NBA2K has dominated the digital hoops landscape over the last decade, but NBA Live 18 was one of the more pleasant surprises coming out of the sports gaming realm when it dropped last year. The stop-start productions and reboots of the once-beloved series gave pause to many, but there’s no point in being the second-best basketball game in the world — EA is going to work at the game and mold it into something that can challenge the 2K throne. It very much could be a longshot, but some recent moves is sending some big time Madden influence over to Live.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Polygon sat down with former Madden executive producer Seann Graddy and senior producer Carlos Guerrero, who took the reins of NBA Live 19 development this offseason. It’s here we learn Live is getting Madden‘s Real Player Motion tech, a move that could move the series up a notch as 2K looks to refine what’s currently working. This is exciting for fans because competition is only going to make both games better. Really good video game basketball is on the horizon.
”One of the big pieces of Madden 18 was the introduction of [the] Frostbite [engine], which elevated the visual fidelity of the game,” Guerrero said. “So this year, the question was how do we get the gameplay itself to feel better. You look at the great visuals, and you want the gameplay to feel the same way. That’s one of the things this year with the addition of Real Player Motion.”
Real Player Motion, in this reviewer’s opinion, was a true, next-gen leap when it came to Madden, so feeling the weight of a player and gaining a new level of momentum as you drive to the basket sounds like a significant change to how we play the game now. Still, we must see if the rest of the game can live up to the tech, because 2K is still very much king.
You can read the full interview over at Polygon.
