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 improvements in basketball video games that I believe are somewhat underappreciated.

Basketball video games have come a long way, in ways that are extremely obvious. Technological improvements have allowed them to look more realistic, include more modes, content, and features, and generally achieve more accuracy throughout the years. However, the little things do matter, and often go a long way in making games more enjoyable. Of course, sometimes the big improvements are underappreciated as well, particularly if we focus on their potential drawbacks rather than how they’ve benefitted the genre.

If nothing else, some milestone improvements are underappreciated because they’ve been a part of basketball video games for so long, leading us to simply expect to see them and thus take them for granted. As such, I’d like to spotlight five improvements that I believe are underappreciated these days. Sure, they’ve become standard features so they’re not necessarily exciting anymore, and it’s not as though we need to grovel in gratitude. Nevertheless, they still deserve recognition for improving the games and pushing them forward. As someone who has been playing basketball games since the 90s, I’d suggest that these five improvements are among the most underappreciated.

1. Accessory Assignment Frequency

One of the biggest hassles when it comes to roster accuracy – whether it’s a mod or the official rosters – is player accessories. Even if the game allows you to give a player their correct accessories, they’re details that can easily become outdated by the time a roster has been completed. What’s even more frustrating is when players constantly change up their accessories during a season. There have been players who sometimes wear a headband and sometimes don’t, players who alternate between arm sleeves and smaller sweat bands, and so on. It means we’ve had to pick the accessories that tend to be accurate for a majority of the time, and assign them until a player’s habits change.

Since NBA 2K18 however, player accessories are assigned with frequency instead of just being a binary option of wearing them or not. Whether it’s a sleeve, band, pad, or whatever, players can be set to wear an accessory always, never, sometimes, or often. This way, if a player usually wears a headband but occasionally ditches it, or rarely sports a wristband but definitely does don one from time to time, that’s something that the games can represent. It’s a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a great touch that can make the games feel more alive and dynamic. It’s not exactly a major selling point, but then again, the underappreciated improvements seldom are.

2. Create-a-Player & MyPLAYER Face Creation Tools

Some basketball gamers may scoff at this, and I understand why. The facial creation options could still be better, whether we’re sculpting a face for a missing NBA player or a career mode avatar. However, it’s often forgotten how far basketball video games have come in this regard. Once games began featuring real face textures, our created players really began to stick out like a sore thumb. It was usually impossible for them to not to look generic, especially when we were limited to a small selection of base faces. Even in games that were ahead of their time with face sculpting – such as NBA Live 2000 – there was still a limited selection of hairstyles, beards, and other features.

Compare that to the face creation tools that we now have. Some improvements were being made by the late 2000s/early 2010s, but I do think the array of options in NBA 2K these days is underappreciated. I’ve seen people in the community create some pretty impressive faces for Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Rasheed Wallace, all with the in-game tools. MyPLAYERs can at least look like real players, even without performing a face scan. Once again, there’s still room for improvement, but the games – particularly NBA 2K since 2K19 – have come a long way as far as giving created players distinct appearances that can decently blend in with the original NBA players.

3. NBA 2K’s Menus

Unless there’s an issue that greatly interferes with the ability to perform a very basic function – such as a cumbersome substitution screen – user interface design flaws are usually low on my list of criticisms. If the frontend is a little cumbersome but it’s still easy enough to get around and do everything, I can at least tolerate it. With that being said, some NBA 2K games over the years have had a really annoying UI. They may be creative and arguably visually appealing, but navigating them is a chore. From too much back and forth to find what we want, to having to constantly hover over options instead of just moving to them, some of them have been extremely poorly designed.

Much like the face creation tools in Create-a-Player, while there are ways that the menus in recent NBA 2Ks could be better, comparing them to their predecessors from the sixth and seventh generations will demonstrate how far they’ve come. To that end, I’d call them one of the series’ underappreciated improvements. Needless to say, the improvements we’ve seen to gameplay, modes, content, and other features are far, far more important and impressive, but they’re generally more apparent and appreciated. The developers deserve credit for listening to the feedback and designing UIs that are markedly less cumbersome, and significantly more user-friendly than they used to be.

4. Patches & Hotfixes

A common talking point in the retro games vs. modern games debate is that back in the day, games didn’t need a ton of patches. Being prompted to update a game before we can play it – as opposed to just popping in a disc or cartridge and getting straight to business – has become a meme over the past few generations. There’s also the issue of patches and hotfixes breaking games, or tweaking the gameplay in a way that alters it for the worse. Patches are difficult to avoid, and sometimes we’re basically forced to download the whole game again. These are all valid criticisms, but such updates are now one of the underappreciated improvements of gaming, basketball or otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that many games of various genres absolutely needed patches all those years ago. Before they were readily available online, patches for PC games were distributed via floppy disk or CD-ROM, often with gaming magazines. Console releases sometimes saw a second run of copies with updates and fixes. We weren’t always that lucky though, so many games remained broken, with issues in the annual sim releases having to wait until the next year to (hopefully) be fixed. Obviously they have their drawbacks, but simply getting patches and hotfixes – and not having to track them down and install them manually – is preferable to not getting them at all.

5. In-Depth Rotations

When you go back and play old basketball games – particularly classics from the 90s – you’ll see quite a few players listed at their secondary position, or the wrong position entirely. While these mistakes were sometimes the result of a lack of resources or just plain oversight, other times they were deliberate choices to help out with rotations and substitution logic. Another issue you’ll notice is that the starters often play a majority of the minutes, and when the CPU makes subs, it’ll always take players out instead of sliding them over to another position. This wasn’t just a gameplay issue, as minutes would often be inaccurate for starters and bench players alike in simulated games, too.

This hasn’t been an issue in a long time, thanks to the introduction of deeper rotation management and substitution logic. The ability to not only set our starting five and bench order, but also individually assign minutes to players, allows modern games to represent situations where a starter plays less minutes than a reserve, and for sixth men to play similar minutes to starters. Furthermore, whenever the AI is handling substitutions, players don’t have to come out of the game to accommodate the sub, as they’ll either be moved over to their secondary position, or the incoming player will sub in at theirs. Since this has been in games for so long now, we take it for granted.

What’s your take on these underappreciated improvements? What are some other big improvements to basketball video games that are underappreciated? 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 Underappreciated Improvements appeared first on NLSC.