When NBA Live 15 hit retail shelves a few weeks back, the expectations from the community ranged anywhere from extremely skeptical to extremely optimistic, and rightfully so. The marketing of NBA Live 15, or lack thereof, forced the Live community to either have faith in developer rhetoric or to simply draw upon their own conclusion as to the level of quality of this year’s iteration.

Upon finishing the review of the game, in which I noted multiple problem areas with Live ’15, my ultimate goal was to continue spending time with the title and see how the issues would affect its replay value. Throughout the review process I also noted how much fun the game was, even with its issues, but would that continue?

Luckily for me, and hopefully for the majority of others who purchased Live 15, the answer is yes.

If you played NBA Live 14, than you have a real understanding of how EA’s synergy updates played a vital role in the how the game played overall. Fans of the series have been waiting patiently for the synergy updates in Live 15 to permeate the game so that players in NBA Live will moderately have the same skills and abilities as they do in real life. The good news is the synergy updates have dropped, and have been updating on a daily basis (at the very least) ever since.

The bad news is that users had to wait until after multiple games after the season started for these synergy updates to take place, as it needs real life statistic gathering to implement the information into the actual game. One has to ask the question though, why not just use last year’s statistics until enough information has been gathered for the 2015 season? We may never know.

Another area that has been lacking is the promised updates to the rosters themselves. There is no need to bring up the direct quotes from the developers promising this feature, but as of the writing of this article there has been just one roster update. Now I am not a huge stickler for the intricate details of an NBA roster (other than the team I follow), but to call this minutiae seems an understatement. Many fans struggle to even play the game with outdated and incorrect rosters, so it's understandable to see the frustration many have had on the lack of total updates to the games roster. Here is to hoping that now the first rosters have dropped, that EA will deliver on their promises of constant roster tweaks throughout the year.

Probably the most important aspect of any sports video game is obviously the gameplay itself. While I took issue with missing contextual animations, poor interior defense, and insanely high 3-point percentages, I enjoyed the overall gameplay very much. After having the game for almost a month now, I can safely say that I am still enjoying the game as a whole. The developers are subtly tweaking the game behind the scenes, and there has been even more improvements to the on-court action since Live was made available to the public.

The game still suffers from those missing animations, somewhat poor interior defense, and successful 3-point attempts, but the developers have tweaked and updated the game enough since launch that I easily notice how differently game plays now, and its initial offering. While I am excited to see what Live 16 will offer, I also am firm in the belief that the developers need to maintain the tweaking and improving of Live 15 consistently for its fan base.

I don’t think many would argue that the NBA Live franchise is not where it should be at this stage, but I would strongly argue against the idea that the difference between Live 14 and Live 15 is negligible, because that’s simply not true. NBA Live is still realistically a year or two away from competing with NBA 2K on a global level, but the series is definitely on the right path. Now it’s contingent upon the developers and powers-that-be at EA to let it continue down said path.

What about you, are you enjoying NBA Live 15 this year?