MyLEAGUE Online Improvements
One of my favorite franchise experiences in the game is our MyLEAGUE Online feature. Allowing you to play in a competitive league with up to 29 of your friends/family/enemies, MyLEAGUE Online allows you the opportunity to demonstrate your team building prowess for others to see. For NBA 2K18, we have added some popular community requests to continue building out the feature set for this experience.
– Team Customization/Relocation: League members will now have the ability to customize their teams including creating news identities, uniforms, arenas/courts, etc. League admins will also have the ability to customize CPU teams should you want to create a custom era league of any type.
– Playoff Games Resets: Admins will now have the ability to reset ‘completed’ Playoff games. In the case where a user unexpectedly drops from the game and a result is granted, the admin can now step in and give those two teams another chance to replay that game.
Player Accessory Frequency
Have you ever noticed how it is a toss-up if Rajon Rondo will wear his headband on a given night? Or if Carmelo or CP3 will choose to wear compressions shirts under their jerseys? Over the years, NBA players’ accessories have become part of their signature. They aren’t just tools to help manage the grueling 82-game season, they are also essential elements of their appearance on the court. And either because of need or choice, they decide whether they wear certain accessories on a game-to-game basis.
In NBA 2K18, players will now decide on a per-game basis which of their accessories they will wear on any given night. And because this is MyGM/MyLEAGUE, you can fully customize how much or how little this happens. All 17 accessory slots come with five frequency options (Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Always) that you can customize to determine if a player will ever not wear an accessory, or if he oscillates on his wear frequency.
This is a feature that extends its wings well beyond MyGM/MyLEAGUE, as in-game players in Play Now and MyCAREER will also make use of the feature. Our roster team here at Visual Concepts will follow real-life accessory trends and update frequencies via our roster updates all season long. For some, it may be viewed as a small thing. We view it as an example of the level of detail will strive for to re-create the NBA experience right in your living room.
Improved Searching for Created Teams/Rebrands
We have improved the search logic when searching to find specific created teams/team packages. Your searches will now return hits for Team Name, City Name, or Gamertag. Our experience with this in development is that it makes it much easier to find the content you are looking for, compared to last year, which often omitted results you might have been looking for!
Bookmarking Favorite Creators
As I noted above, there is a passionate community for creating logos, uniforms, courts, team designs, and more. In previous editions of NBA 2K, every time you would want to search for and find a design from a specific community member, it would be a laborious process of remembering the intricate gamertag and then using the in-game keyboard. In NBA 2K18, we now allow you to Favorite/Bookmark your favorite creators providing quicker and easier access to their content than ever before.
Hardship Exception
Injuries happen, there is just no way around it. This year we have implemented support for the NBA’s Hardship Exception. This ‘rule’ allows you to sign an additional player to your roster (above the existing limit) in the event that your team has four players who are injured and have missed at least three regular season games (or one week of calendar time, for people playing shorter seasons). Coupled with the above-noted Two-Way Contracts, you will have a lot of options this year on how to triage your roster in the event disaster strikes. All in the name of authenticity!
Jumpshot Creator
All of the roster editors and draft class creators out there are going to enjoy this one. When editing any player in the league, you will now have the ability to completely customize that player’s jumpshot. This feature takes the elements seen in 2K17’s Jumpshot Creator in MyCAREER and applies them in such a fashion that they are easily editable for every player in the league!
Duplicate Player Picker for Fantasy Drafts
I’m a huge fan of the classic teams we provide inside the game. One of my favorite uses is to include them as playable teams inside MyLEAGUE in an attempt to create an all-classic league. One issue that arises when doing this are the players that appear on more than one team, leading to duplication in the league. When doing a fantasy draft, you will encounter things like Ray Allen appearing twice (’07-’08 Celtics and ’12-’13 Heat) or Danny Ainge (’85-’86 Celtics and ’90-’91 Blazers) or five different Michael Jordans if you included all of the Bulls teams. To alleviate this in NBA 2K18, we have added the ability for you to choose if you want the duplicate players to appear in your league. You can even choose which version of the player you want to keep in the player pool. It always felt weird to me, and I’m pleased to say we have an elegant solution for it this year.
Practice Plays
A long overdue feature, in both MyGM: The Next Chapter and MyLEAGUE, you will now have the ability to Practice Plays with your user controlled teams. Developed by the gameplay team here at Visual Concepts, Practice Plays is a powerful tool that teaches you the proper tactics to succeed on the court. If you consider yourself a true sim player, you will definitely want to practice with your team using this feature.
Player Create Added To MyLEAGUE
NBA 2K18 adds the ability for you to add new created players to your already ongoing MyLEAGUE saves (even midseason). In previous years, all players needed to exist in the roster file prior to starting the game mode. For those of you who like to play along with the real season and keep your roster up-to-date, you will now be able to create and add free agents to the league as needed.
Quick Edit Improvements
NBA 2K17 saw the introduction of the Quick Edit feature, which allowed you to quickly perform edits to players without having to go into Edit Player and back out for each player you wanted to edit. In a post release 2K17 patch, we added the ability for you to also edit player tendencies. In NBA 2K18, we are taking this a step further by allowing you to easily edit all body part durabilities, and more importantly, all badges and their levels for every single player in the league.
New Team Relocation Cities
For 2K18, we have added 10 new cities that you can relocate your team to. Those cities are: Fort Worth (Texas), El Paso (Texas), Albuquerque (New Mexico), Tucson (Arizona), Fresno (California), Long Beach (California), Mesa (Arizona), Virginia Beach (Virginia), Colorado Springs (Colorado), and Raleigh (North Carolina). When you consider things like market size, metropolitan income, and television homes in the market, many of these cities can present a great financial challenge when moving your team to one of these cities in MyGM: The Next Chapter. Are you up to the task?
Improved MyGM Slider Support
Taking a cue from MyLEAGUE, MyGM: The Next Chapter now features a number of new customization options and sliders that can be used to personalize the experience.
Closing Thoughts
I shouldn’t be at this point, but I am continually surprised at how little support other sports games give their franchise modes. I vowed long ago to never let the NBA 2K franchise regress to that mean.
Having had time to reflect back on what Dave, Tim, Barry, Leftos, Yu, and Daniel (take a bow, gentlemen) have accomplished for you all in these modes this year, I feel continually reaffirmed that our direction of Innovation, Authenticity, and Engagement is not only the right path to take, but that it is the ONLY path to take.
Here at Visual Concepts, we believe strongly in the franchise experience. Our management here provides us full support and believes strongly in our ability to provide innovative experiences that, as I said above, are built to delight and entertain. And in turn, you, our fans, have shown TREMENDOUS support of the work we have been able to provide over the last many years.
As I said in this space last year, it’s important to me that you feel we respect your purchase of our product. Your passion and enthusiasm is what drives us. Don’t ever stop giving us ideas, or telling us what you want to see added to the game.
Until next time folks. Enjoy your time with NBA 2K18!
Erick Boenisch aka SimBaller
You’ve fixed everything wrong with 2k17 (or missing), most importantly the practice plays and trading draft rights.
But your support is still really bad
That all sounds pretty great.
But still, like I’ve said for 2 years now…is the actual drafting process fixed? Is that atrocious draft music gone? Is the staff signing fixed? Do staff attributes actually matter now (or if they always mattered, is it made more clear what it actually affects)? Has the scuzzy business practice of telling us we need to update the game, only to have to back all the way out to the menu screen and get greeted with “VC SALE! 10% Off!” been remedied? Can we sort by position in the roster view screen like we used to a few years ago (why the hell was this ever removed)? Are you ever bringing back roles?
I could go on. Good job on bringing back the D-League (well, G-League) and all the cool improvements mentioned in this article. Still a ways to go.
I wish they would add Puerto Rico as an expansion city.