The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

[Boilerbuzz]

Reread my post man.

[yellow86]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

Seriously, you're a game developer, it's not that hard if you change it one step at a time instead of completely ignoring certain aspects and modes and constantly focus on new modes and keep changing controls and aspects of gameplay - especially going from being more in control like passing to changing it back. The other things I seriously dislike about 2k is making it seem like they've added something new, when it either was in the game all along or they took it out and put it back. 2k should own up to its shortcomings instead of trying to cover it up with Jay-Z, MJ or Lebron modes, soundtracks and things that don't really matter to the core game.

[Boilerbuzz]

The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

Seriously, you're a game developer, it's not that hard if you change it one step at a time instead of completely ignoring certain aspects and modes

Spoken like an industry veteran I assume? How do you know how hard anything is? And there is that "ignore" ranting again.

[luda06]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

This is why sports games should just exist as one game (w updates) versus annualized alphas and betas with roster updates slapped on.

[The 24th Letter]

Good article...

Some of these replies are embarrassing....

[blues rocker]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

i definitely appreciate the complexity of a 2k basketball game. to me, it is probably one of the more complex types of games to pull off successfully...the amount of player interaction and specific animations that go into it are staggering. if you look at the average video game, the amount of movements the characters do are usually pretty limited and simplified: run, punch, clim, shoot, etc. but in 2k basketball, there are so many nuanced movements and contextual animations that other games just don't have to deal with. every year i'm blown away by how well 2k can pull off that level of complexity in movement compared to the average video game.

[cthurt]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

Are Mike Wang and the crew working on both 2k14 for current and next gen, or does 2k have a different development team for both games??

[Sundown]

Sports games have to have the depth of an turn based strategy, the visual quality of a front line FPS, the character development of an RPG, and the balance of an RTS.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

And the realism of a simulator.

[Rensational14]

How about things like

Correct team color accessoires
Saving slider sets
Correct jersey colors

[RyanFitzmagic]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

I think one of 2K's biggest problems (if you can call it that) is that they're amazing at inserting/building upon great, dynamic, complex features, but then the simplest of mechanics are removed (such as saving sliders) or never even seen in the games (changing headband colors, removing a Signature Skill after it's been assigned to a player, etc).

It's not even like I'm really mad about those exclusions. It's just that I know 2K is better than that. I'm more mystified than anything.

[Sundown]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

I think one of 2K's biggest problems (if you can call it that) is that they're amazing at inserting/building upon great, dynamic, complex features, but then the simplest of mechanics are removed (such as saving sliders) or never even seen in the games (changing headband colors, removing a Signature Skill after it's been assigned to a player, etc).

It's not even like I'm really mad about those exclusions. It's just that I know 2K is better than that. I'm more mystified than anything.

Also QA.

A ridiculously complex game with a variety of compelling gameplay mechanics and well engineered systems is often undermined by one or two oversights and exploits-- the weakest links the chain. As a result, it's arcade cheese online most of the time.

The limited number of patches they can put out before being charged on current gen consoles didn't help either. Hopefully that changes moving forward.

[Melbournelad]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

Wait, wait...you mean there are more than one person other than Wang and Jones working on the game?!

Jeez it must get annoying for those guys.....Mike is pretty much the gameplay guru and I remember when he posted here and a Crewbie came in complaining about the lack of crew in game....now we are going to hear it from ASSociation guys....smh....

How about we wait about association news before saying they did nothing and if it remains the same THEN complain ffs....

Wait for Association news? I don't think you understand, in 4 years they have added a barebones TSC. All the issues which are just code related (meaning they should take less time than art related development) are still glaring. There was no mention of it in the features list. The obvious thing to assume would be that it still hasn't been fixed with no mention of it. You don't think 4 years (most likely 5) is being patient? Association players get left out EVERY year. We have been very patient.

[Melbournelad]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

Jones and Wang's group don't do franchise mode. So why assume the groups work the same way and also assume nothing's been done with franchise. It is like you guys want to convince yourself to complain about something. Don't you get tired of operating on ignorance?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

Who does work on "franchise" then? Convince yourself to complain about something? I have never complained about anything in 2k unlike most people until now. Because all the issues which you would of thought would of been fixed a year after they were apparent haven't been. Let alone new features. We just want the basic issues to at least be fixed. It's been like this since 2k9.

[Sovartus]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

After hanging out with the guys at 2K a couple of times, I honestly think they do excellent work with the small amount of time they have to produce a product. They have to prioritize the changes they want to make to gameplay figure out what they want to add to the feature list and hope they don't break something while they are doing it....

In one cycle, they just don't have the time to do "everything" we would like for them to do. Really, those little DVD's can only hold so much information and taking the time to patch stuff in, takes time away from the new dev cycle and costs big money to implement after release. Some of the decisions they make work and others... well, let's just say, they leave us saying... "What tha.... why did they waste time doing that?". At the end of the day, someone, somewhere had been crying for that "WTF? Feature" in the game and so they put it in. All the people, including Mike's group, have some big choices to make each year and have very little time to make it happen. Most of us are big critics until we see what it takes to make it all happen and the small margin for error it carries with it.

[Melbournelad]

Re: The Tough Road of Being a Sports Developer, Featuring Mike Wang

^ I absolutely understand what you are saying, but what about 4 (5?) cycles? Is that not enough time to fix an issue?