Monday Tip-Off: Play With Your Own Roster Mods
We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on the importance of playing with your own roster mods.
There have definitely been people over the years who are more interested in creating mods for basketball video games than hitting the virtual hardwood. Far be it from me to tell anyone else how to enjoy their leisure time, but that has always struck me as a little odd. Obviously there’s tremendous creative satisfaction in modding, but to me, mods are meant to enhance the gameplay experience. There are limitations to what we can achieve through modding of course, which is why I’d ultimately prefer a fun game that we can’t really mod to one that’s modder-friendly, but a poor on-court experience.
With that being said, the best and most popular games in our community throughout the years are the ones that were highly moddable, while also being great out of the box. As such, current roster updates, retro roster mods, and total conversions have all made some fantastic games even better. Because they take time to make however, if you’re creating one of those big projects, you may not always get to enjoy the fruits of your labour. I can certainly attest to this! It is important that we spend some time playing with our own roster mods, though. After all, not only should we be able to have fun with what we created, but it’s essential to becoming a better roster maker.
Once again, this is often easier said than done. No matter how much we may enjoy creating roster mods, there’s always some degree of burnout with major projects. Furthermore, if we finish them towards the end of a game’s lifecycle as a new release is looming, there’s a chance that we’ll be kind of over the game and looking forward to its successor. As a result, we may not have the time or inclination to take a roster into a season, or even play a bunch of exhibition games with it. Similarly, if we’re still creating roster mods for a game that we’re no longer playing, we’re putting a ton of work into projects that won’t be making our own basketball gaming more enjoyable.
Granted, for some people the completion of a roster mod and then sharing it with the community is its own reward. Also, without getting into the whole issue again, for people who are charging for mods, I assume that the financial incentive outweighs the drawbacks of creating work that you’re not personally interested in playing with. Still, as someone who has created current season updates for games I’d moved on from but wanted to keep updated for the community, as well as retro roster mods that weren’t finished until a new game was on the horizon, I do regret not spending more time with them. I’m still proud of the effort I put into them, but I didn’t get to enjoy my work.
Thankfully, retro basketball gaming has allowed me to begin rectifying that! It’s been rewarding to dust off some roster mods along with old favourites for a double dose of nostalgia. It sounds egotistical to say, but it’s also been satisfying to see my work hold up and provide a great on-court experience, whether it was a current roster or a retro season mod. The whole reason I got into roster modding was to create projects that I wanted to play with; a philosophy that I’ve kept in mind while dabbling with rosters in recent years. If you’re putting all of that time and effort into creating in-depth and accurate roster mods, then you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t use them.
It’s been a joy to connect with Dee over Parsec and play some NBA Live 2004 with my 1996 mod, which I’ve also been able to go back and add some polish to. I’ve had fun using my 2002 season rosters for NBA Live 99; a project that was mostly about moving on from modding NBA Live 96, and gaining experience with a more recent favourite that people still had interest in. The last few years of maintaining the NLSC roster updates for NBA Live 2005 through NBA Live 08 were all about catering to a portion of the community that hadn’t yet moved on to NBA 2K on PC, rather than for personal use. All these years later, it’s been refreshing to play with those roster mods.
Of course, as enjoyable as it’s been – especially when it feels like my work has held up – there have been some cringe-inducing moments. Whether it’s a player not having the correct dunk package or missing the appropriate Freestyle Superstars moveset in a roster for NBA Live 06, or perhaps using the wrong head model in a project for NBA Live 96, I’ve spotted some errors and oversights that flew under the radar. They may not have been glaring errors that ruined the whole project, or a disastrous technical issue, but they were nevertheless details that I always want to get right. They were a failure in quality control, because I didn’t spend enough time playing with the roster.
Obviously, you can still miss errors when playing with your own roster mods. Even if you’re being conscientious, it’s easy to overlook your own mistakes. It’s tough to catch everything when you’re both the creator and the primary tester! However, when you’re spending hours playing with a roster, you’re going to spot errors that still managed to escape your meticulous double-checking during the creation process. You’re going to notice when players are underdone or OP, and it’ll be apparent when your approach to ratings isn’t working. You’ll discover that typo or spreadsheet error that causes weird behaviour, hopefully before your roster is publicly available and others experience it.
In short, even if you know a game’s ratings like the back of your hand and have made several roster mods for it, playing with your own work will allow you to ensure that nothing is amiss. When I was making those aforementioned roster updates for NBA Live 2005 through NBA Live 08, I developed effective methods of beginning with 08 and converting the databases for use with the previous games through batch files that quickly adjusted certain values as necessary. It wasn’t foolproof though, as I would discover when revisiting those rosters with Dee. If I’d been using those mods myself, I’d have found those errors, corrected them, and avoided them in future conversions!
On top of emphasising the importance of playing with your own rosters, it was also a clear sign that I was spreading myself too thin. As I’ve acknowledged, in hindsight it would’ve avoided burnout and been better for quality control if I’d simply chosen to focus on one or two games, rather than trying to maintain four current roster projects simultaneously. I thought I’d developed an effective system, and in some ways I had, but it was at the expense of some attention to detail. Considering that NBA Live 07 and NBA Live 08 weren’t among the most popular releases, I should’ve just stuck with NBA Live 06 as originally intended with the NBA Live PC Project, but live and learn.
Needless to say, just as there’s no reason I can’t play with old roster mods now, there’s no reason that I can’t fix any issue that I encounter, and then upload a new version to our Downloads database for my fellow retro basketball gamers. I’ve already done that, and I’m sure I’ll do it again as I continue to revisit old favourites with mods from the archives. However, it’s definitely a reminder that when you plan on making any roster mods – especially large projects – it’s best to focus on creating them for the games that you actually want to play, and subsequently put them to good use. You always want to know that what you’re releasing is as enjoyable and accurate as you intend it to be.
Moreover, if a specific roster mod for a particular game is something that you actually want to play with, your passion for the concept is going to make it far more likely that you will indeed see the project through to the end. It’s become clear that a declining enthusiasm for the modern NBA was a major factor in my failure to finish any current roster updates for NBA 2K11 PC. It also didn’t help that while I do enjoy the game, it’s not one of my personal all-time favourites, and thus not necessarily one of my first choices for retro basketball gaming. Basically, if you can’t really see yourself playing with a roster mod for whatever reason, you’re far more unlikely to ever complete it.
Now, if you do happen to find the process of creating roster mods more enjoyable than playing with them because of the creative satisfaction, so be it. It’s not my place to tell you how to enjoy basketball video games, and if tinkering with them and then sharing that work with the community is more fun than jumping on the sticks, more power to you. I do speak from experience when I say that I have lamented not using my own work more often though, particularly the big retro roster mods. It doesn’t have to be too late if you’re an enthusiastic retro basketball gamer, but not everyone is. If you can go back though, roster mods will breathe new life into old favourites.
As I said, there have been moments where I’ve cringed at mistakes that I somehow overlooked. I wish that I had been playtesting more often than I did, and I also hope that people didn’t feel as though they couldn’t provide feedback about any errors that they noticed (and that they still enjoyed those releases regardless). Once again though, there’s nothing stopping me from making some fixes and adding some extra polish now, and sharing those revisions with anyone who wants to revisit some classics with a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, enhancing some old projects for games that I’d like to bring back into my rotation remains one of my goals for retro gaming and modding.
In any case, whether you’re playing an old game or fixing up an old mod, or creating new roster mods for a more recent title, I highly recommend that you make a habit of playing with your own work. Besides the obvious troubleshooting and quality control, you should enjoy what you’ve created. After all, you were inspired to make it, so you presumably like the concept! Admittedly I’m sentimental for the early days of our modding community when attitudes were different, but the purpose of mods is to enhance the gaming experience for ourselves as much as the people we share them with. After all that time and effort, don’t forget to reward yourself with some fun.
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