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 bad omens in basketball gaming.

I don’t believe in omens as a mystical force in the universe. However, I do believe that there are warning signs that we should take notice of, which I’ll colloquially refer to as bad omens. As far as basketball gaming is concerned, there are definitely some bad omens when it comes to an upcoming release, or the future of a series. They’re not exactly mysterious and hard to spot, but it obviously gets easier with experience. We can recognise patterns, acknowledge precedent, and employ some common sense. At the same time, it’s easy to ignore bad omens.

After all, many of us try to remain optimistic about our hobby. We don’t want to jump the gun and assume the worst, especially if our predictions and pessimism have been proven wrong in the past. Things that have seemed like bad omens have turned out to be meaningless, or in rare cases, good news. Still, it pays to err on the side of caution, and there are warning signs that we should probably brace ourselves for bad news; or at the very least, temper our expectations. Once again, experience can usually guide us, as the red flags are much easier to spot after you’ve been through a few preview seasons. To that end, when one of these five events occurs, it tends to be a bad omen.

1. Silence During Preview Season

This bad omen comes in two forms. In the worst case scenario, there’ll be complete silence from a developer after a game is announced, and a few initial previews are shown. When this happens, there will be predictions of a cancellation, and these predictions are usually proven correct. Complete silence in the middle of a preview season suggests that there are serious internal concerns about the game. Whenever that’s the case, forget keeping the hype train at the station; it’s being sent back to the shed! Even if the game is released, it’s unlikely to live up to anyone’s expectations. Sure, subpar games are still previewed and released, but silence suggests a disaster.

The second form may not be as catastrophic, but it’s still not good news. When the previews very clearly neglect to mention a feature or mode, or developers and social media reps won’t answer any questions about it, it doesn’t bode well. For example, if the big developer insight about franchise mode has already been posted and it doesn’t mention a major addition or change you were hoping to see, you can take it as read that you shouldn’t expect it. During the eighth generation, complete silence was a bad omen for the NBA Live series, while previews of NBA 2K have disappointed us by deftly ignoring questions. It proves the old oxymoron that silence speaks volumes.

2. Indefinite Delays

Delays are announcements that we gamers seldom want to hear. If nothing else, they mean that we have to wait longer for something we’re looking forward to! The much bigger and more worrying concern is that the delay is the result of a game not shaping up well, especially if it’s been preceded by the aforementioned silence. Of course, a delay isn’t necessarily a harbinger of a disappointing or cancelled game. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the most prominent examples of a game that was delayed and turned out to be absolutely worth the wait. With that being said, when a game is delayed indefinitely, it generally doesn’t inspire confidence and optimism!

Sadly, the NBA Live series has been a repeat offender. NBA Elite 11 was initially delayed after its launch was aborted following the negative response to its demo, but it wasn’t a surprise when it was ultimately cancelled. Likewise, a potential NBA Live 17 was pushed back with vague hints that we’d be getting something called The Drive to NBA Live, which had no release date and was subsequently canned (though the promising NBA Live 18 did come out later that year). “Indefinite” doesn’t necessarily mean forever or a long time – as Draymond Green’s suspensions prove – but just as “maybe” often means “no”, indefinite delays are bad omens for basketball games.

3. Suspicious Demo (Or No Demo At All)

Demos are undoubtedly a double-edged sword for video game developers. On one hand, they can give gamers a tantalising taste of what’s to come, hyping us up for release day and likely securing a few more pre-orders along the way. If we can take progress from the demo into the full version, so much the better! On the other hand, if a demo is poorly-received and clearly indicates the full game is going to have some issues, it’s going to dampen hype and potentially lose sales. As such, there’s merit in not offering a sneak peek, especially with a series like NBA 2K that is popular and always sells well. Still, the lack of a demo is always going to feel like a bad omen.

Mind you, even if we get a demo and everything looks good, it can still be suspicious. Developers have admitted to tweaking sliders and otherwise tuning demos to give the best possible impression. This includes juicing the abilities of our avatars in demos that preview a career mode, giving us a false impression that the starting ratings won’t make our player complete garbage. The NBA 2K18 Prelude was guilty of that. Also, unlike the NBA 2K17 Prelude, we couldn’t level up our player. This conveniently hid the cost of upgrades, as well as the fact that we’d have to pay for haircuts. Demos are a carefully curated preview, so even promising ones have bad omens we should heed.

4. Timely Coordinated Content Creator Posts

You may have heard Dee bring up this phenomenon on the NLSC Podcast. One of the bad omens that have becoming increasingly common in the influencer/content creator age is when there’s a calculated social media campaign very close to release. As a new game is looming, suddenly all of the content creators who have a working relationship with its developer will make very similar posts hyping it up, as well as pre-emptively shouting down naysayers. As Dee has pointed out, these posts frequently use similar if not completely identical phrasing, and specific buzzwords. It’s a rather transparent attempt to use trusted voices to steer the narrative in the lead-up to a game’s release.

These coordinated posts are particularly concerning if they mention specific gameplay mechanics or other new features. If the influencers and content creators are all talking about gamers “whining” about how difficult it is to shoot, chances are the brand new shooting mechanics aren’t working out as well as hoped. There’ll be an attempt to shift the blame onto gamers in the short term, before next year’s previews acknowledge the issue and tout supposed improvements. If you’ve been through a few preview seasons, this becomes painfully obvious. I understand the need to remain in good standing with developers if you’re a content creator, but participating in these lies makes you a shill.

5. Post-Draft Roster Updates

As I said, even when we’re familiar with the spin and suspicious signs of the preview season, sometimes we ignore bad omens. Again, this may be because we’re trying to remain optimistic, but circumstances and context do matter. We can’t always rely on precedent. Something that was previously a positive or neutral event can become a worrying sign, or we may conversely worry about something that isn’t an issue. If you think that I’m saying all of this to rationalise a couple of incorrect predictions over the years…yes, you’re absolutely correct there! The official post-Draft roster updates for a couple of the eighth gen NBA Live games were bad omens that I should’ve heeded.

In my defense, when NBA Live 14 received a couple of offseason updates, it had no bearing on NBA Live 15. It was just a show of goodwill after the game proved to be a rough start to the generation; an attempt to encourage gamers to give the next release a chance. However, when NBA Live 16 and NBA Live 19 were updated following the end of the 2016 and 2019 seasons, people correctly predicted that a new release wasn’t on the horizon. I’ll own up to not seeing the writing on the wall, having incorrectly looked to NBA Live 14 as the precedent. Admittedly it wouldn’t worry me if NBA 2K received such updates, but there’s no denying they were bad omens for NBA Live.

Did you recognise these bad omens in years gone by? What are some other bad omens when it comes to basketball gaming? 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 Bad Omens in Basketball Gaming appeared first on NLSC.