“Let’s say you start this little cool move and you want to break out at that moment in time,” Jones says. “The animation had launched and there were specific branch points where you could get out, but as a user, you wanna get out when you want to get out. This year, we took all of that — what we felt like — canned stuff and was (sic) like look: ‘as a user, you can still recreate it.’ The animations that make up that guy’s dribble package, are signature. But if you wanna create that situation that he specifically does, it’s on your stick skills.”

That emphasis on a user’s “stick skills,” specifically how they’re able to move their player in a fashion similar to how they would in real life, is now augmented. You are controlling all of the player’s movements instead of just most of them. There’s no jumping off point where you’re left the manipulations of what they’ve already programmed for that player at that time in the game.

Most games only do release stuff on jump shots. Jones compared it to pulling a bow and arrow: you pull it back to the right tension and then release it. That release timing has always been there for NBA 2K jump shots, but now they’ve added aim, so “you can actually aim left-right on the shots.”