Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five ways that roster editing was lacking in the eighth generation NBA Live releases.

For all the insistence that the only reason to prefer or still enjoy old games is blind or wilfully ignorant nostalgia, experience has taught me that the opposite is often true. Sure, I love revisiting old favourites that hold up well, and to a certain point, my nostalgia and affection for them does smooth over some rough edges. At the same time, I’ve discovered that some old favourites haven’t aged as well as I thought upon revisiting them, while games I never played or indeed didn’t care for when they were new have impressed me. It’s a case-by-case matter, rather than an absolute either way.

To that end, going back and playing some eighth gen NBA Live titles with fresh eyes and no (or low) expectations has allowed me to enjoy them more, or at least notice some of their stronger points. Unfortunately, roster editing isn’t one of them! Despite being a staple feature of basketball games and sim titles in general, roster editing was severely lacking in the NBA Live games released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It’s a perfect example of how the series was lagging behind where it needed to be, as well as the vision for the series being out of step with what many long-time NBA Live fans wanted. Let’s take a look at the biggest roster editing shortcomings in those releases.

1. Roster Editing Was Completely Lacking For Most Of It!

It only makes sense to begin with the most obvious way that roster editing was sorely lacking in the eighth gen NBA Live games: its complete absence for most of that run! When the series finally returned with NBA Live 14, it brought back Dynasty, which was good to see even though it lagged behind what NBA 2K was doing with The Association. NBA Rewind and BIG Moments were examples of good live service content, expanding on an idea that NBA Live 10 experimented with. Rising Star made its debut, laying the foundation for a career mode experience. Sadly, the gameplay was quite rough, and other staples were missing, including sliders and roster editing.

While it was disappointing, simply reviving the series – even in a barebones way – was an understandable priority. And so, we made do with the official roster updates. Then NBA Live 15 was lacking roster editing as well, raising concerns that our feedback wasn’t being heeded. When I attended the NBA Live 16 event and told the developers point blank that the lack of roster editing would be a big issue for many gamers, it was a surprise to a few of them. Adding roster editing in NBA Live 18 post-release was definitely a show of goodwill, and it was a relief to see it retained in NBA Live 19. On the whole though, the series dropped the ball with this vital feature on eighth gen.

2. Inability to Sculpt Faces

When roster editing finally returned via a patch in NBA Live 18, we didn’t want to take it for granted. Even if the kneejerk reaction was to scoff and say “about time”, for the most part we were happy to have it, and that we were being listened to. Also, in some respects, the customisation options in NBA Live 18 were deeper than they were in previous games. From all the attributes and tendencies, to the animations we could assign, to the ability to modify player contracts, there was more content and access than before. The return of Create-a-Player was also a pleasant surprise. It’s something that we wanted, but we’d have made do with just moving and editing original players.

With that being said, and not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, it was rather disappointing that we couldn’t sculpt faces for custom players. There are a variety of faces that can be chosen in NBA Live 18 and 19, and with all the hairstyles, facial hair, and other customisation options, it’s certainly better than nothing. Nevertheless, it’s extremely challenging to create a unique-looking player! These limitations to face creation also affected The One, since not everybody was willing or able to scan their likeness with the companion app, and had to settle for a generic face if they didn’t. Considering that older games included this functionality, it was a step backwards.

3. Loss of Trade Function

Considering that there’s no guarantee that options and functions will always carry over, and that roster editing only came in NBA Live 18 post-release via a patch, it wasn’t paranoid to be concerned that it might be missing once again come NBA Live 19. Thankfully, those concerns were allayed during the preview season, and we were able to tinker with the rosters in NBA Live 19 from launch. On the downside, it didn’t take long to discover that a lack of a key function meant that customising the rosters would be far more cumbersome than it should’ve been. While the trade function is there in NBA Live 19’s Franchise mode, it’s not available while editing the rosters.

Now, you can release players into the free agent pool, and sign them to another team. You can also directly assign players to a team, essentially trading them for an empty roster slot if it’s available. To that point though, not every team had room to do that, and even if they did, it was a much slower way of swapping players than being able to trade them for one another. Again, the trade function was in the game and had been for years thanks to being part of Dynasty/Franchise, so its disappearance from roster editing was truly bewildering. With a focus on The One and a community manager who didn’t want to listen to any feedback that he didn’t care about, it never got fixed.

4. No Position Or Number Editing In Franchise Modes

As a content creator, there are times when you want to set up a custom roster scenario for an article or video feature. When robust and user-friendly roster editing is lacking or completely absent, we need to find creative workarounds. In NBA 2K14 PS4, the single custom roster slot and lack of in-game reset function requires you to keep a backup of your user data file, so that you can restore it when you’re done with your custom roster. In NBA Live 14, NBA Live 15, and NBA Live 16, we can engineer trades and signings in Dynasty mode to capture the necessary media. It’s better than nothing, but it’s a lot of messing around for something that shouldn’t be so difficult.

Not only that, but there are limitations that we can’t overcome. Unlike older games, there’s no way to edit jersey numbers when making trades or signings in Dynasty in the eighth gen NBA Live games. Players just use their existing number from the official rosters, or will be assigned the next available one if that number is retired or taken by a player already on the team. Obviously, it’s not just content creation that suffers here. When you’re a franchise gamer, there are times when you’ll want to give a player a specific jersey number, or switch their primary position to better fit your rotation. The absence of this staple function definitely hurt the franchise experience.

5. Ruinous Bugs

The plethora of patches that most games receive nowadays, beginning with a Day 1 update, is frequently a source of frustration for many gamers. However, as I’ve said before, in some ways I prefer it to the days where we had to beg, plead, and petition for patches that may never come; and, if they did, they barely fixed anything! With that in mind though, when a game receives a steady stream of updates but big issues aren’t addressed, it’s even more frustrating than the days when even getting just one patch wasn’t a guarantee. Anyone who was keen on tinkering with the rosters in NBA Live 19 knows that all too well, as none of the patches addressed some ruinous bugs.

Custom rosters can become corrupted and unusable, through no fault of the user. It was a different matter on PC where we were opening up roster saves with external programs and potentially messing up values or saving a DBF file in an incompatible format, but on console, everything is being done in-game. There’s also an annoying bug in NBA Live 19 where creating players and saving the roster results in everyone’s ages getting messed up, with no way of fixing them. As I’ve said before, programming and game development isn’t as easy as many people think, and no title is 100% bug free. Still, a buggy staple function is a bad look, and not addressing it is even worse.

Were you bothered by these shortcomings in roster customisation in eighth gen NBA Live? Do you recall any other ways that roster editing was lacking in NBA Live on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Ways Roster Editing Was Lacking In 8th Gen NBA Live appeared first on NLSC.