Last year's NBA Live crippled the series. Many longtime users abandoned the franchise and aligned themselves with NBA 2K7. But of course EA isn't going to give up without a fight, and it has finally decided to stop stacking features on top of its troubled basketball game. Now it's getting back to the basics.
At a press event earlier this week, producer Brian Ullrich said that the focus of NBA Live 08 is the core basketball experience. The goals are pretty straightforward and the development team is trying to nail down what it believes to be the 10 key elements of a great playing basketball game. That means passing, locomotion, collisions, ball physics and rebounding (so the ball goes into the player's hand) for starters. Shooting will be overhauled -- to catch up with 2K, the game will feature tons of signature shots. Dunks and lay-ups will be contextual, so you can't try to dunk every single time. Team offense and defense will be tweaked as well; players won't just run around like crazy people whenever they move, according to Ullrich. To illustrate his point Ullrich ran NBA Live 07 side-by-side with 08, which while still early in development shows significant progress -- jumping to 60 frames per second with a new side camera (as opposed to the end to end camera in last year's game).
[Click the image above to check out all NBA Live 08 screens.]
So what prompted these changes from Live 07? "It wasn't that we decided that we did it the wrong way last year, and we had to fix it with Live 08," says Ullrich. "In a lot of cases we just didn't finish what we started. I don't want to make excuses, but we tried to do way more than we could do in one year. So a lot of the systems that were created last year, we can continue working on. So now we're just building on what we've already started. So, every one of the 10 things in that list existed in some way last year. We're hoping to get as close to a 100 percent on each of those things this year [as possible]."
This year there will be ground-to-ground, ground-to-air and air-to-air contact, which means that if a player of Iverson's size goes airborne against someone of Shaq's size, there will be consequences and the accuracy of the shot will be affected. EA claims this will revolutionize the way basketball games play defensively, as body positioning will matter like never before. We also saw how a great ballhandler could make mincemeat of slow-footed defenders by cutting quickly. Though a great defender like Ron Artest can react to moves and cut off a lane to the bucket, big guys won't have the footwork to adjust.
But the million dollar question is: will EA's pro hoops rebound? So far, so good. Will working towards nailing the fundamentals pose a threat to 2K's hoops game? The jury's still out.