NBA Live Committed to Consoles - Shipping in 2017, But the Focus Will Be on Mobile

[Crunky]

Quote: Originally Posted by strawberryshortcake

Then the obvious question is, how do you know all of this? How do you know that they in fact wanted an "arcade easy to pick up and play catering to the casual gamer." How do you know about the "2man animation" part? Is this just speculation on your part because that's what the game turned out to be as opposed to the developers couldn't program the game to be in line with their vision to create a respected simulation product? An easy to pick up and play game doesn't mean how the gameplay is executed needs to be arcadey. At the same time, arcadey doesn't mean something has to look fake. People are graphics whore. Something can look extra real and extremely realistic with the most simplest control scheme catered to casuals or extra hard with the most difficult control scheme ever developed catered to your hardcore gamer. How do you know the suits wanted the interior defense to be lackadaisical? Honestly as a gamer of the competitor's product, the only major issue I had with NBA Live's 16 demo was the lackadaisical interior paint defense. A couple great things, very realistic things about NBA Live16 was the way steals actually look realistic and the way rebounding actually looks realistic. Suits-desired features still doesn't dictate what happens with the gameplay component as far as what a pass, a shot, a block, a dunk, the way the player dribbles, the way the players run, player movement, player awareness, etc should be. What difference does it make to how gameplay mechanics are implemented in the game if all the suits wanted were money making features? Session one of day one at the office for motion captures is not dictated by what features make it into the game. EA's NHL series and Fifa series' gameplay mechanic looks "real" enough. Some might consider certain elements to play arcadey, but overall, both series look real. Each game's respective programmers are able to "program" their game to do what they want. This is why I don't believe the suits caused the potential downfall to NBA Live. I believe it's because the NBA Live team simply can't program the game how they want it to be -- and that's simulation gameplay with casual easy to pick up and play controls. Gran Turismo, Forzas, Skate 1/2/3 are supposedly classified as simulation products more or less and sells pretty well.

Your right I don't know much of anything that caused this, it was purely speculation on my part and I'll leave the conversation at that so we can remain on topic.

[HoosierDaddy]

This needs to be said...

If they (all of EA) were serious about putting out a quality product that would actually create some competition, they would be much more receptive to the ideas the community could provide. I've offered my services multiple times and I'm aware of others who have done the same with minimal response. I hate to say it, but look at what the "other" game has done with bringing in these quality people. Don't have to name names, but you all get the point.

The community days we get to spend at EA are more of a marketing ploy and a sales pitch instead of bringing in these people EARLY in the process to actually have some impact on what the final product could be. Devs (not all) are afraid to think outside of the box, they get tunnel vision, and develop the attitude that we as consumers don't know how to improve a product. It's sad to say, but many of these devs don't know the game of basketball and yet are tasked with creating a "sim" game. Shame on you, EA, you get what you deserve. It's unfortunate for us as gamers (and true sim heads) though who really wanted to see this game succeed.

Adios.

[Hassan Darkside]

Quote: Originally Posted by strawberryshortcake

Then the obvious question is, how do you know all of this? How do you know that they in fact wanted an "arcade easy to pick up and play catering to the casual gamer." How do you know about the "2man animation" part? Is this just speculation on your part because that's what the game turned out to be as opposed to the developers couldn't program the game to be in line with their vision to create a respected simulation product? An easy to pick up and play game doesn't mean how the gameplay is executed needs to be arcadey. At the same time, arcadey doesn't mean something has to look fake. People are graphics whore. Something can look extra real and extremely realistic with the most simplest control scheme catered to casuals or extra hard with the most difficult control scheme ever developed catered to your hardcore gamer. How do you know the suits wanted the interior defense to be lackadaisical? Honestly as a gamer of the competitor's product, the only major issue I had with NBA Live's 16 demo was the lackadaisical interior paint defense. A couple great things, very realistic things about NBA Live16 was the way steals actually look realistic and the way rebounding actually looks realistic. Suits-desired features still doesn't dictate what happens with the gameplay component as far as what a pass, a shot, a block, a dunk, the way the player dribbles, the way the players run, player movement, player awareness, etc should be. What difference does it make to how gameplay mechanics are implemented in the game if all the suits wanted were money making features? Session one of day one at the office for motion captures is not dictated by what features make it into the game. EA's NHL series and Fifa series' gameplay mechanic looks "real" enough. Some might consider certain elements to play arcadey, but overall, both series look real. Each game's respective programmers are able to "program" their game to do what they want. This is why I don't believe the suits caused the potential downfall to NBA Live. I believe it's because the NBA Live team simply can't program the game how they want it to be -- and that's simulation gameplay with casual easy to pick up and play controls. Gran Turismo, Forzas, Skate 1/2/3 are supposedly classified as simulation products more or less and sells pretty well.

Lol you're thinking too hard. EA Devs have been pretty candid in the past about (in particular this game and Madden) about the vision of the managers vs the vision of the people that work there.

The Devs aren't deciding to not give a **** when they're programming. This was posted on Reddit last year and I've posted it around here a couple of times for those that may want perspective...

Quote:

As a former developer, there's a lot of things I wish gamers knew. Here are some of those things... Game engines help, but every game is essentially made from scratch Game Engines like Unreal and Unity can reduce the load, but they also add a layer of complexity to your codebase, and some walls that you have no ability to customize. Ever wonder why so many UE 3 games feel really similar? Because making changes to some of those base elements was considered too costly for the development team to do. (Read as: someone would need to completely read, understand, and extend the Unreal Engine without breaking EVERYTHING) Code and assets can be shared between projects, and occasionally teams. However, usually enough time has passed between when the code was poorly written at 2 AM to meet a deadline a year ago that nobody really remembers/knows why it was written that way. Time to rebuild it and reinvent the wheel, or ignore it and hope there isn't a bug. Think this is only reserved for ****ty developers? It isn't. Unless a dev team has all of its original members, with all genius-level brain capacity, and none of them ever took a break from developing they will not remember what everything does, and waste time relearning stuff and integrating it into a new game. Better graphics = higher budget Everyone is loving those new Unreal 4 screenshots. So realistic. Did you know that Epic Games spends months with a large team just to create each demo? And the demos are usually one-and-done scripted scenes to prove out a concept, not a complete game. Ever wonder why so many games have been getting released in a semi-broken state? Because many studios are not committing the correct amount of time and resources to provide the content at advertised quality. Development is far more expensive and time consuming than you could ever imagine. A common phrase for developers is: “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time” One feature change/addition can require several hundred hours or more of testing Large AAA studios have QA teams that outnumber the dev team, usually by a large margin. Any time the code is changed you have 3 possible outcomes: The game is broken, everyone stop working and find out why The game MAY be broken, upwards of a hundred people need to be mobilized to retest absolutely everything in the game Just kidding, there’s only 2 options. Stop dreaming. You may think additions to the pause screen would be a quick change with no consequences on the rest of the game...until it breaks the game. You may think the player customization should have no effect on the final boss battle…. until it breaks the game. You may think an artist can add content to a level with no adverse effects….until it breaks the game. Starting to get the idea? I’ve seen development come to a halt for the most trivial of changes that you would be shocked any game was ever finished. Game studios are like group projects in college Remember all those fond memories you have of getting assigned into groups in your English 101 class? Remember how awesome it is to do group projects? Game development is like that. It is EXACTLY like that. Imagine a group project where 5 people need to write sections of a creative writing assignment in a Word document together. That’s EXACTLY like game development assuming some of the members are not native-English speakers. Sometimes a game is a failure because of poor management. You would be surprised how many talented and passionate people are in the industry. Poor management can ultimately sink a talented team almost every time. Every game is just smoke and mirrors with known defects when it's shipped I remember a simpler time, before I began my game development career, where I bitched about developers failing to add accurate collisions to character props, or pieces of trees, etc. I remember complaining about the lack of realism in character faces, or hair, or anything. Guess what? Almost none of those things I mentioned are created or placed in a game by programmers. These things will almost NEVER be right no matter how many developers you throw at a game, or how long they develop. There are usually so many higher priority problems with a game at the end, that spending time on these minor issues is viewed as a waste of money, time, and energy. Artists and designers generally spend the end of a development cycle by figuratively putting rugs over the cracks in the floor, and hanging paintings over holes in the walls. This is called polish. Great artists and designers can sometimes make a mediocre game feel nearly perfect, but it’s all done at the end, and only if there is time and money for it. The work done here is what people praise more than anything, and is the least important and poorly planned part of the project. No game has ever finished early No game has ever finished early. There just isn’t enough time to fix everything. If you gave a development team hundred years to make a game, they would take a hundred years and complain about running out of time at the end. The reasons for this are varied: Developers generally schedule the project based on the amount of time allowed in an attempt to maximize the output from a team Nothing ever goes exactly to plan, leaving management with a load of tough problems to solve, and pushing the team past internal deadlines As the complexity of the project increases, the difficulty and time involved with testing and fixing issues increases disproportionately. You have to test the combination of features as well as the feature by itself on the off chance that some edge case bricks the game. Given more time, developers unleash their ambitions and elect to make larger and more complicated systems with more attention to detail. Nobody ever says “Ok, I think we have the perfect ___.” and never looks at it again. No developer is scamming you to get your money Game developers love their jobs. They’d have to or else they would be suicidal. With the amount of training and knowledge required to be a successful developer, there are about a thousand other jobs you could take that pay better, and give you less stress. They want to be universally successful, entertain the masses, and be recognized for their work. This is not an environment where people want to half-*** something for the sake of a paycheck. The reason some of these games end up being ****ty is usually because of investors, publishers, and MBAs. These people are not developers, and they view the development cycle as a business investment. They do not make decisions for the love of the community, they make decisions for their bottom line. Unfortunately, the larger a game budget needs to be, the more important people like investors and publishers become. By pushing things towards high-end graphics, the consumer is forcing non-developers into the process, and destroying their own games.

[iFnotWhyNoT]

Quote: Originally Posted by Hassan Darkside

Lol you're thinking too hard. EA Devs have been pretty candid in the past about (in particular this game and Madden) about the vision of the managers vs the vision of the people that work there. The Devs aren't deciding to not give a **** when they're programming. This was posted on Reddit last year and I've posted it around here a couple of times for those that may want perspective...

Code and assets can be shared between projects, and occasionally teams. However, usually enough time has passed between when the code was poorly written at 2 AM to meet a deadline a year ago that nobody really remembers/knows why it was written that way. Time to rebuild it and reinvent the wheel, or ignore it and hope there isn't a bug.

I think that's what starwberryshortcake was getting at, at one point do you begin to blame the dev's for glaring issues that have been talked about from past iterations of the game not being properly addressed in the new version... i agree it's not entirely on the dev's but when you see the same complaints year round, you have to wonder.

However, ultimately the blame for this franchise goes to first and foremost the upper management, MARKETING, and then devs.

[GisherJohn24]

Quote: Originally Posted by blackceasar

I mean honestly and I'm not trying to dog on EA Sports (you know, don't wanna get banned), but at some point you just have to base your judgment and level of skepticism based on previous track record. It's all about that track record folks. No one put a gun to their head and told them to make really bad basketball games (Live 10 and Elite 11 I'm looking at you). Also no one put a gun to their head and told them to scrap a game, take multiple years off and talk a big game of promising that the time off was to make something truly amazing (...or at least worth a full 60.00), only for the next game to come out after the big speeches was another relative failure. I dont say "failure" but I say "relative failure" because had they just kept their mouth shut in the past, the backlash would have been so severe last time they pulled this stunt. It's track record people. No one here is out to just see EA Sport's demise. Nor does anyone here want to see them fail. So when we read articles like this and hit them hard, we have a right to do so, we have a right to be skeptical, and we have a right to disagree with the fanboys and other people over hyping up the game because of their own relationship potentially with the publisher. At the end of the day, again, it's track record. You cannot deny it. It's there. It's forever written in the history of the interwebs. It's no different than being bad with your money and debt and having a 370 FICO score now. No bank want's to hear your story, or your sell job on what you're going to do now. They don't wanna hear it and you're not getting the benefit of the doubt simply because your track record is all on you as a game developer. So he said they are giving it more development time... okay... last time you did this you had a whole two years... you talked it up.. and look what happened. So he said we want to release our own basketball game in a different time of the year to shake things up. Hmmmm... basically what you're really saying is you don't feel as confident in your own game to compete with the 2k franchise. Think about it... the fact that you don't want to release your product at the same time, and around the time youve always released it until another company started doing it better really speaks volumes in the faith and confidence you have in your own product. It's like a group of kids that arent that good at basketball wanting to play a pick up game but when they get close to the court they see some really good players there, so they just wait for those kids to leave before you get on the court.... I'm not an EA Sports *****. I wish they would get their **** together to be honest. I WANT two GREAT games so I can choose. That's not been the case in years.... Track record. When it comes to Live your's isnt great and here you go again....

Honestly they should consider hiring a ton of new people or developer all together

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

[CMH]

Quote: Originally Posted by strawberryshortcake

This is directed to anyone who has any input whatsoever, from anyone please.

You're severely understating how understaffed the Live team is.

You can't expect developers to do so much and fix so much with such a small team working at such an extreme deadline.

That's why I don't have faith in Live the product. It's not about who is on staff as the developer. It's about the management. That's not changing so why should I have faith in a product EA does not support?

They could hire Naughty Dog and the game would be just as poorly developed due to lack of funding and support.

[Daddy123]

It's pretty much over. You can ignore all you want but since 2014, there have been MINOR changes to this game. You can't come out with a new game like that with those minor changes. The game, for most, is not playable. Even presentation wise, I would say 2K has surpassed EA. EA sees their mobile game had some success and most who played it had nice things to say. Mobile is where the big money is at, they can make good money on mobile if they put 100% of their focus on it. They are not getting anywhere with a console release unless they change the whole game and come out with something totally different. And I refuse to buy the we need 4-5 extra months for release if you are not ready by original date..I doubt they will be ready by January.

Maybe they are trying to release it in January since they can't compete with 2K sales wise during the same week, and most get tired by 2K during that time, not really sure. Wish they would go in more details rather than being so quite.

[Focus10]

Yall realize no more NBA Live means NBA 2K is going to be lazy with their game. Look at NBA 2K10, that was mediocre game and Live 10 was the best NBA Live. Then we got 2k11 masterpiece because NBA Live challenged 2k. It sucks EA has ruined NBA Live, it was headed towards the right direction with NBA Live 10