For repeat 2K customers used to incredibly small incremental bordering on stingy changes from year to year in the series, the biggest additional features to the NBA 2K series in years were announced this week.
In MyLeague and MyPlayers, teams can now move cities. You’ll be able to change up the team’s name, logo, jersey, and build a new arena. Vindictive Sonics fans can finally smile again or the Lakers haterbase can move them back to Minneapolis. Even cooler about these new features are they clearly thought out some of the finer details. If say you move the Bulls to a west coast city because you want to make the Eastern Conference somehow worse, they will change divisions and other changes will be made to balance out the divisions and conferences.
That said there are some additional features I could see fun to watch the first time and then become tedious, like having to sit through Adam Silver introducing the NBA Draft in NBA 2K15. Let’s continue with the good news, you can skip straight to your draft selection and pray to a higher being you will have the option to skip the 20 plus trade offers if you have a Top 3 draft pick. In other yes finally news, users will be able to build their own draft board and even auto-draft based on that.
As part of the revamped offseason, NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum will introduce the lottery order pick by pick with (likely repetitive) sound bites from reporters analyzing each result. Summer League has also been added to the MyLeague and MyGM offseason and if it’s anything like the real NBA offseason, no one will be watching it.
2K Sports is also attempting to beef up the A.I. and franchises will be labeled into four categories that can change as you play: rebuilding, buying, selling, or contending. Other teams will keep track of when big name players are set to hit free agency and unload players when they see a fit. Expiring contracts are reportedly to be more intelligently leveraged. Fortunately or unfortunately, the A.I. isn’t developed enough for the Knicks to realistically dump their expiring contracts for spare change.
GMs you propose trades to now will factor in their and their coach’s preferences in personnel. Maybe they prefer a defensive presence and you propose Al Jefferson in a trade. The trade offer rating will likely be lower unless you modify Jefferson’s player ratings. A slew of advanced stats for players have been added, individual players’ opposing field goal percentage and their shooting preferences in shot charts.
MyLeague can now also be played online with your friends if you needed a final reason to never leave your house with tons of customization settings including the ability to import a custom roster (40 classic teams will be available including the 00-01 Lakers, 07-08 Celtics, and ’99-00 Jail Blazers) and setting the play progression rates, salary cap, rate of cap inflation, and trade logic. MyLeague online though can only be one season long so maybe there’s hope for daylight.
With all the new 2K options, barring some huge failure like the A.I. being the equivalent of JR Smith, it’s hard to see me not playing NBA 2K16 once it comes out for the foreseeable future.
