NBA Live 10 Blog: Gameplay Defense

[Beluba]

Check out the new NBA Live 10 blog. This one featuring defense.

Quote:

"So what happens if you have a mental lapse or you get crossed up and your first line of defense gets beat? That’s when your second line of defense comes to the rescue. I’ve always felt that the NBA Live series featured strong help defense logic. But Live 10’s help defense is really something special. Our AI engineer who works on defense (who shall remain nameless to keep away the headhunters) worked closely with Novell Thomas (one of our resident basketball strategy experts, who should probably be playing ball somewhere for lots of money by the way) to beef up our AI in that area. Now when the onball defender gets beat, you’ll see some textbook help coming to protect the basket and some beautiful rotations off the ball. These guys worked tirelessly, constantly tweaking and tuning the system to ensure that the right guys rotate over to help, that they come at the right time, and that everything happens in a realistic manner. Not an easy feat by any means, but take my word for it… dribble penetration takes quite a bit of skill in Live this year when you’re playing the higher difficulty levels."

[Stumbleweed]

"Our AI engineer who works on defense (who shall remain nameless to keep away the headhunters)"

LOL

Good stuff Mike, I'm happy to hear about the defensive assist tweaks so it's not a crutch for people but can still be useful in certain situations (especially OTP, where it's definitely needed).

Can you say yet if you can deny the ball and other things in OTP? That was the biggest issue with the mode last year (aside from the near-unstoppable alley-oops) because offensive players could basically just run around like headless chickens at will and pop jumpers or cut to the hoop for dunks. Being able to body them up or use defensive assist to stay between your man and the ball would do wonders for that mode.

[shadox]

Quote:

So at the start of Live 10’s dev cycle, we encouraged all of the guys to incorporate difficulty level tunables in a meaningful way for every gameplay bucket that we touched… which basically ended up being all of them. So this year, you’ll see and feel some very noticeable differences between the various levels, that really make playing each one a different experience.

So this is the second (or first->debatable) EA Sports game where the difficulty is not (only) determined by AI stats boost?


Nice read, thx for the info.
Sounds real great!

But acutally...I would love to see some paint drawings

[RayDog253]

Great blog Mike....

"We really got sick of seeing people actively trying to switch away from the ball when playing defense, feeling that the AI could do a better job at guarding the ball than they could. Instead, we wanted to encourage users to stay active and not run away from the play, so to speak."

I hated this, would always talk ish to my friends because I was the only one that played on ball D.

Overall Live 10 seems to be shaping up real well, can't wait to get my hands on the demo.

[23]

Quote: Originally Posted by Beluba

Not like you guys need anymore info today. But here it is: http://www.easports.com/blogs/nbaliv...meplay-defense

Of course we do!!!!...

Matter of fact, feel more than free to write yet another blog today on GP

[shadox]

Quote: Originally Posted by 23

Of course we do!!!!... Matter of fact, feel more than free to write yet another blog today on GP

+1

of course after you've left the plane

[poster]

Thanks Mike for the blog. Defense is sounding good. The information on the difficulty level tuning is nice as well.

[HoosierDaddy]

I feel so overwhelmed! LOL!