That screen has been changed for NBA 2K15 based partly on feedback from Jones, who added that the game's implementation of VC isn't nearly as pernicious as last year in general. M圜areer mentors teach you "what it takes to be an NBA player" "It's the first screen I walk into!" he said. Yet the first time he entered the conversation screen in last year's MyGM mode, he was presented with two "free" options and others that cost VC. Jones acknowledged that VC was too pervasive in NBA 2K14, and noted that he's the kind of person who never wants to spend money on microtransactions when he's playing a game like this. The deep integration of VC led Visual Concepts to store save games from those modes in the cloud on 2K's servers, rather than locally on players' consoles, in order to prevent people from hacking saves for ill-gotten VC gains. It wasn't technically an always-online game, but its two main modes, M圜areer and MyGM, both used in-game funds known as Virtual Currency (VC), which players could earn by playing or purchase with real money. Visual Concepts also learned some other lessons from the blowback to certain elements of NBA 2K14. "But, are we better prepared to answer them than we've ever been before? Yes." "Do we anticipate that we're going to have some kinks? If we didn't, we'd be stupid, because I don't think there's a single game that's ever shipped that doesn't have any," said Jones. And it will give players error codes, so they'll be able to look up specific issues online.
On the back end, NBA 2K15 will alert Visual Concepts' support staff as soon as a problem crops up. The developers also compartmentalized the various modes, so if connectivity for, say, MyTeam goes down, the problem hopefully won't prevent people from playing M圜areer. The studio rewrote the game's matchmaking logic as well as the way it delivers content to players.
"We realized last year that we had issues at launch," said Rob Jones, senior producer for NBA 2K15, in an interview with Polygon during a demo of the game this week. "Internally, we thought that we'd be OK, and obviously, it didn't turn out the way we expected."Īccording to Jones, two of Visual Concepts' top engineers spent the entire NBA 2K15 development cycle working on network infrastructure. So the studio put some of its top developers on the task of shoring up the network side of NBA 2K15, and is promising that the situation will be much better this time around.
It was a humbling setback for Visual Concepts, the company behind the venerated NBA 2K franchise. But it had an Achilles' heel, its lackluster online infrastructure: Network issues severely hampered access to all of its modes. NBA 2K14 did more than perhaps any other PlayStation 4 or Xbox One launch title to usher in the new generation of consoles last November.
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