by Andrew on Fri Aug 11, 2017 5:08 pm
Some initial impressions of the demo.
The game feels a lot smoother on the sticks. In NBA Live 14-16, it felt like you were running along angles, and players were not very manoeuvrable, especially on defense. The controls feels a lot more responsive, which is nice. I have mixed feelings about the dribbling controls. I feel a regular crossover dribble should be performed without the sprint modifier, while between-the-legs should be a modifier dribble, but it's still pretty familiar. It's interesting that they adopted the Shot Stick from NBA 2K, and it definitely helps with some advanced moves, which I'm glad to see. Still getting the hang of them, and dribbling in general. If you've played NBA Live before then you'll have an advantage, but there's definitely a learning curve.
There are some nice animations in the game, new moves in the paint and so forth, but there's definitely still awkwardness there. It seems to be the speed of the animations more than anything. There's quite a few animations that look quite good in slow motion, but when they play out in real time, they're too fast, and look very stiff and abrupt as a result. Same thing when chaining certain animations together. If they can clean up the animation speeds, I think it'll really help from a visual standpoint, as well as further enhance the feel of the game.
Lobs seem a bit weird, especially when trying for an alley-oop at the rim. Even with directional passing, it seems to go to the wrong player. Might be me, I'll have to keep practising.
Defense in the paint could still be beefed up a bit, with more physicality. However, there are a lot more altered shots inside. Ambitious layup attempts do miss, and dunks do get blocked. I saw some different block animations, including a very cool looking fingertip block that didn't send the ball flying back. Field goal percentages, shot distribution, and stats in general were pretty on-point. Again, probably a few too many inside shots, but not too bad overall.
Shooting feels good, I do like the Shot Meter this year. A great shooter can knock down shots in the defender's face, no cheap contest logic there. Again, percentages were pretty good, so I don't think it'll be too cheesy. I saw the AI make some smart decisions like passing out of shots and hitting the open man when I made defensive errors. The Shot Meter is pretty quick on free throws, though. Overall, the NBA game feels pretty fun.
Interesting story with The One, a bit different to what 2K is doing. The ESPN presentation is cool. Being able to choose between rewards gives the conversations meaning on top of advancing the story. I like the idea of choosing between getting a crate, or RP/Hype. I wish I didn't have to play through that part of the demo to unlock the rest of it - I've never been a fan of that approach, and it bugged me when NBA Playgrounds did something similar - but I understand it's the big new feature, so they wanted to show it off first. The game felt a little slow from the baseline angle in The Streets, so I'm going to try another angle to see if there are any framerate issues. There does seem to be some framerate issues on the screen transitions, such as the ESPN wipes. They're quite choppy; could just be a bug in the demo. Also, a couple of menus/part of the interface seemed to be off-centre, but I'll have to check my settings.
Biggest gameplay gripe apart from some of the choppier animations would probably be some of the canned moments, like the automatic dribbling animations when you bring the ball up the court. I was hoping they'd get rid of them, as it adds a feeling of being out of control. I also wish they had a metric/imperial option for the measurements. It doesn't feel authentic to be playing an NBA game, and see metric measurements on overlays and so forth, just because I'm in a PAL region. They avoided that for 14 and 15, so I was disappointed that they went back to doing that for 16 and now 18. A minor gripe, and a region-specific one, but still. It detracts from what is otherwise really good presentation.
Online felt a bit sluggish, which was surprising. I didn't have a very good experience there. The best experience was probably the Play Now game between the Cavs and Warriors, which I guess bodes well for an NBA title. Playing single player in The Streets was OK, though. I noticed I had to call for the pass a lot, so the teammate AI could probably use some work in terms of making things happen and not standing around as much. That's not to say they weren't at all aggressive, but there were times when they weren't making the quick pass.
The Baseline camera angle, intended to maximise court vision in player lock mode, is zoomed in a bit too much. I haven't tried the other angles for The Streets yet. It needs to be zoomed out, and focus on your player, so you don't lose them. It's more important than your camera follows you rather than the ball in player locked gameplay, at least in my opinion. Nice to see some options for locking the view though, so that it always faces the opposing basket if you want. I'll have to play around a bit more with those settings.
I've recorded some footage which I'll upload as soon as I can. Just got to cut it down to the gameplay stuff. I'll also post a bunch of screenshots as soon as possible.
Overall, it does feel like a significant improvement on NBA Live 16 in some key areas. There's still some stuff to work out in regards to the animation speeds, because when some of them are slowed down, they definitely look better. Biggest technical issues were probably with the framerates on the wipes, and possibly from the Baseline camera angle in The Streets. I haven't messed around with sliders yet, but I felt the default ones weren't too bad in many respects, which is promising. I'm a bit concerned about the sluggishness of online, but other stuff felt pretty good, with the NBA gameplay being the best in my opinion. For the stuff that I'm interested in, it felt promising.