Recently Operation Sports got a chance to talk with NBA Live 10 developers Mike Wang and Ryan Santos -- Mike Wang is the lead gameplay designer for NBA Live 10, and Ryan Santos is the lead visual designer on Live 10. We asked them about some of the recent media that has been released to the public, and we also asked them some general gameplay questions.

Operation Sports: What improvements have been made to the fast-break game? Last year it was nearly impossible to run an effective fast break.

Mike Wang: The transition game has been re-written and that encompasses both the primary fast break as well as the secondary break. Players will fill the lanes much better now when they have the opportunity, or spot up in transition if they’re effective shooters. Also, we’ve leveraged (and built on top of) NCAA’s Team Tempo feature, so up-and-down teams will get out much faster on the break when compared to the teams that like to slow it down and play a more half-court game.

On top of that, we spent a ridiculous amount of time tuning player speed differentiation. So slow oafy dudes will no longer be able to keep up with fast guys on the break. It’s really nice to feel that subtle pulling away when you get a step on a guy, or when you have a mismatch on the break. These changes definitely make playing the different teams more interesting and force you to adjust your transition defense strategy.

OS: Did you retain the "signature move" element from NBA Live 09 where you hold a direction and press the shot button to engage in a special player-specific jumper? If so, have you expanded upon these moves and added other "signature" elements to make certain players stand out?

MW: Yes, Go-To Moves are in NBA Live 10, and we’ve added some new ones for different guys. The basic philosophy regarding signature player animation is that every player (not just the top players in the league) is accurately portrayed in Live. And that means everything: the way he moves, dribbles, shoots, passes, his pre-game rituals, etc. All in all, we’ve added thousands of new animations to make sure that everyone was covered, and we intend to continue to build our library of assets for future iterations of Live.

The other big signature element that we’re proud of is the DNA of each of our players. Through the Dynamic DNA service, we’ve gone to an incredible level of detail in architecting the "thinking" that our players do under the hood. So which way a player likes to drive, how he likes to finish, how he moves away from the ball, and how he performs in different situations is as authentic as the real thing.

OS: Can we get an explanation of how shooting will work this year since now there is only one button involved? Is it all just contextual, or can you change your shot in mid-air or elect to put the ball off the glass?

I’ll be going into more detail regarding the mechanics of shooting in a blog later on… but essentially, the goal was to make shooting simpler for the first-time Live player, while at the same time more in-depth for the hardcore. In a nutshell, the shot you get is a function of how your player is moving at the time the shot button is pressed, the context of the situation, and what the user does on the left analog stick. Look for my blog in the coming weeks for a full "tutorial" on how shooting has changed in NBA Live. Believe me, it’s one of the best improvements in this year’s game.

OS: Has any work been done to the double teams? In Live 09 it just seemed like there were automatic double-downs in the post, even when they were not necessary.

We improved double teams on both the animation side as well as the logic side. Scrubs will no longer get doubled in the post automatically every time as we do a much more in-depth read on the situation, such that the AI [artificial intelligence] only doubles true post threats.

The same holds true for perimeter double teams. The AI will do a much better job at only trapping hot players or when trying to get the ball out of a certain player's hands. They also are aware of valid trap zones, so if you dribble into a danger area, the AI will know to take advantage and back you into a corner that might force a turnover.

OS: How were the right-stick crossovers made more responsive? And are they signature or generic?

Responsiveness was a key point of emphasis for us as a gameplay team across all of our features this year. Our lead AI engineer found a huge win early on in the project that basically improved our controller-input response across the board. On top of that, we did a lot of animation pruning and tuning to make sure that every asset was quick and responsive, and the user was never locked up watching a long sequence play out without having control.

As for the signature part, as I alluded to earlier, we captured a great deal of animation with a bunch of different ball handlers to make sure that our players were accurately represented. We implemented signature dribbling styles a bit differently than other games however. What we did was capture as many unique dribble moves as we felt necessary and then used various animation techniques to modify these same animations for different players in real time to get the variation. The reason for that is we wanted to be as efficient as possible with our asset usage while at the same time making each player feel different.

We’ve also built our dribble system in such a way that every animation can blend seamlessly into any other type of dribble move the user chooses. This was important to achieve a more dynamic ball-handling experience that allowed the user to create whatever anklebreaking sequence he wanted. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the perimeter game. It makes playing one-on-one basketball a lot of fun in Live and really makes the LeBrons, Kobes and Chris Pauls of the league stand out.

OS: How has the passing game been modified? Are there touch passes now? User-controlled bounce passes, lob passes or pass fakes?

Passing is another feature that saw some interesting innovations this year. I’m not ready to go into detail at this time but look for my "Passing" blog in the next couple weeks. One thing I will say is that there’s a lot more control over how you pass the ball in NBA Live 10, and one new aspect of passing (which I’ll talk about later) has been called out a few times in our focus groups as one of the best new features in this year’s game.

OS: What modifications have you made to the post game this year?

We weren’t very happy with the post game in Live 09, especially from a visual perspective. So it made sense for us to integrate NCAA’s post game this year. You’ll have all the same moves available to you as you did in NCAA Basketball: up and unders, fake and go, drop steps, spins, etc. We also brought in some NBA-caliber bigs who gave us some beautiful new post-specific animations, so the whole system got a nice facelift.

OS: What are some key changes to the defensive side of the game?

Wow. That’s a loaded question. At a high level, the mantra was, "always create a game within the game… every offensive tool needs a defensive counterpart." Every feature we worked on this year absolutely had to support this. So for dribble moves, there are defensive bumps, steals, charges. For shooting, we’ve rewritten the block system to improve shot challenges and blocked shots. Locomotion was also a huge focus. We improved the movement of on-ball defenders, close outs and rotations. I could probably go on for days talking about all of the things we tightened up or added on the defensive end of the floor.

But instead, I’ll just let you guys know that we recognized that playing defense hasn’t been fun in any basketball sim in recent memory, and we put a lot of effort into this year’s game to make sure that playing both ends of the floor was equally important. And I can honestly say, Live 10 is the first game in which I feel like, if I concentrate, I can really lock down a team while on defense and change the outcome of the game. Mr. Jeff Antwi and I battle regularly throughout the year, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times either of us have shot above 60 percent. In almost all of our games, we end up shooting in the 40-percent range, and it never feels unwarranted.

And no, we don’t suck on offense. The game just allows defensive-minded players to really dig in, get into guys and force tough shots. In the past, I had to tune games to have an overabundant number of missed layups or blocked shots to balance out the numbers… but that’s not the case with Live 10. And for me, that’s one of the most rewarding accomplishments in this year’s game.

OS: At the EA event in Vancouver, you talked about controlling the "wow moments" of the game rather than simply watching a canned animation play out. Can you go into a bit more detail about this?

Sure. First, we wanted to redefine what a "wow moment" was. We wanted to go beyond just a nice dunk or block and make a game in which everything that led up to the big play at the end was just as interesting as the finish. The problem with '09 was that the various gameplay systems didn’t necessarily work too well together, so you’d often see plays develop in a cookie-cutter fashion and all your wow moments tended to look the same.

For me, this caused the game to lose a lot of replay value and become stale very quickly. When Sean O’Brien and I sat down at the beginning of the year, one of the pillars we came up with was "every game is different, every possession is different." For gameplay, that meant that we needed to take a step back and figure out a way to have all our gameplay systems work together holistically so that users would always see something different and that my wow moments looked completely different from yours.

So it’s a bit difficult (and way too involved) to explain how we changed the game to make it more organic. But it’s more than just moving away from long canned animations. It’s building gameplay systems that understand and listen to each other, so to speak, and ensuring that the user is always in full control at all times and empowered to dictate exactly what happens on the court at all times. Thanks to a very complicated animation branching system and some really talented engineers, I think we made some excellent strides in that regard.

OS: We have seen some of the superstars in the videos, but will the role players actually look like themselves this year? Last year players like Anthony Parker and Rodney Carney did not look like their real-life counterparts.

Ryan Santos: We focused on getting a whole bunch of player likenesses better including Anthony Parker. Here’s a list of some other role players who needed an update or redo from Live 09:

- Andres Nocioni
- Chris Anderson
- Kendrick Perkins
- Matt Barnes
- Fabricio Oberto
- Morris Peterson
- Eddie House

This list is just a sample of the many players we updated. It doesn’t matter if they are an all-star, sixth man or a rookie, every year we try to get to as many players as we can.


Thanks to the Live 10 developers for taking some time out of their day to answer some questions. Check back for more NBA Live 10 content in the coming weeks.