The NBA 2K video game series has been lauded for consistently producing the most realistic basketball video game on the market, but even it’s having trouble keeping up with the real life absurdity of Stephen Curry.
The Golden State Warriors star’s ridiculous skill set and creativity on the floor is hard to translate to the video game world. It seems like Curry does something more and more jaw-dropping every night, so much so that if he pulled it off in a video game, you’d likely complain that it was cheap and unfair.
For example:
And again:
But the real glitch in the system comes with Curry’s absurd range beyond the three-point arc. As we’ve seen plenty of times, it seems like Curry has the ability to drain a jumper from just about anywhere on his own side of the floor, which creates a serious conundrum for the video game producers trying to replicate him.
So if you’re a basketball game developer, what do you do? You spend years developing a system that rewards good shot selections and punish players for taking ill-advised long range shots, but the real-life Steph is taking and making these supposedly terrible shots. If Wang and his team allow digital Steph to do these moves (meaning, take 25-foot bombs off the dribble) in the game without check, then that would just open the door for cheese again.
So yeah, Steph has the 2K guys somewhat stumped for now.
“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” says Wang. “He’s a ‘rule breaker’ when it comes to jump shooting … he becomes a problem in the video game world where we’ve been trying to train our gamers [to know] that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.”
Until 2K finds a way to make Curry as dynamic in their games as he is in real life, gamers are likely going to be left frustrated when trying to use him in the digital world. Amazingly, it seems the video game Steph is the more “realistic” version than the actual (possibly super) human that takes the court, at least for now.
(Via Forbes)
