LOS ANGELES — Mike Wang has been around for a while. Now the gameplay director for the NBA 2K — a role he’s held for the last three or four games, he estimates — Wang joined the team for the world’s most popular basketball video game prior to the release of NBA 2K6.
In that time he’s seen it all. He’s been an integral part of creating the game for more than a decade, and as such, he’s used to things like hearing from NBA players who might not be happy with their ratings in the game.
This leads to Wang giving a blunt answer whenever it pops up: Prove us wrong.
“It’s just so cool because all these guys grew up on 2K,” Wang told Dime. “And they come in, they’re like, ‘Man, you got this and this and this wrong. You got my rating wrong here. You got this wrong. I was like, ‘Well, you gotta prove it to us. You gotta perform on the court or, right now, show us what you can do.’”
Player ratings, whether they be “accurate” or not, are the culmination of hours upon hours of work by the 2K team. Each year, Wang and those around him do serious research to make sure every single detail of the game is accurate — this doesn’t just include the ratings they give to players, but their mannerisms on the court, too.
Whether it’s watching games, doing their form of scouting, or talking to players, Wang and his team make it a point to iron out all the details. The goal isn’t as much to make a great video game, but rather, the folks behind the NBA 2K series want to make it feel like fans are consuming an honest-to-god game of basketball.
This year, making sure those little details give fans as lifelike of an experience as possible will be more important than ever, as the NBA 2K team added a new detail to the game that will make things a little more fun when a player finds a groove. It’s called the Takeover system, and it looks to make it so gamers can have a little more fun when players catch fire.
“One of the big things we’re talking about this year is called Takeover,” Wang says. “What I like about Takeover is it’s kind of a combination of things that we’re doing, signature skills, badges, the hot and cold system. Every player has an archetype, every player has a strength. As you play, and you get hot, and you perform on the court, they’ll get hot. And as they get hot, depending on what that archetype is, they’ll unlock different skills and abilities and animations and it just makes it like a nice, really fun meta in the game.”
Basically, imagine you’re using the Houston Rockets, and James Harden starts cooking in the way that only he can. The virtual version of the MVP will start acting like the real life version of the player he’s modeled after, both in terms of his games and his mannerisms.
As Wang says, over the course of his time at the helm of the 2K series, technology has pushed their effort to create the best basketball game imaginable forward. Whether it’s things like creating accurate versions of players, or making the game as authentic as possible, or getting as many details into the game as they can add, it’s easy to see the evolution of the series.
But still, the games aren’t perfect. There are compilation videos of angry people on YouTube that prove this, even if Wang says gamplay is their number one concern each year. Last year, a major issue came in the form of blow-bys, as the game’s new motion system made it easy to get to the rim.
“We completely reworked the floor game,” Wang says of how they tried to remedy that situation in 2K19. “It’s completely different. We’re doing a lot more with looking at player ratings, looking at positions on the court, looking at the sticks, so as a user, you can be good on the sticks, you can anticipate, cut people off. So that part feels a lot better.”
A similar issue popped up with paint defense — it wasn’t as strong last year, which led to the team making layups more difficult, which led to a whole lot of missed layups that drove gamers insane.
“There’s a lot more contact in the paint,” Wang says of paint defense in 2K19. “It made it so that we do all that stuff you’re actually when you’re contested. So if you’re open in your layup, you’re not gonna miss them like you did last year. But if you’re contested, and you play good paint defense, you will miss those.”
All of this, Wang hopes, will take “dice rolls” out of the game. His team made it a point to try and get random outcomes out of the game — the decisions that shouldn’t work but do, the shots that get thrown in the air but magically go in. Like the ratings that players in real life so desperately covet, in 2K19, gamers will have to earn everything they get on the floor through the gameplay that Wang says is “head and shoulders” above what gamers received last year.
And if this doesn’t work, and gamers are struggling to find wins in the newest version of the game, there’s always one thing they can do: Just go use the Warriors and make your opponent be the one who has to figure things out.
“We do our best to be accurate to real life, and so I think you can beat them in ways that you can beat the real Warriors, which is hard to do, but there are strats out there that you can employ against them,” Wang says with a smile. “But when you threw DeMarcus Cousins out there, it kind of just made it a ridiculous thing.”
Uproxx was invited on a hosted trip by 2K Games to take part in early play of NBA 2K19.
