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 noteworthy shortcomings with roster editing over the years.

Although comprehensive modding projects generally require external tools to achieve the level of detail we desire, it still helps to have robust in-game roster editing on PC. As for console releases, the in-game customisation functionality is all that we have to work with. In the best case scenario, we can put those functions to good use to create everything from minimalist projects to custom rosters that are surprisingly deep given the lack of custom art files and external modding. Unfortunately, several titles have severely limited what we can create in-game.

Alternatively, some shortcomings don’t stand in the way of creating the project that we envision, but may make roster editing more cumbersome than it should be. If nothing else, there might be some minor inaccuracies that don’t affect the on-court experience, but are nevertheless annoying for those of us who are sticklers for detail. I’ve talked about limitations to roster editing before, such as an inability to assign or edit certain bio data, and those certainly are frustrating shortcomings. However, for this list, I wanted to focus on some roster editing shortcomings that don’t necessarily receive a lot of attention, but have undoubtedly bothered modders over the years.

1. Lack of Role Player Ratings Presets

During the 2024 NBA Playoffs, NBA Live 10 was back in my rotation. As such, I felt compelled to update a handful of the teams so that I could play some contemporary matchups. Because it was a minimalist project that I wanted to throw together very quickly for personal use, I took advantage of the ratings presets so that I didn’t have to spend as much time adjusting every single attribute and tendency. It was definitely a timesaver, but it reminded me that all of the presets assumed that I wanted to create an OP superstar. As a result, not only were most of the stars rated a bit too high on the first attempt, but the role players needed massive adjustments in order to be accurate!

It reminded me that created player ratings presets have usually been that way, and it’s why I’ve generally preferred not to use them. Mind you, that was easier back in the days of NBA Live 06, when there were only about twenty player ratings to assign! As I said, NBA Live 10’s presets did save me some time, but also got me thinking about how useful it would be for roster editing if there were presets that not only reflected player styles, but also their role/ability level. Obviously, an accurate roster would still require further customisation even with additional presets, but it’d be handy to start with ratings that are closer to the role and skill level of the player that you’re creating.

2. No Previews of Player Animations

Another issue that I was reminded of when I was tinkering with the rosters in NBA Live 10 is that while there was a decent selection of player animations – not as many as in NBA 2K10, but certainly a respectable amount – you can’t preview them. Sure, you can look up clips of the player in action, and even a photo will give you a rough idea if a shooting form is the right animation to choose for a custom player, but it’s nowhere near as convenient as seeing a preview of the animation play out. Given that NBA 2K10 does preview animations while creating and editing players, this isn’t a case of such functionality being impossible back when NBA Live 10 was released.

Just in case anyone wants to make the elitist argument that a great roster modder should know every single player in real life and every animation package in a game like the back of their hand, frankly, that is an impossible standard and unreasonable expectation! Besides, even if your memory is somehow that amazing, you’ll probably still want to preview your selection. I mean, you wouldn’t expect roster creators to select options for facial features without a preview of what the player is going to look like! The same goes for signature animations, and any game that doesn’t provide a preview of them is definitely coming up short in terms of roster editing functionality.

3. Missing School Options & Functionality Issues

There are only so many options you can include for created player bio data, and it makes sense that those selections are based on real players. For example, it’s logical that the list of schools that you can choose from is comprised of the alma maters of players that are already in the game, seeing as that data needs to be there. Some games have also snuck in a few schools without any currently-active alumni, or perhaps the alma maters of members of the development team. Other games have done the bare minimum, though. Not only that, but over the years, we’ve lost the ability to choose options such as “None”, “N/A”, and even a generic “High School” for created players.

This is something that I noticed while working on the aforementioned NBA Live 10 rosters. International players such as Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic are using “Air Force” as their school, because neither their country nor a lack of college can be selected. Similarly, some games don’t actually include every NBA player’s school among the options in Create-a-Player, which is annoying. Also, for a while there, NBA 2K grouped schools by conference rather than listing them all alphabetically, which made finding the one you wanted extremely tedious. It may sound like a minor nitpick, but roster editing shortcomings absolutely do include accessibility issues.

4. Insufficient Cosmetic Options

I realise that there are shortcomings with the current facial creation options in NBA 2K that are frustrating, particularly to anyone who’s editing a MyNBA Eras roster. There are some impressive Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Rasheed Wallace CAPs out there, but even with the enhancements that came along in NBA 2K19, they can’t quite match a well-crafted face texture and model. To that point however, those improvements to face creation that were made in NBA 2K19 were a welcome step forward. Putting aside the sculpting options, the fact that there’s some flexibility with hairstyles and facial hair, and a variety of basic facial features, is much appreciated.

Needless to say, in the 90s and early 2000s, we didn’t have nearly as many options with created player faces. In fact, even games from the early 2010s are rather limited in that regard. From a tiny assortment of hairstyles and facial hair, to certain hairstyles and facial hear only being available in one colour, to a scant array of eyes, noses, and head shapes, replicating a real face or creating a player that didn’t look like every other CAP was close to impossible. For a modern example, just look at the lack of face sculpting options in NBA Live 18 and 19. Feeling as though you can only create generic Roster Players is one of the most frustrating shortcomings in roster editing.

5. Low Created Player Limits

Of course, even with the aforementioned roster editing shortcomings, we can still put together some minimalist projects that are fun to play with. However, we’ll eventually hit a wall once we reach the maximum number of players that we can create. This isn’t an issue on PC where there are workarounds, such as changing the ISCREATED flag in NBA Live’s roster files, or simply overwriting players in NBA 2K. In most console releases however, we don’t have that luxury. As such, whatever roster project we have in mind will need to take into account the created player limit. That may not be so bad if we can create over 100 custom players, but a limit of 20-50 is extremely restrictive.

Obviously, there are technical reasons for these limitations. Back in the day, consoles such as the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 had memory cards with fairly limited storage capacity, so save data files needed to remain small. Even on PC and newer consoles, keeping the roster file to a smaller size makes it easier for a game to handle all of the data that it’ll end up storing during multi-season play, and thus is done for stability. With that being said, a logical and reasonable explanation doesn’t mean that it isn’t frustrating! A creative modder needn’t be discouraged by such limitations and work within them to make something special, but some ideas simply won’t be feasible.

Do you recall being bothered by these roster editing shortcomings when tinkering with games? What other limitations have been bothersome when putting together custom rosters? 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 Frustrating Roster Editing Shortcomings appeared first on NLSC.