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This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb opinion of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.
In case you missed it, MyLEAGUE for the next gen versions of NBA 2K15 was detailed this week. I think Steve over at OperationSports summed it up best by calling it Association “on steroids”. Essentially MyLEAGUE is an NBA sandbox. We can customize many aspects to our liking with no VC to spend or objectives to meet other than our own. On top of the customization features we, for the first time, get to change core AI aspects of mode with trades and other logic. And on top of that we get new features like the detailed “injuries 2.0” and gameplans, which will also affect MyGM. But at its core there is that customization. That customization is why I may as well call this mode MyDREAM.
If you are reading this, you probably know who I am and can understand why I am so hyped for this mode. To keep it quick, I love customization is my basketball games. It is what drives my modding obsession. I still have fond memories of running 6 team Dynasty modes on NBA Live PC just because I could. I regularly play 14 game seasons in NBA 2K because the regular season separation of the conferences gave an interesting dynamic of the league to experience, and more value to the All Star Weekend and NBA Finals.
All of that is fine, but the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of NBA Live 14 and NBA 2K14 did not give a lot of options for me to play with. Both strive towards sticking within the realm of reality, which to me is one of the most restricting things you can do in a video game. Don’t get me wrong, I want the option to have the most realistic player development and trades…but I also want to entertain the silliest ideas I can come up with in my sick mind.
I am not expecting to run my fantasy 90 team league (30 teams per division with relegation rules like soccer) and the lack of mentioning the NBDL or EuroLeague scouting still leaves big wants left on the table, but I can do so much more now. It was tough to do with the limited EuroLeague teams in NBA 2K14, but with 25 teams in NBA 2K15 I can create a league with the 5 worst NBA teams, or maybe make 5 retro teams to import with nothing but the generic fill-in bench players. Or maybe recreate the ‘Death of the NBA’ with the draft class quality slider, or go with the idea of a player-led league by turning up the sliders for player ambitions, or increase trade frequency and blockbusters to mess with the current NBA, or go hardcore difficulty and make it impossible to trade players, or make the risk of injuring anybody not worth playing stars in non-playoff situations, or, or, or, or (you get the point).
Some of those ideas are already possible on with some finagling of the console versions or more obviously with PC mods, but having this level of customization as an official part of the game just makes it all, simple. Nothing I’ve attempted that gets too crazy ends up being worth the time I put into it. Now if I can do some of these things with simple slider edits, oh boy, I’d love to have the ‘Death of the NBA’ scenario without having to manually (hex) edit the rookie generator ratings.
This isn’t even touching on the new features like the new injury system or gameplay settings. This isn’t even mentioning how some of these ideas were a part of the ‘rabbit hole’ idea with Leftos before he got hired. This is simply the return of user customization in a franchise mode on consoles. I can only hope that MyLEAGUE isn’t the only mode that received customization options in NBA 2K15, or that EA Sports is listening and gives at least some options to its users.
