Wayback Wednesday: How Free Agents Enhanced Roster Modding
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at how the addition of free agents in basketball video games has enhanced roster modding.
A pool of free agents and the ability to sign and release players is just one of those things that we take for granted in basketball video games. After all, it’s a concept that goes back to games released in the 90s, making it a well-established staple of roster customisation that we expect to see. Indeed, if you got into basketball gaming during the 2000s at the earliest, you probably haven’t played many sim games that didn’t represent free agency in their roster customisation functionality, or at least their season or franchise modes.
However, if you’re my age and you recall playing the classics of the 90s, you’ll no doubt remember how restricted we used to be when it came to modifying the rosters in-game. Even after the ability to trade players outside of season modes was added, it still took a couple of years to implement the free agents pool. It was longer still before that pool was frequently filled with players to sign! Needless to say, the addition of the free agents pool and subsequent inclusion of a selection of free agents every year significantly enhanced roster modding. Let’s take a look back…way back…
By NBA Showdown, EA Sports’ sim basketball games provided us with the ability to trade players in Season mode. The catch was that only players in the starting lineup could be swapped. This restriction was due to the fact that only starters had portraits for pre-game introductions. By excluding bench players from trades and not allowing lineups to be changed, there’d never be a scenario where one of the starters would be missing a portrait. This restriction carried over to the 16-bit version of NBA Live 95. The PC version of NBA Live 95 finally allowed us to trade any player in the active rosters, but there was no way to release players to remove them from a team’s lineup.
With no free agents pool or Create-a-Player, roster modding in NBA Live 95 involved overwriting players that we no longer needed. As I’ve previously recalled, this made the process far more complicated than tinkering with the rosters of later games! NBA Live 96 PC introduced both Create-a-Player and a free agents pool. On top of the executable being far more modder-friendly, this made it way easier to edit the rosters, even before our founders developed external tools with added functionality. Players who were no longer in the league could be sent to the free agents pool, freeing up roster spots for trades and signings, or newly-created players to be added to the team.
Unsurprisingly, the free agents pool has often been the default team assignment for created players. That was the case in NBA Live 96 PC, so with all the roster modding I’ve done for that game, I became very used to seeing the free agents logo and jersey in Create-a-Player! Naturally it doesn’t have much bearing on roster modding or the game in general, but it’s been interesting to see the different logo and jersey designs for the free agents pool in games over the years. There have even been some mods that updated those assets, just to freshen up the frontend aesthetic while working on the rosters. It’s a fun idea that I believe embodies the intended spirit of modding.
There were some limitations with the free agents pool in NBA Live 96 PC. Unlike in later games, it’s basically just another team that you can trade to. As such, it can only accommodate 14 players, just like a regular team lineup. It was still a step up from the 12-man rosters and lack of free agency in NBA Live 95 PC, but it still meant that a maximum of 14 players could be unsigned at any time. Furthermore, between the 14 roster slots of the free agents pool and 17 empty roster slots throughout the league, a maximum of 31 players can be created in NBA Live 96 PC. To that end, major roster projects still require original players to be overwritten if they’re no longer needed.
Still, the free agents pool was useful for roster modding. Depending on the project, 14 slots for unsigned players could sometimes be enough. It was helpful when moving players around, especially when replicating multi-player trades involving teams that didn’t have room for all of the players they were acquiring. Early games also tracked the method in which players on their roster had been acquired: drafted, via a trade (and where from), free agency, and in some cases, the expansion draft. For the sake of accuracy, a player could be released into the free agents pool and then assigned to a new team, so that their bio would correctly list them as being signed as a free agent.
NBA Live 97 PC saw a major step forward for in-game roster editing. Not only could we save and load custom rosters, but each roster could have up to 100 created players. Team rosters were also expanded to include 15 players – the maximum at the time – and the free agents pool wasn’t subject to the same limitation. These were welcome improvements, but the cherry on top was the inclusion of several free agents who had been on a team’s roster during the 1996 season. A few whose contracts had expired at the end of the 1996 campaign weren’t included – presumably due to specific terms of their respective deals – but there were still plenty of familiar faces there to be signed.
Obviously, the inclusion of these free agents was extremely beneficial for roster modding. Quite a few of them latched on with teams during the 1997 season, and since they were already in the game, they didn’t need to be created. This saved a created player slot for someone else, and meant that those players would have a portrait, career statistics, and full bio data. You can actually do a pretty good job of rolling the rosters of NBA Live 97 PC back to the 1996 season thanks to all of the free agents in the default rosters! There are some that you’ll need to create, and some team art will be inaccurate, but the point is that the game’s content facilitates the project.
Interestingly, providing a complement of free agents didn’t immediately become the norm after the concept was introduced in NBA Live 97. Come NBA Live 98, the free agents pool was still available, but it was empty in the default rosters. It wasn’t until NBA Live 2003 that the series began including a selection of unsigned players once again. Meanwhile, early NBA 2K titles included a selection of fictional free agents that shared portraits with real players; a bizarrely unrealistic element in a series that was vying to become the premiere sim game! By NBA 2K3 however, these fake players were removed, with only real players being included in the free agents pool.
In NBA Live 97 PC, the free agents were a mix of veteran journeymen, young players who weren’t retained during the offseason, and some fairly well-known names that were still on the market when the game’s rosters were being finalised. To that point, while there were mainstays who would soon be back in the league, the biggest names who remained unsigned in NBA Live 97 PC are probably Rex Chapman, Byron Scott, and Kevin Duckworth. There are also a handful of memorable and fairly recognisable players that retired in 1996 or were set to sit out the 1997 season, such as Jeff Malone, Harold Miner, and Spud Webb. In short, there were no current or former superstars.
This is something that began to change in the early 2000s. Between stars suffering a fall from grace, and Hall of Famers who retired before their contract had ended, we began to see some really big names in the free agents pool in NBA Live and NBA 2K. All-time greats such as Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, once-perennial All-Stars such as Shawn Kemp, and prominent players such as Charles Oakley and Rod Strickland, were available to sign in the default rosters of games. As I’ve spotlighted in a previous feature, several noteworthy names from the 90s can be found in NBA Live 06. Some are still on their 2005 squads, but the rest are included as free agents.
The presence of major names in the free agents offered a couple of benefits for roster modding. As with anyone else who remained unsigned when a game’s rosters were being finalised, their inclusion facilitated a variety of projects, particularly retro roster mods. Of course, it’s a much bigger deal to have Hakeem Olajuwon available for a 1996 roster than, say, Victor Alexander! Moreover, when Hall of Famers were in the game as free agents, it usually also meant that they could still appear in the Legends pool and All-Decade teams. With the way all-time greats so often disappear from the games for a few years after retiring, these extra appearances were some nice bonuses.
It’s never been entirely clear how long players can remain in video games as free agents after they’ve left the NBA. Sometimes retirement results in their removal from the active rosters, while other times they’re still available to sign. It’s been speculated that players can be included in games for up to one year after their last NBA contract, and there are plenty of examples that seem to follow that rule. Of course, there have also been plenty of exceptions! There are a host of players in NBA 2K11’s free agents that hadn’t played in the NBA since 2008 or even earlier. Some had recently played in the Summer League or were training camp cuts, but others were tougher to explain.
Mind you, roster modders weren’t about to complain! Leftover free agents, legends, hidden players, retro jerseys and team art, unused but intact files…the more assets that are immediately at our disposal, the better. They can provide an excellent head start on major projects, but they’re great for minimalist rosters and scenarios as well. So many of the makeshift retro teams that I’ve assembled in NBA Live 10 have been made possible by the inclusion of players who had retired or were otherwise out of the league by the 2010 campaign. Notably, Allen Iverson is a free agent in NBA Live 10’s default roster, ensuring he wouldn’t be left out of the game while he was unsigned.
As someone who has engaged in both comprehensive and minimalist roster modding, I can attest to it being a delight when I browse the free agents and find that a player I need is in the game! It’s helped my minimalist retro rosters for NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360 come together, and also helped set up some of the scenarios for the NBA 2K14 Retro Series. Being reminded of the recently-retired players that are left over in NBA Live 06 PC’s free agents pool encourages me to seriously consider some retro roster modding ideas! It’s a rare game that includes every single player you need to roll back its rosters with complete accuracy, but a selection of free agents is always helpful.
Even putting aside the array of projects that are made easier (or indeed, feasible) by the presence of certain free agents, the ability to release players to remove them from the league, or move them between teams without a trade, has been extremely useful for roster modding. It’s understandable that the early sim games had limited or no roster editing, but fortunately it didn’t take long for it to become a staple feature that allowed us to tinker with the lineups outside of season play. Once again, we’re so used to having the ability to edit rosters that it’s easy to forget it was a major innovation. Well, at least until it was missing from NBA Live for most of eighth gen, anyway!
With how normalised it’s become to include unsigned players in the default rosters of sim titles, it’s funny to think that the free agents pool was originally mostly used for discarding original players without necessarily replacing them, and of course housing created players. I’m grateful that the circumstances have changed, and that the games provide a pool of free agents for roster modding and franchise gaming alike. Whether we’re updating a game for the current season and beyond, or taking it back in time, it’s been extremely handy to have all those players at our disposal. From saving time to ensuring authenticity, the free agents pool has undoubtedly enhanced roster modding.
The post Wayback Wednesday: How Free Agents Enhanced Roster Modding appeared first on NLSC.