shift, as it made almost everything seem much more dynamic, and I was usually always willing to stay on whatever team happened to draft me through the first contract without any issues. But as the seasons progressed, I realized a gigantic flaw in the design: in attempting to create a more life-like structure and story, 2KSports had sacrificed your ability to control pretty much any aspect of your team. You can no longer proactively speak to the GM, but must wait for the few times per season when you are invited into his office; and even then you are only provided 3 topics over which to converse, after he asks you how you are feeling about the team: "Great," "I want a trade," and "I don't get along with coach". Two of the options will open up a few sub-topics, which basically amount to a screen popping up on a web-browser that says "you are about to leave the current page. Are you sure?" After which you select either "yes" - and you leave the team or the coach is fired - or "no", and everything goes back to how it was. It's rather infuriating that if you don't like the point guard on your team, or the defense that your coach is running (why the hell are we doubling off of Lebron James every time to trap Mario Chalmers at the three point line?) you have absolutely no way to express it; which, in case you aren't aware, is not realistic at all. In the interest of increasing the "immersion" into the life of your created MyCareer player, they also added a few investment opportunities, which amount to some dude pitching you a movie idea or a sports drink; and you either say "yeah" or "nay" to the offer. Not that it matters; even if the investments ever paid off (and after 7 complete seasons playing almost every game, and 3-4 such opportunities every season, not a single one ever has) there is no actual capital invested, so you can't get a return anyway. It's nothing but words, and as the Game of Thrones series so often points out, "words are wind." Or, in the words of Taiwanese slang, "I hear you farting right now."
The biggest, most indefensibly lazy oversight in the Mycareer mode, is that on the Xbox One, free agency does not exist for your player. You could play through the rookie contract, win the NBA Finals every year, make 3 straight All-Star teams, being named MVP of 2 of them, and even be MVP of the entire league one year; and you have no contract negotiations with your current team, nor even the option to entertain offers from other teams. You are automatically signed to the minimum contract by your current team; which means, that if you want to change teams you have to wait for the GM to come and talk to you, and then demand a trade. Which, you may have noticed yourself, means that you can't choose what team you want to play for - you are forced to go to whatever team to which the computer decides to send you. It's an unforgivable oversight; all it would have taken was to test the code once to make sure it worked properly, and 2kSports didn't even bother to do that; instead they rushed out an inferior product just to grab more cash. Dicks.
The last thing I"ll mention in this section of the review is the manner in which rosters are modified. In the Xbox 360 version it was pretty simple: you select "edit rosters," and then trade/release players at your whim. This means that the rosters will be changed forever, but that's okay: who would you rather have on your team, Deshawn Stevenson and J.J. Barea or Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen? For the Current-Gen 2K14, they had what seemed like a brilliant idea: why not allow you to alter and save multiple different rosters, allowing you to load whichever one you wanted? That actually may have existed in previous versions, I'm not sure; I never really messed with it much until 2k14. While it was a good idea, the execution was palpably, and in the case of 2KSports, consistently mismanaged. In order to alter even a single roster, you must first connect to 2K servers and download a previoiusly created roster; there is no official 2K sports roster default which is downloadable, so you have to download one that another player saved. Which is a small oversight, but it still sucks. By far the most egregious oversight is the fact that, in order to play a multiplayer game - even when it's offline - each controller is required to be signed in with an Xbox live profile. Which gets even more annoying when trying to play with a created roster; because you can only actually load rosters that were linked to whichever user account happens to sign on first - even though they are all supposedly saved on the servers. You'd think that maybe they'd let you each at least have access to separate rosters saved under the same account, but nope! One set of rosters only. Which means that if I want to play with a roster that I have built, while my friend plays with a roster he has built, that roster has to be created on my Xbox profile, or I have to create one under his account. What's the goddamn point of having internet connectivity if it's going to be treated like the files are saved on a memory card?
Here's a simple solution: instead of just saving an entire league roster, why not give us the opportunity to save multiple rosters for the same team? So that way, you could have twelve different rosters for your favorite team to choose from at any moment, while the teams you don't really care for would probably only have the original, default roster. Let's say that your favorite team is the Dallas Mavericks (which mine just so happens to be); when you go to the Mavericks, it would then load a list of every Mavericks roster you have saved to your hard drive. The default, your own version of what the greatest team ever might look like, a current roster that would be updated with trades and free agent acquisitions from throughout the season, a "classic Mavs" roster, and whatever else you choose to do. All of these - and any other teams' rosters - would be saved to the hard drive, and thus be available to any account logged on to that specific system. You could also upload them to a server and link them to your profile, if you choose, so that if you are playing at a friend's house and on his Xbox, you would still have access to your own rosters, in addition to whichever ones he has saved onto his own hard drive.
To be fair, I've played the game so much that almost every little detail of it irritates the hell out of me by now, like a friend with whom you've undertaken a mistakenly-far-too-long road trip. "Dude, can we stop at a gas stop; I need to pee?"
"Shut the hell up!"
So I'm going to pass over the minor irritation that is the inability to skip any of the cut-scenes, all of which you have seen at least ten times by your third season (although, god help you if you end up having to play Jackson Ellis' team in a playoff series. You're then forced to sit through about ten minutes of pre-game smack talk, all just to give another In-Game Objective which you have no opportunity to review at any point on any screen; so if you get sick of listening to it and tune out at the wrong moment, you won't have any idea what it is you're supposed to do. Which, again, is simply indicative of a company that cared less about the product than they did about the opportunity to make more money.) Actually, I'm not going to skip that part. It's really damn annoying: you can't review what any of your current objectives are in-game, unless it's the still-active one that displays over your stat line every once-in-a-while. Once again, just a company overlooking the details of the game which may not effect the function-ability of the game, but seriously limit your ability to enjoy the experience.
In the next installment, I'm going to look at some of the issues from which both iterations of the game suffer, and maybe even get into the single most broken aspect of every version of the game which has been released since 2K9: the computer AI, and the irony of calling it intelligence. But that last part might need it's own post; we'll see when we get there.
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