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 features that we’ve lost, yet for some reason don’t talk about enough.

One of the unfortunate realities of long-running annual sports video games is that over the years, features will be lost. Contrary to popular belief, the code is re-written every year, as it’s necessary to accommodate new features and mechanics. As such, anything that is incompatible or otherwise causes issues with the new code is at risk of ending up on the cutting room floor, particularly if the telemetry data indicates that it isn’t a very popular feature. With that being said, some features are dropped because they’re no longer useful or relevant, or indeed, stand in the way of recurrent revenue.

I’m sure that we can all cite plenty of examples of lost features that we’ve fervently wished were still in NBA 2K, NBA Live, and other games. Indeed, I’ve mentioned some of my own picks in previous articles and on our podcast! However, there are lost features that really should receive more attention than they do, yet people seldom bring them up. To that end, I’m as guilty as anyone else of glossing over some of these lost features that were once staples of basketball video games, so I figured it’s about time that I spotlight a few of them. While some of them may not seem like a big deal, they’re still basic functionality that’s bewilderingly absent in otherwise deep games.

1. Rules Options

Let’s begin with one of the biggest and most puzzling lost features in modern hoops titles: the rules options. Some of the earliest basketball video games have allowed us to modify the rules, whether it’s a simple Arcade and Simulation toggle, or rule-by-rule settings. The deeper rules options allowed us to modify the amount of realism in sim titles to suit our needs. Want to turn off fouls and out of bounds calls, but keep the shot clock in play? No problem! Maybe you’d prefer to keep the rules basically intact, but disable defensive three second violations, or the old illegal defense rule, just to make the game a bit freer. You could do all of that and more with the rules options.

For some reason, we no longer have access to those settings. Sure, we can change foul frequency in the sliders, and the quarter length settings are still available. However, you won’t find those old rules options anywhere in modern games! It’s strange that they’re gone, but stranger still that it’s rarely brought up when we talk about the lost features that we want to see brought back. Maybe it’s because so many people have moved on to MyCAREER and MyTEAM where we have limited customisation when it comes to gameplay, while sim heads who play franchise modes want authenticity. Nevertheless, it was a long-time basketball game staple, so it’s worth mentioning.

2. Quick Access to MyPLAYER Customisation

MyCAREER and its connected modes as a whole have become more contrived and less convenient over the years, so it’s no surprise that it’s lost some basic functionality features. That doesn’t mean we should accept it, though. Even if the MyCAREER team is set on doing what they please as far as introducing open worlds and other things that ruin the experience for anyone over the age of 14 – and even that’s likely giving the tastes of 14 year olds too little credit – we could at least speak up about the issues every now and again. For example, whenever we want to change the name or appearance of our MyPLAYER, we need to load into a MyCAREER save file first.

Now, this may sound like an incredibly minor nitpick, but we used to be able to quickly change a MyPLAYER’s name and appearance from the main menu. It was a much faster process than selecting a save file, loading into The City or Neighborhood, opening up the menu, and finally selecting the player customisation. Sadly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some wretched corporate reason for this: exposing gamers to the advertising in the open world, pumping up the engagement numbers in MyCAREER, and so on. Well, that may be good for Take-Two’s bottom line, but the result is that something we should be able to change with a minimum of fuss takes far too long!

3. Offline MyCAREER

While we’re on the subject of lost functionality in MyCAREER, let’s talk about how the entire mode hasn’t been available offline since NBA 2K19 (and even then, it was a severely stripped-down version of the experience). Granted, people do talk about this, but it’s too often shot down with bootlicking excuses (“Won’t somebody think of the children profits?”), or well-meaning but misguided suggestions (“You can just play MyNBA/MyLEAGUE with player lock on”). The former doesn’t deserve addressing beyond stating we should care more about games being fun than a big corporation’s revenue, while the latter is treating “feasible” as being the same thing as “desirable”.

I’d like to discuss the issue of feasible vs. desirable in-depth at another time, but as it relates to MyCAREER, needless to say a dedicated career mode offers a number of advantages over a makeshift experience in a franchise mode. It’s an option to consider of course, but seeing as how an offline MyCAREER was clearly viable prior to the introduction of The Neighborhood, it’s frustrating that the focus on turning the mode into an MMORPG has snatched it away from retro gamers and content creators. Like the rising cost in MyCAREER and other anti-consumer changes, the lack of an offline MyCAREER is something too many gamers meekly accept, and that’s a real shame.

4. Playing with Free Agents

So, this might seem like a strange one, as it’s not something everybody needs. Still, it’s among the lost features that bother me, so here we go! In older NBA Live games, we were able to select players from the Free Agents pool to use in various modes, from shooting around in Practice to competing in the Slam Dunk Contest. To be fair, it’s probably not something that we’d commonly do, but it was nice to have the ability. If nothing else, it was handy being able to jump into Practice and take screenshots of a player who was currently a free agent. Whether it’s a preview for a mod or an image for an article, sometimes we need a shot of a player without assigning them to a team.

Unfortunately, that’s no longer possible. In both NBA 2K and the more recent NBA Live titles, we select teams rather than individual players in their practice modes, so the Free Agents pool isn’t available. It makes sense since the practice modes include a scrimmage option, which requires viable lineups that can go head-to-head. With that in mind, it’s only logical to reuse the same team selection interface from Play Now, rather than implement a new menu and function to select an individual player for a solo shootaround. All the same, there are times when I’d like to get shots of players in a generic uniform, so I do wish that the Free Agents were as accessible as before.

5. Daily Bonus

Along with the aforementioned rules options, this is the most frustrating of all the features that we’ve lost. Sometimes I reflect on all the time I spent in MyCAREER, and wonder how I managed to stomach the grind year after year. Then I remember that it wasn’t always as bad as it is now. Sure, the pressure to buy VC and skip the grind has been mounting since Virtual Currency was introduced in NBA 2K13, but for a few years there, we had the Daily Bonus. Not to be confused with the Daily Prize in its various forms, the Daily Bonus was a randomly chosen task that, if completed within 24 hours, would net you a fairly generous lump sum of VC.

Sure, 3000 VC doesn’t stretch very far once you level up and the price of attribute upgrades scales accordingly, but every little bit helps. Furthermore, many of the tasks became easier once your MyPLAYER levelled up, and could be completed in a single game. It was a gesture of goodwill in a mode designed to generate revenue…and then, they took it away. Actually, first it was left in NBA 2K21 Current Gen but bugged, with no VC awarded upon completing tasks. Instead of fixing it, the developers just set the Daily Bonus to always display “None”, and then officially removed it in future games. I’m sorry, but if you still blindly defend decisions like that, then you’re a shill.

What’s your take on these lost features? What are some other useful, staple features that we’ve lost over the years? 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.

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