NBA Live 10 Blog: Shooting the Rock

[WTF]

04-September-2009

Hi again Live fans. Well, this is the last gameplay blog you guys will see before the NBA Live 10 demo hits PSN and XBL next week. I’m really looking forward to seeing all your homemade videos and reading your feedback. Keep in mind that the demo isn’t final code, so it’s really just a taste of what you’ll see in the full game. Take my word for it, one of the real strengths of Live this year is playing with and against all the different players and teams, which unfortunately, you won’t be able to do in the demo. But I’ll let Novell speak in more detail on just how deep the AI upgrade was this year and how we took player/team differentiation to the next level with Dynamic DNA. I know you sim-heads out there are gonna love it, so expect that blog in the near future.

But with the demo coming soon, we thought it would be good to give you one more tutorial to help you hit the ground running with some of the new gameplay mechanics. And today we’ll talk about everybody’s favorite subject: shooting the basketball.

There were a number of goals in our upgrade of the shot system in Live 10. But if I had to narrow it down to three, they’d be:

1. Control
2. Balance
3. Authenticity

Control:

Too many times with past versions of Live, shooting wasn’t much more than pressing a button and hoping that your player would “do the right thing.” Personally, I felt the 2-button setup didn’t really accomplish that goal of giving the user more control…but rather just made things more complicated than they needed to be. I’m sure by now most of you have heard that we’ve ditched the 2-button setup in lieu of a single Shot button. And I know there are some who are worried that you’re losing control with this change, but it’s actually the complete opposite. For Live 10, the movement of your player, the context of the situation, and the input on the left stick dictate what kind of shot you get. With this kind of system, we were actually able to give the user way more control over shot type while also making life a little simpler for the casual gamer. I’m not going to write up instructions on how to do all the different types of shots because there’s a whole lot you can do, but check my tutorial video and you’ll get a good sense of how it all works.



Another nice thing regarding control, is the new animation branching tech we built into our shot code. We really wanted to capture the beauty of a long drawn out canned sequence, but never wanted the user to feel like they were out of control at any moment. So with our jumpshots, layups and dunks, we’ve added the ability to branch seamlessly from one system to another. So for example, if you trigger a spin layup from the free throw line, sometimes you’ll get a nice clean finish, sometimes you’ll blend into a collision asset where your guy gets knocked down, sometimes you’ll get stripped as you get into the air, sometimes you’ll get the shot off clean but you’ll come down in traffic and your guy will fall like D-Wade, etc. Live 10 does a good job at mixing and matching the different systems in a believable way and what might look like a 5-10 second mocapped sequence, might be 8-10 different bits of mocap “frankensteined” together. So you always feel like you’re in control, the defender doesn’t ever feel taken out of the play, and every user will see something different from possession to possession.

Balance:

Pretty much the bane of basketball games = inside shooting. For whatever reason, it’s been tough to properly balance the inside/outside game in previous versions of Live. Whenever I watched people play, every game came down to who could hit more 3’s or who could get more dunks. With Live 10, we really wanted to break that cycle. So we spent a considerable amount of time upgrading our contact shot system so that if a defender properly impedes the shooter on his way to the hoop, he’ll be able to force him into a tough shot. So no more overpowering dunkers knocking guys out of the way or magically clipping right through the defense. In Live 10, if you force your way to the basket, be prepared to reap the consequences. We’ve also completely done away with our ratings-based shot success calculation and are now driving all of our shooting percentages through Dynamic DNA. It’s a very complex heuristic which takes a lot of various factors into consideration. But the end result is picture perfect shot distribution and percentages. Needless to say, I’m really happy with the way shooting is balanced in Live 10. If you take the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your players, and properly balance your offensive attack, Live 10 will reward you. It’s great to walk around the office and watch people playing each other. Sometimes I’ll see one guy trying to play “old school” and continually force up bad shots… and it’s so great to see him getting owned by the guy who plays smart hoops. Finally, mid-range shooting is a valid weapon!



Authenticity:

It pretty much goes without saying, but everybody expects players to replicate their real life counterparts in today’s sports games. I remember when I was back on Inside Drive and everybody in the league had the same jumpshot. In Drive 2004, we put a whopping 3 jumpshot variations in and I remember how revolutionary it was for its time. Fast forward to today’s b-ball games where everybody now expects a sig shot on every player, even if he takes one shot per season. With Live 10, we put a lot of resources, not only on signature shots, but on the overall quality of our shot animations. We brought in some phenomenal mocap talent and they gave us some beautiful data. So everything from our layups and dunks to our jumpshots got a nice facelift for this year’s game. It’s quite a jump over Live 09 and we really feel like our players move and shoot much more like real NBA athletes now.

Well, that’s about all I wanted to write for today, so let’s move on to the videos. Again, I apologize for the quality of the video and for the hitchiness of it. Don’t worry, it’s not the game, it’s my computer. The game runs a silky smooth 60 FPS… it’s just my laptop chugs from time to time. The videos really don’t do the game justice and I’m sure marketing will love for me to stop posting them - but hopefully they give you a better idea of what to expect in how the game controls, the overall pacing, and how the AI looks this year.



So here’s the shooting tutorial. It will give you a pretty good rundown of how to use the new shooting controls in this year’s game:

Now I know you guys just can’t get enough 5-on-5 gameplay footage, so that’s the second vid. It’s a montage of gameplay from different camera angles and different teams to showcase some of Live’s shooting in action. I tried to mix it up so some of the games are CPU vs. CPU like the last clip of GSW vs. NYK. That game was sweet by the way. The Warriors were on fire in the first half (Stephen Curry had 23 at halftime), and were up by 23 or so at the break. I left the room to go eat dinner and when I came back, the Knicks went on a nice run, cutting the lead in half. I went to finish dinner and when I came back again, the Knicks were within 3. I stayed and watched the finish and it came down to the wire. Wish I could’ve recorded the whole game for you guys cause it was pretty fun to watch. That’s one of the cool things about Live this year. I’ve seen blowouts as well as games that go back and forth the entire 48 minutes… both when I’m playing and when I’m watching the AI play itself. I just find it really cool that as we’re moving closer and closer to authentic AI and team playstyles (and Dynamic DNA plays a HUGE role in that), NBA Live is really starting to replicate the ebb and flow of a real NBA game with all its ups and downs and big runs that make watching real NBA basketball so great. But anyway, I digress. Here’s the video:


That’s it for me. Looking forward to seeing what you guys think of the demo!

- Mike

[Stumbleweed]

Oh man, my Live crush just keeps getting bigger. Loving all these options... just getting to the gameplay vid now and that post-play replay of Wade driving looked AMAZING. Perfect broadcast angles and the play itself was nice.

EDIT: Whooo, that D-Wade finish after he smoked his man was nasty.

[krazyboy225]

Quote: Originally Posted by Stumbleweed

Oh man, my Live crush just keeps getting bigger. Loving all these options... just getting to the gameplay vid now and that post-play replay of Wade driving looked AMAZING. Perfect broadcast angles and the play itself was nice. EDIT: Whooo, that D-Wade finish after he smoked his man was nasty.

Watch out for the D-will replay he made his man drop.

[greenegt]

Beautiful. What a difference a year can make with the right dev team. Just one more week until the demo.

[ronimous]

Yet again NOT a Kobe fan here.. But they got kobe's fadeaway jumper spot On @ 1:38 from the tutorial vid! Damn how sick is that? Cant wait for the demo!!! HopefuLLy its on Sept 10th for PS3, as Mike Wang says on the blog "Hi again Live fans. Well, this is the last gameplay blog you guys will see before the NBA Live 10 demo hits PSN and XBL next week." And Its Sept 04 today! Pls do check at the 1st vid Mike says ps3 and xbox demo on Sept 10th @ 8:22 from the vid!

[RayAllen20]

The atmosphere in the Knicks-Warriors game was intense! I loved it! And it looks like we have a playoff/finals mode this year. Because the Raptors and Jazz usually aren't playing the playoffs haha.

2k is going to have to amaze me to get my $60 now. This game has made such a huge step. This dev team is amazing. O and that postgame recap thing was awesome, sounded like a real broadcast. And the rim physics looks great now.

[jrich730]

That Kevin Durant on the big screen in the back was great i didn't know they had those type of celebrations

[Jasong7777]

The more I see of Live10 the more I am ready to play this baby. Can't wait!!!