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NBA 2k becomes even more RPGish

Kaanyrvhok

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May 1, 2008
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I figure this belongs in this forum since its one of the few major sports games availible on the PC.

People have already posted about this series boosting its ratings and eliminating the competion while moving towards a stat heavy simulation. The player creation was already far beyond any RPG but that is somewhat typical of sports games. 2k13 will now feature 31 skills. I was looking at the descriptions and well if this aint RPGish...

http://2ksports.tumblr.com/

Shot Creator
Example players: Kobe Bryant, Kemba Walker, Dwyane Wade
A player with this skill can hit shots at a higher percentage than most if he creates space for his shot. For this skill to fire off there are a number of rules that must pass:
  1. The shooter must break his defender down to create space, either with iso-moves, triple threat moves or drives into special shots (i.e. step backs, drifters, hop shots, spin jumpers, etc). The space he creates when he starts his shot must be more than the space he had when he started to break his defender down.
  2. The Shot Creator must be closer to his matchup (within 7 feet) when he starts to break him down.
  3. The shot must be taken within 2 seconds of the initial break down.
  4. The shot must be taken in a half-court context (i.e. not in transition and not on a fast break) and must come from 33 feet to the basket or closer.
  5. The shooter must not be smothered by the defender at both the break down and the release of the shot.
If the shooter passes all of these rules, then the shot penalty enforced by the defender on the release of the shot is reduced up to 100%.
 

Kaanyrvhok

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Floor General


Example Players: Jason Kidd, Rajon Rondo, Chris Paul
This skill identifies an offensive team leader that has the ability to raise the offensive game of his teammates while he is on the floor. While a Floor General’s team has possession of the ball, all teammates are given up to a six point attribute boost to their offensive abilities.

Is that the Paladin?
 
In My Safe Space
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Codex 2012
The ugly truth is that the cRPGs weren't dumbed down by wanting to appeal to the widest audience possible but by the "nerds" themselves who didn't want gameplay intruding into their pathetic love life fantasies.
Remember that the people who were on the spearhead of the decline were the same who have mastered WeiDU to be able to distribute their mods.
A kind of people who played BG2 100 times and now "plays" romances by reading scripts and dialogue files.
 

Esquilax

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I'm calling it right now: NBA 2k13 for Codex game of the year. Not like there's much competition.
 

Duckard

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I think the NBA games are trying to appeal to basketball nerds whereas modern RPGs have stopped trying to appeal to RPG nerds in favour of trying to appeal to a larger audience. The NBA brand and the fact that basketball nerds probably outnumber oldschool CRPG nerds means that NBA series can become more popular by adding greater depth with each installment but RPGs cannot. Plus, I'm pretty sure you can just play using the NBA characters without creating your own, and the mechanics iterate upon the previous games. This allows for a slow increase in complexity without alienating those who would otherwise not purchase the game.
 
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It doesn't really have to be about nerds, fans love details - back in school, even the guys who couldn't subtract their way out of a paper bag loved those soccer Manager games, which were mostly a static screen with stats changing now and then. Mondblut would be proud.
 
In My Safe Space
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It doesn't really have to be about nerds, fans love details - back in school, even the guys who couldn't subtract their way out of a paper bag loved those soccer Manager games, which were mostly a static screen with stats changing now and then. Mondblut would be proud.
The whole "nerd" concept should fucking die. Only Americans could invent something so degenerate.
 

Machocruz

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Content is king. The masses don't want to play with elves and castles and chosen ones. But they do want to be Lebron. Build stat heavy Lady Gaga RPG, and they will come.
 
In My Safe Space
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Content is king. The masses don't want to play with elves and castles and chosen ones. But they do want to be Lebron. Build stat heavy Lady Gaga RPG, and they will come.
More like the kind of people who likes elves and castles and chosen ones doesn't want to play stat-heavy cRPGs.
 

Machocruz

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Maybe related to people who say they only want to play games to relax as they get older. RPG nerds lose energy for stats and consequences, just want to choose paragon or renegade option for romantic encounters.
 

Kaanyrvhok

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My theory is its all about realism

When sports games fail the gnereal critisicm is that the game lacks authenticity. Realism is coveted. A sports game dev might announce that this year their game will feature AI that prepares a gameplan based on how you play. The fans eat it up. They know it will make the game feel less generic, more unpredictable, and ultamatly more fun.

RPG devs temper a bit when talking about realism. Realism doesnt have as marketbale of a record with RPGs otherwise we would hear a huge mainstream plea for JA3. Thid is partially a product of PC exlcusives and marketing. I know there is some untapped fandom for such a game. The appeal doesnt justify the workload assuming the devs entertain its value in a fantasy setting.
 

Johannes

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The beauty of sports games is that you can also mostly ignore the stats, and just play it for the action game it is. The stats still matter of course, it's a well designed system like that.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The beauty of sports games is that you can also mostly ignore the stats, and just play it for the action game it is. The stats still matter of course, it's a well designed system like that.
Additionally, a fan of the real sport will know who the good players are without looking at the numbers. That kind of built in knowledge by your audience means you can build upon that and add to the depth.

Now take any video game, hand someone a list of NPC names, and ask them to guess which ones are more or less powerful.

Writing this post makes me think a big problem with moving RPGs into a bigger market without making them romance simulators is initial communication with the player. Sports have 1) built in recognition of the NPCs and how powerful they are and 2) an "overall" stat that quickly communicates to the player which NPCs are more powerful. It's not perfect, and levels in RPGs generally do the same thing, but RPG players get mad if you can magically know the level of an NPC while this is seen as a requirement for a sports game.
 

PorkaMorka

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Feb 19, 2008
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If only they could make it turn based.

Bloodbowl is a turn based sports game and it is awesome.

Playing in a league provides for a nice persistent party building campaign with permanent consequences for in game events and choices.

And the sports aspect makes for a game that is focused more on maneuver than boring old attrition. Usually. There are some technical problems with the current ruleset.
 

Carrion

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Sports have 1) built in recognition of the NPCs and how powerful they are and 2) an "overall" stat that quickly communicates to the player which NPCs are more powerful. It's not perfect, and levels in RPGs generally do the same thing, but RPG players get mad if you can magically know the level of an NPC while this is seen as a requirement for a sports game.
Yeah, I pretty much completely agree with your post, but there are also popular sports games that don't do that. For example, some of the older PES games didn't have an "overall" stat for players at all, and partly because of their lacking licenses there was also a big bunch of made up players meaning that you actually had to look at those stats too. I don't remember anyone complaining.

And of course, even though it's directed at an entirely different audience than NBA or even FIFA, Football Manager is a very popular game where you'll have to deal with fictional players more and more as the game progresses (or, if you start with a lower league team like many people do, players that no one's ever even heard of), and where you have about forty different attributes plus tons of other information on each player without a defining "overall" stat. You can get an overall star rating for each player from your scouts, but how accurate those estimates are depends on the scouts' attributes, meaning that there's always some uncertainty involved there and you'll have to look at individual stats anyway. Outside of the players' base attributes there are also things like age, personality, morale, motivation, position, hidden attributes, preferred moves, spoken languages and potential that are often much more important than the star rating. I'd say your average RPG with half a dozen stats and a bunch of skills is pretty light compared to that, not to mention that in FM your "party" usually consists of 20-30 characters.
 

Phelot

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Sports games have been more RPG than games labeled as "RPG" for years now.

Imagine when elite nerds that look down on jocks figure this out...
 
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Imagine when elite nerds that look down on jocks figure this out...


"Hey, look at the nerd playing his girl games with only six stats. Wait, let me see that sheet...just five characters per party? HHAHAHA FAGGOT"

jocks-77621062613_xlarge.jpeg








1234443297_ken_park_suicide.gif
 
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Oh, I imagine that will be coming. You can have your players date various celebrities, models, and other athletes, etc. Various partners will have their own advantages and drawbacks. Hooking up with other athletes may improve your players' performance and inspire them to more effective training, while models will grant them bonuses to the media and status attributes. Also, your players will acquire various traits (with their own stat +s and -s) based on their romantic activities and performances. For instance, you can have your player marry a supermodel, then sleep around with a bunch of hoes, gaining the "Tiger" trait, which negatively impacts your performance due to distraction (there is also a chance to catch "ailments" that increases with each partner for your player, though certain partners will of course be more likely to pass along ailments). However, there are short term gains to be made for "scoring" with various partners, so it may be advantageous to have your players go out on the town the night before a game for a nice performance boost. You'll have to balance this with exposing them to the aforementioned ailments, which are also affected by your management of your trainers/medical team.
 

Arkadin

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The elevating of stats in games like NBA 2k series is funny because player skill is the dominant aspect of these games. I can't comment on other sports games, but knowing something about basketball doesn't actually help me much on these. It takes 5 seconds to look at the the ratings the players have and pick someone with high numbers. Then it's just manipulating the controller.

I have an understanding of the game of basketball and of the teams and players in the NBA over the past 25 years, but never does my knowledge of, say, how to challenge the Miami Heat come into play in the actual game. My opponent just learns button combinations better than I do, and thus he wins, because L. James is doing things he won't do in real life, and I can't get Garnett and Pierce to work together properly on defense. I'm not convinced that knowing the combinations better would help much...because people usually end up finding a method of play that works within the rules of the video game itself but has little correlation with reality.

Maybe if they took full advantage of keyboard mapping, and plays could be run with more diversity, and simple keystrokes could allow for a wide range of actions with or without the ball, then it would be different--like playing an RTS, perhaps. But I doubt it. The games aren't designed as sims. The stats, then, in my mind, are there mostly to give the appearance of reality--allowing them to pull in a wide range of fans from the casual to the stat geeks--and perhaps more so to cause discussion and hype. Really, it's amazing how much controversy is stirred up when the ratings for players are released. Even the players themselves get in on it via twitter.

Hopefully FIFA is better. Meh. I suck at gamepad games, and will just admit that I'm probably wrong anyway.
 

Carrion

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Don't know about NBA since I haven't played it, but I'd guess FIFA is more or less the same. For example, you can make shooting and passing completely manual, making character skill a lot less important. Still, there are some stats that are important and easily noticeable, like pace, acceleration, stamina, shot power, strenght and jumping. Small, technical forwards feel completely different from big centre backs like it should be, meaning that Stoke won't be too succesful if they want to use Barcelona's tactics. On the other hand there are many stats that should be really important but are barely noticeable, like short passing, tackling and vision, and especially online you see most people just choosing teams that have a lot of fast players because physical stats are much more important than anything else. In any case, while a good player can win a bad player even with a bad team, for two evenly matched players it does make a big difference which team and which players you choose.

I'd say real-time RPGs could probably learn something from sports games in how stats affect the feel of your character. Per Mertesacker and Leo Messi feel completely different from each other, the former being clunky and slow but so tall and strong that he can make up for it, and the latter being fast, agile and technical but having to rely on his speed and tricks to win individual battles on the pitch. On the other hand, in a game like, say, New Vegas, a character with maxed out strength and agility feels exactly the same as a character who used them as her dump stats. That's just lame.
 

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