Visual Concepts Promises To Ease The Grind In MyCareer (Game Informer)

Article: https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/20 ... n-mycareer

You still start as a 60 overall player, but when I asked how long it takes to raise your rating to the 80s, senior producer Ben Bishop says "we're talking weeks instead of months." The change should encourage more users to create mutiple characters for use in the Jordan Rec League and the Park, which is a net win for the series.

Some other info about MyCAREER, MyPLAYER, and the connected experiences:

To unlock a badge, you no longer have to grind a particular way. For instance, if you wanted to earn the Corner Specialist badge last year, you would have to take shot after shot in the corner. Now, the badge unlock meters track across the four badge categories, meaning no matter what shot you take, you are earning experience that eventually allows you to choose any badge in the category. Every time you level up one of the four categories, you also have a chance to respec your badges in that category, so you don't have to worry about wasting a valuable upgrade point on a badge that doesn't work the way you hoped it would.

The progression changes dramatically once you read a 95-overall rating as well. "Once you hit 95, then it becomes all about how you play, what competition you're going up against, and you're essentially trying to chase that 99," Bishop says. "So if you're winning games, you're playing really well to move up in small increments, you'll be going up by tenths of a point. You'll get to 95.6, 96.3. But the other thing that we've never done before is now this falls back, This has nothing to do with you deciding what to use your VC toward, this is just based on what you're doing on the court. So if you playing well, you'll go up and you're not playing so well you'll drop back down. The key there is to try and keep your level of play high so you can get up to 99. You won't fall below 95, obviously, but if you're not playing ball, you're just kind of be stuck there."

The progression from 95 to 99 is much more weighted toward competitive players than those who prefer to dominate the CPU in the NBA games. You can still get up to 99 playing in the NBA eventually

Past games did a bad job of keeping you abreast of team and league happenings – sometimes you wouldn't even know if a teammate was traded until you walked onto the court. This year, a radio program plays in the background when you're in the locker room that keeps you better informed. If they mention a teammate went down with an injury, you will even see them getting worked on in the trainer's room on game day.

The modern NBA experiences seismic shifts when star players plot ways to play together, whether via trade or free agency. To better reflect this culture where players dictate roster creation almost as much as general managers do, MyCareer now offers more straightforward ways to influence your team composition.

"We had elements of this in the past, but one of the things you can do when you get to a certain level with the team is ask them to try to trade for some people, and also give them a list of people you want them to sign in free agency," Bishop says.

Once the team decides you are a critical part of their franchise moving forward you will get these tools to help determine your roster. Bishop says it happens a lot earlier in your career than it would in previous games.

I'm still iffy on the 96-99 stuff, but I can see what they're going for. Pushing through more info about what's going on around the league is a good idea, as stuff like that did tend to take you by surprise. It didn't help that there weren't any injury and transaction listings in MyCAREER, so you had to go digging through the roster listings and in-game social media to find out about that. Overall it sounds less grindy, which I think is good for both the NBA side of things and being able to level up a player for online if you wish.

Essentially seems like they got rid of specific badge progression and you simply get to use the point you earned. In 2K19 once you got the max version of a badge (or if you couldn't earn one in the first place) those points still counted for cap breakers, but no longer towards any badges.
So sounds like those points will go towards that category and that's it.

Sounds like there's Cap Breaker XP, Badge XP, and VC this year; kind of like how it was last year except the Badge system is different, with less repetitious grinding of specific tasks.

So road to 99 is still there just harder to actually get to 99 because your rating can fall down at any time.

Last edited by TGsoGood on Sun Aug 25, 2019 12:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Pretty much. However, getting to 95 is going to be much less of a grind from the sounds of things, which is welcome. With that in mind, it might be the best of both worlds. 96-99 is still reserved for the elite, but you don't have to put hundreds of hours into the game just to get to 91 or 92 (assuming, of course, that you're earning all VC in-game as I did in NBA 2K19).