NBA 2K18

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“ Playing to the strengths and weaknesses of your players comes through.

Every IGN NBA 2K Review Ever 22 IMAGES

However, the AI does do a much better job this year of playing into the signature styles of teams and players on offense. Guys like Devin Booker run off screen to catch the ball on the move to immediately pressure your defense. Unique big men like Nikola Jokic aren’t featured enough for my tastes, but overall, teams play like their real-life counterparts more than they ever have before.

“ Seeing all these improvements across the board has breathed new life into the series for me.

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The biggest downside right now to the head-to-head games online is that timeouts are causing a minor frame rate issue for many folks (including myself) after returning to action. If neither team ever calls a timeout, this issue never occurs. You can play through it, but it is noticeable, especially when stat overlays come up on the screen during the action. I imagine it will be patched because something similar has happened before in an NBA 2K game and was quickly patched then, but as of now, it remains my biggest issue with online play.

“ It’s a smart way to keep you in a populated world at all times.

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Playing online has seen a number of structural changes, some better than others. The first and most obvious is that, in what feels like the culmination of years of baby steps, NBA 2K18 has largely stripped away the linear starting path of MyCareer and combined it with MyPark and Pro-Am to create The Neighborhood. Instead of picking modes from menus, you’re set loose in an open environment as your player and are free to jog to various places to take part in MyPark Ante Up games, or even just compete in trivia against a bunch of other random people.

Those are all steps forward, but NBA 2K18 has also taken a significant step back by bringing microtransactions to a place that feels uncomfortable. They were around last year, but now you’re forced to use virtual currency to buy everything from a tattoo to a T-shirt, as well as increasing your character’s stats. You can earn this currency by playing – very slowly – but if you buy the $150 version of NBA 2K18 you can get a big boost with the currency that comes with it. You’ll see plenty of those artificially high-rated players around, and it feels like we’re being steered toward spending money to avoid an insane amount of hours spent grinding for points.

“ It’s a dangerous slide into pay-to-win territory.

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Meanwhile, over in the franchise mode, MyGM, there’s a new text-driven story mode attached to the extensive simulation. It’s good to see an element of story added to try and give you a reason to play beyond just crafting your squad to win games, but this is not a great first attempt. It’s largely styled like a choose-your-own-adventure book that plays out in simple cutscenes, only it feels like the choices don’t actually mean much. For example, one story path leads to a choice of whether to hire the owner’s son as assistant GM. If you refuse, the owner hires his son anyway. If you then fire the brat, he’ll keep showing up in meetings until you fire him again after the season ends. That’s either a really annoying bug or a serious lack of impact to decisions.

In another instance, your owner demands you trade for a specific player. This also felt completely scripted because it seemed next to impossible to manually trade for him, no matter what I offered the other team. But then magically, right at the trade deadline, this specific player was acquired in a move that was done behind my back by the owner’s son.

“ As a huge NBA nerd, this is a tool that feels like it was made for me.

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Between the irrelevant choices there’s also a cringe-worthy number of bizarre food and drink jokes. Your owners are obsessed with made-up foods like do-nakes (a cross between a donut and cupcake that isn’t nearly as catchy as the cronuts that inspired them). I imagine it’s supposed to be a running gag, but it really just slows down the cutscenes more than anything and isn’t nearly funny enough to justify that.

That said, some of the new additions don’t work quite right. A lot of the new elements of the recent NBA collective bargaining agreement (CBA) have been added to various amounts of success. For example, things like the G-League integration and two-way contracts seem to be working, but cap holds and player rights seem to be off in various ways. For example, players should always count as cap holds for your team until you renounce them in the offseason, thereby impacting how much money you have to spend in free agency. To use the Sixers as an example, J.J. Redick should have a massive cap hold after the first offseason until he’s renounced, only he’s just an unrestricted free agent and does not appear to count against your cap. Another example is restricted free agent Joel Embiid: his cap hold does stick around, but it should be closer to $18 million, but ends up around $12 million.

A bigger problem is that some players coming off rookie contracts are being marked as unrestricted free agents when they should always be restricted if the fourth-year option was picked up – that’s just the way the CBA works. I recognize a lot of this is in-depth and many won’t notice because there are many other deep elements working correctly within franchise mode, but this stuff does matter for the long-term health of a franchise if you want to play multiple seasons – and that’s what this mode is for. Overall, NBA 2K18 continues its streak of having one of the deepest franchise modes around.