why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's "gameplay"?

[Hustle Westbrook]

Re: why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's "gameplay"?

16 felt way more grounded and the players had a bit of weight to them. 17 and 18 has a floaty feel to it, sort of like you're playing on the moon.

Another thing is the ball tangibility. People always complain about "bump steals" but I LOVED the ball tangibility in 16. It made playing on-ball D so much fun! You had to respect the other players body. That game completely killed the zig-zag nonsense. You try zig-zagging when I'm in your face and the ball is getting knocked loose and it's a turnover.

In 17 and 18 people can bulldoze their way through someone dribble through 3 of my defenders and I can watch the ball go through all of their bodies and not get knocked loose.

[Hellquist]

Re: why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's "gameplay"?

I played 2K16 to death like the previous 2Ks I bought (13, 14, 15), but cannot stand 2K17 and 2K18 without raging and not playing for months. I haven't played 2K18 since May and that wasn't the case with the other 2Ks where I would be in my 3rd or 4th MyLeague season right now, but I haven't done this in forever. You can play defense on 2K16. All of the AI deficiencies were not there on 2K16. The AI isn't perfect on the game, but the legacy issues weren't as bad and they're weren't things that irritated me.

I still think 2K16 is the GOAT 2K of this generation so far. Nothing has touched it since.

[Jrocc23]

Re: why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's "gameplay"?

People aren’t just bringing up these games out of nowhere. 2K16 was really a good game. It definitely had issues and people did cheesy dribbles (mainly the shot gather i.e. Curry’s back into a dribble move) but the defense was nice. It was a solid game.


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[jyoung]

Re: why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's "gameplay"?

2K16 after the breakstarter patch is still the best version of pro am that 2K's put out to date.

Once they patched that hail mary Daunte Culpepper to Randy Moss BS out of 2K16, the only remaining cheese was:

-- Layups & dunks were too easy to interrupt with a clean strip animation that rarely resulted in a reaching foul, due to everyone having the gold pick pocket badge.

-- The "change your shot in mid-air" circus layups went in too frequently, due to everyone having the gold acrobat badge.

-- It was too easy to pass out of jump shots, due to everyone having the gold flashy passer badge.

-- Performing right stick dribble moves did not take away any of your stamina, allowing people to dribble with a full stamina meter for the entire offensive possession, so long as they didn't touch their turbo button.

-- That Stephen Curry hop shot animation was responsible for some annoying left-right-left-right BS when it should have forced you to pickup your dribble if you didn't shoot or pass after the first gather step. Hop shots can still be cheesed like this in 2K18.

-- The LaMarcus Aldridge jumpshot was somehow the best one in 2K16, even though it doesn't resemble his real life form at all. This cheeser base still has not been correctly rebuilt as of 2K18.

-- Off-ball charges were too easy to take in the paint. But nowadays, I would actually prefer having that 2K16 problem compared to the issue that 2K18 created where big men can just turbo into the paint and push their defender backward to gain position directly underneath the rim for an easy dunk/layup. At least in 2K16 there was some balance to that off-ball charge cheese, as the offensive player would never get called for a charge if he didn't have the turbo button held down.

That relatively brief list comprises all of the bad parts that I can remember from 2K16 pro am. Most of my memories from that year are positive:

-- Everyone with a 2K16 account had a permanently saved pro am court with its own record and ranking. You didn't have to delete your pro am team just to go play on a friend's team like you do in 2K18. All you had to do was join your friend's mycourt, which is a much faster and more efficient method than 2K18 has with its silly, unnecessary rule that prevents team owners from playing on anyone else's team, and its cumbersome free agency system that no one ever uses for its intended purpose (to scout new teammates).

-- In 2K16 it only took me a week or two to get all of the badges on one MyPlayer and earn enough VC from those play sessions to upgrade his attributes to a level that would be competitive online. I can remember having so much leftover VC in 2K16 just from playing lots of Pro Am that I was able to purchase tons of celebration animations and clothes without ever having to worry about my VC balance. 2K18's anti-fun, anti-consumer, pro-corporation game design ensures that your MyPlayer will always be poor and VC-hungry, regardless of how many games you play. And in 2K18's inferior MyPlayer system you don't even get to choose how to upgrade your player's attributes like you could in 2K16. There are several archetype combinations in 2K18 that will force you to spend hundreds of hours leveling all the way up to 95 or 96 overall just to unlock enough predetermined attribute points to finally get contact dunks or pro dribble animations on your character; that's some ultra-thick timesink BS compared to the attribute-building freedom that 2K16 offered.

-- Differences in the speed, athleticism, & skillset ratings felt more noticeable on the court in 2K16 than they do in 2K18. And if you chose to sacrifice height for better speed/stealing/shooting/passing/dribbling ratings in 2K16, then it seemed like you had a more tangible on-court advantage in those categories compared to taller players at your position. 2K16 is the last game where I truly felt like it was worth making smaller players at certain positions. And even in the instances where there were only a few inches of height separating similarly positioned players (I had a 5'7" and a 5'10" point guard that year), you could still feel a big difference in how those characters played.

-- Most of the flashy passes in 2K16 were quick to animate and were actually useful for fooling defenders in competitive games. 2K18, on the other hand, has a bunch of needlessly long, easy to intercept flashy pass animations, making that badge completely useless on playmaking archetypes.

-- Alley oops had an even balance in 2K16 between the ease of completing them vs. the ease of intercepting them. 2K18 did a poor job of balancing alley oops by making them too hard to complete, even when the passer is a playmaker, the receiver is a slasher, and the person trying to breakup the play doesn't have any kind of defensive archetype.

-- All of the dribble moves in 2K16 were fluid and responsive. You wouldn't have some useless walking sizeup animation or a random hand-switching animation interrupt your dribble combos like you see in every possession of 2K18.

-- The basketball was a lot more tangible and prone to coming loose during body/limb collisions in 2K16, so you couldn't just carelessly dribble through Casper the Friendly Defender with reckless abandon like you can in 2K18. To become an elite dribbler in 2K16, you had to memorize the exact amount of spacing that was required for every move in your arsenal if you didn't want to lose the ball by dribbling it off a defender's body/limbs. There was a true risk/reward to performing right stick dribble moves in 2K16 that no longer exists due to how much ghosting, warping, and clipping 2K18's basketball physics allow.

-- Ankle breakers and brick wall screens could trigger stumble/fall down animations, but they were appropriately rare moments. I played several hundred pro am games at point guard and center in 2K16 and I can't remember getting more than a dozen total ankle breakers/brick walls that year.

-- Gold was the highest badge tier in 2K16, so there were no cheeseball hall of fame badges or Super Saiyan grand badges. This shrunk the floor spacing (compared to how wide HOF limitless range can spread the court), and it significantly lessened the number of SportsCenter top 10 highlight plays that you'd see per game. When spectacular plays happened in 2K16, I would get legitimately hyped, whereas in 2K18, there are just so many ankle breakers/contact dunks happening in a single game of pro am that these "spectacular" plays are just boring, routine occurrences.

-- Basing your offense around three-point shooting was a big gamble in 2K16, since its outside shooting percentages were a lot more realistic than 2K17's and 2K18's; sharpshooters in those latter two games can make 70% to 80% of their threes from as far out as 30 feet. It was actually harder to make threes in the original NBA Jam than it has been these last two years in NBA 2K pro am.

-- 2K16's inside bigs couldn't trigger standing contact dunks like they can in 2K18, and bigs actually had reliable hook shots and fadeaways in 2K16, making post play more skilled back then than it is today. The only "post move" that you need nowadays is turbo shoving your way underneath the rim so that you can catch the ball and pump fake until you know that you'll be able to trigger a standing dunk animation.

So shoutout to 2K16 for being BY FAR the most FUN, BALANCED, and SIM year of pro am:

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[cthurt]

Re: why are there a lot of players who prefer 2k16's &quot;gameplay&quot;?

If 2k19 has the same feel gameplay wise as 2k18 I know I will be sticking to 2k16 for another year, from the early videos it still looks like 2k18 animation wise but hopefully the player movement is a lot tighter and players actually feel like they have weight to them, the Prelude will tell me all I need to know before I purchase 2k19.