MyCareer mode in NBA 2K14 was a cool, but flawed experience.

I don’t know about you, but having to sit through nearly an hour of cutscenes at the beginning of the mode with no option to skip really ruined the experience for me from the get go. From there, the linear nature of the storytelling was more like holding your hand through a pre-designed NBA-experience moreso than letting you live your own story both on and off the court.

To me, MyCareer represented the best of intentions with some paltry execution.

I do enjoy some aspects of the mode, especially now that I’m through that brutal stretch where I literally sat the controller down after 10 minutes and came onto the OS forums to browse while cutscenes played in the background. Let’s not forget about sitting through the draft waiting for your name to be called when a simple press x to skip option would have sufficed.

Time is money, and most working adults don’t want to buy a sports game to sit through an hour of what basically amounts to pretty subpar dialogue in a story they'd rather be creating themselves right then and there.

So as we look ahead to NBA 2K15, here are three areas MyCareer should focus on to enhance the experience next year:

1)Make the mode less of a singular storyline and more of an unpredictable experience. To me, it makes more sense to not have to come up with a single fleshed out storyline so much as a series of smaller story lines and events which can have a dramatic impact on your career.

I feel the hand holding aspect of MyCareer held you back in many ways and limited your freedom to become a player you wanted to truly be. You don’t need subpar/uninteresting dialogue to get the point across, get rid of that stuff in favor of a more dynamic experience where any number of things can happen. Give players the ability to make choices which impacts the game environment and their likeability.

Most importantly, make some aspects of the mode random. Injuries are one possibility, either to you or to players in front of you. Past editions of 2K's career mode included them, but on a limited basis. What about having random events come up which affect your ability to play well, think MIchael Jordan's flu game here. Another cool aspect would be having a minor injury which you can fight through with lower attributes but higher VC rewards -- but playing through an injury also can result in you being injured and missing time.

Things like that would be far better than a sterilized and linear NBA experience.

2)Don’t make us sit through uneventful stuff. Pressing X to skip through cutscenes would’ve been amazing the first time I played through MyCareer…because I just wanted to build a character and see where things went. I felt trapped the first time through, as if I were being forced to watch Rocky V over and over again with no way out of the theater.

It was a similar feeling when I had to enter every game, wait for the game to load into the arena, only to sit through the game and have random times when I’d see some in-game action. Why not allow the ability to quickly move through games and if we don’t appear, we don’t have to actually go through the process of loading into arenas?

In fact, much of the MyCareer story aspects are best described as forced, boring, or corny. Getting rid of the cutscenes and creating a more seamless experience would make the mode far more playable and addicting, as getting from place to place would be less a chore and more of a seamless transistion. If 2K is adament about selling Virtual Currency, making the aspect of the modes quicker to move through and advance through makes them far more likely to hook consumers and get them to want to pay for some upgrades -- not that I'm condoning that sort of approach or anything.

3)Allow us to define the experience more. It would be nice to be able to do crazy things like talk trash on the court or taunt fans or celebrate — or on the other end be a very low-key player who just goes about his business. As I said in the first point, I think the ideal career mode isn’t a storyline driven experience, but rather the ability to make real choices both on and off the court which impact your virtual universe in real ways, but not in the West Side Story 'we're rivals and that means we're enemies' kind of way.

At the end of the day, sports games have always been at their best when users can create a world of their own making and become sucked into that. How cool would it be to choose our rivals and our words instead of having those be forced onto us?

For instance, after playing at home against the Heat with a rookie from Chicago, I could choose to take to social media to trash talk the Heat or a specific player (aka LeBron James). Depending on how persistent I was, when we went on the road maybe the fans are THAT much angrier towards me and maybe the Heat are a little more amped up to stop me.

I could see this all centering on a popularity/likeability type of scale, where your popularity and likeability both can change and affect the other and your ability to grab endorsements and such. A high popularity and likeability rating, for instance, would net you a major shoe deal, with a very generous VC reward to be had obviously.

The possibilities are endless, as they say.

Final Thoughts

MyCareer mode wasn’t a bad experiment this year. In many ways I believe the foundation established this season will be important towards taking career modes in sports gaming to a better, more dynamic, and story driven future — it’s just my hope that the experiences of the future are more dynamic, and less time consuming than MyCareer mode was this year in NBA 2K14.