Tag Archives: LUT

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of five ways to improve Ultimate Team in NBA Live 20.

Due to its extended hiatus, NBA Live was the last EA Sports title to implement an Ultimate Team mode. Along with Franchise and The One, its presence provides the game with the staple experiences of a franchise, career, and card collection/team building mode, and has proven to be a welcome addition. However, while Ultimate Team is a mode I’ve enjoyed since the reboot, it shares the same problem that other modes in NBA Live have suffered: it’s still too barebones. To that end, just as I have ideas on how to improve Franchise mode, I have suggestions for Ultimate Team.

After enjoying the mode so much in NBA Live 18, I felt disappointed by NBA Live 19’s Ultimate Team. Quite a few changes were made that I believe were done with the best of intentions, but the result was that an already thin mode became even thinner, despite making a couple of additions. It’s not too late to correct course however, as a lot of the building blocks are in place. LUT also made a great move in NBA Live 19 by removing contracts, something that NBA 2K’s MyTEAM should also implement. Generally speaking though, Ultimate Team should borrow ideas from MyTEAM, as well as bring back or expand upon concepts that it has featured in previous iterations.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at Ultimate Team in NBA Live 14.

The concept of Ultimate Team actually originated in EA Sports’ UEFA Champions League 2006-2007, released for the Xbox 360. It didn’t debut in the FIFA series until FIFA 09, launching in March 2009 as paid downloadable content. Other games in the EA Sports lineup began adopting their own versions of Ultimate Team, with Madden adding the mode as free DLC for Madden 10 in January 2010, and NHL 11 including it at launch. It has since become a staple game mode in EA Sports games, alongside the various franchise and career experiences.

However, with the NBA Live series being derailed by the attempted revamping and rebranding with NBA Elite 11, it wouldn’t be until the release of NBA Live 14 that we finally saw Live Ultimate Team. It was reasonably solid upon its debut, and while it hasn’t been greatly expanded upon in subsequent games, it remains a mode with a lot of potential. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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