NBA 2K16 Gameplay Blog With Mike Wang

Dunking and rim hangs have also never felt better. This year, the rim and stanchion respond to dunks with a true physical model. So on rim grazers, you’ll see the rim breakaway very slightly if at all. While monster rim hangs will show the basket and stanchion getting pulled down and snapping back up when the player lets go. Dunks that hit the side of the rim will cause the basket support to sway laterally and so on. And a quick side note on dunks, we’ve improved the ability of bigs to dunk from a stand when operating deep in the paint. So it feels amazing to shake a guy in the post or come down with an offensive board and finish with authority like a big should.

As a blocker, you can now choose to go up conservatively with verticality or more aggressively to try and make a bigger play on the ball. We’ve also implemented point IK, which allow blockers to track the ball in real time and react to different situations in a dynamic way. For me, swatting a shot into the stands is probably the most gratifying thing to do in NBA 2K16. The improved physics on blocks make these scenarios look great too.

For jump shooters, we’ve added some of the post-release follow through antics that shooters tend to do in real life. So on high percentage shots you’ll see guys leaving their hand up on the follow through or heading back upcourt early as they watch the flight of the ball. You’ll see players try to “will the ball in” with their body language, follow their shots, or even celebrate early like Steph Curry on a buzzer beater. It may be a small detail, but it’s one of my favorite features this year.

MUCH more responsive defensive movement both onball and off which feels fantastic and really helps balance the game.

Brand new dribble crowd system allows you to body up the ball handler while he’s standing in triple threat or dribbling. This makes the physical onball defenders feel much more dominant. The moving body up ride system also saw a ton of improvements. Collisions are much more appropriate, more intense, and more responsive for both the dribbler and defender. In a nutshell, playing onball defense is nice now.

Speaking of onball defense, we’ve also added a new Dynamic Defense Assist feature. The harder you press the Intense-D trigger, the more assist we give you as an onball defender. I can’t overstate how much this feature improves the ability to play defense online. There’s also a slider, so you can tweak the strength yourself or turn it off.

Blocking is another area that has gotten a lot of love. As a blocker, you can now choose to go up conservatively with verticality or more aggressively to try and make a bigger play on the ball. We’ve also implemented point IK, which allow blockers to track the ball in real time and react to different situations in a dynamic way. For me, swatting a shot into the stands is probably the most gratifying thing to do in NBA 2K16. The improved physics on blocks make these scenarios look great too.

Layup strips have been improved and are a much more reliable counter against guys going to the rim

We’ve re-worked the offball collision system to allow you to deny with more physicality and chuck cutters away from the ball. It’s especially awesome to see guys trying to fight their man off while being grabbed to try and get open for those last second buzzer beaters.

We do a much better job now of detecting shot defense and responding with realistic outcomes (fewer missed easy layups, more bricks when heavily contested, and contested jump shot values that match real life stats.) Also, just about every variable we have in our shot heuristics can now be re-tuned post-release without having to create and release a patch, ensuring that we’ll be able to fine tune the system based on community feedback so that everybody’s happy.

Because players aren’t able to cheat physics by sliding or radically shifting momentum it allows the flow of basketball to play out in a more natural fashion.