by Dee4Three on Thu May 10, 2018 1:27 am
A few things.
I agree with Andrew, If you think about it, we are talking about the greatest mods maybe of all time (UBR/URB). The amount of work/content/collaboration is unmatched from what I have seen. The UBR team (Hawk) actively recruited people. I posted a Julius Erving mod I made on Moddingway, and Hawk messaged me and asked if I wanted to join the UBR team, and share my faces/make more work. I ended up contributing some faces, and eventmusic that was included as part of the mod. For me, I considered it to be a big deal at the time, because it was the biggest project I'd ever seen, and the biggest one in the 2K14 section. We just don't have that many people working together now, and it does make me sad sometimes.
To Andrews point, we don't necessarily have the tools either. You stated that we didn't have a detailed roster to start on NBA 2K12, you are right. But what we did have was RedMc/Reditor, and also people clamouring to work together. It can't be underestimated the value of what a program like RedMC/Reditor can do for these huge projects. As stated prior, the program is so robust and easy to use, it's like using excel to make a roster. It made everything so much easier. On NBA 2K13 and 2K14 I was able to effortlessly add new teams/replace current teams from roster to roster, this includes arenas/jerseys/players/logos, literally everything. I could swap a team into a roster in like 10-15 minutes, an entire team with all the art and everything. We just don't have that on this gen.
Not only that, the drag and drop feature of files is just not the same. While we have the modded folder, we need to overwrite in game files in basically all situations, meaning we cant add a ton of our own new content ON TOP OF what is already in the game. This makes things much harder. The new file system operates completely different, instead of thousands of individual files in the main folder, we have like 20-30 compressed files that are clearly harder to break into. Because it operates with this new file system, a program like RedMC is probably much harder to make. I am not a programmer, but I can guarantee that is the biggest reason we don't have a program like that for this gen.
As stated prior, I will jump on 2K19 immediately if I like the gameplay, and I will absolutely set out to create three rosters like I did for 2K17. However, a UBR with every single season is a different story entirely. That would take a collective team effort, and even with that, with our current resources, we may be able to achieve 4 or 5 amazing single season rosters to go along with a base roster that includes a bulk of new teams. I think that would be a great start, and would get retro moving forward again.