Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five remnants of missing and removed features in basketball video games.

Features and content are removed from all genres of video games for a variety of reasons, from design changes and technical challenges to deadlines and legal issues. It’s unfortunate even when it’s understandable, but it’s also entertaining to discover the remnants of cut content. They’re intriguing mysteries when we stumble upon them, fascinating What Ifs when we know their back stories, and sometimes even things that can be restored through modding. Our community has definitely been able to make good use of leftover content in NBA Live and NBA 2K!

Of course, the remnants of cut content can also be annoying. Not only are they proof of what we missed out on, but sometimes they’re a sign of anti-consumer design. A feature that would’ve been useful to have – and indeed was in a previous game – may have been removed because it isn’t conducive to recurrent revenue mechanics being as profitable as they could be. That may not be quite as insidious as removing content in order to sell it as downloadable content, but it’s still lacking in goodwill! Whatever the case, there have been some memorable remnants of missing and removed features in basketball video games over the years. Here are five that spring to mind for me.

1. Injury Animations in NBA Live 10

I’ve seen some people call NBA Live 10 the best game in the series. While I’ve come to appreciate it a lot more after revisiting it years later and would consider it to be a favourite, I will respectfully disagree. It’s not that it isn’t a very good release – to this day, I wish they’d kept building on it instead of torpedoing the series with NBA Elite 11 – but I can’t enjoy Dynasty mode as much as earlier games. Its sim engine produces inaccurate stats, and some of the Academy drills don’t impact player development as they should. The lack of All-Star Weekend is a bummer in general. Most egregiously, players can’t get injured during gameplay, removing risk and realism from the mode.

This is particularly frustrating because there are remnants of in-game injuries in NBA Live 10. Not only that, but their implementation would’ve been better than in previous games! Following hard collisions and falls, players will limp, hold their heads, and otherwise show signs of being hurt, all of which is acknowledged by the commentary. Moreover, shooting fouls don’t have to be involved for this to occur. It’s all cosmetic though, which makes those moments a tease. I wouldn’t be surprised if the code for injuries is still present but disabled – much like rim stuffs before a patch enabled them – but in any event, the remnants that we see leave us wondering what might’ve been.

2. Daily Bonus in NBA 2K21 (Current Gen)

The Daily Bonus was an extremely useful feature for anyone on the grind to level up their MyPLAYER. Every 24 hours, MyCAREER would present us with a randomly-chosen task or challenge that could fetch as much as 5,000 VC. Granted, like all live service content it was meant to incentivise us to play the game every day, so it wasn’t entirely altruistic. Nevertheless, every little bit of free VC helps when you’re levelling up in MyCAREER, and the challenges could be fun; well, whenever they suited your build, anyway! Looking back, the Daily Bonus was one of the features that made the grind somewhat tolerable for me for so long, as it helped me to go No Money Spent.

Unfortunately, the Daily Bonus was broken in the Current Gen version of NBA 2K21. Tasks would register as completed, but no VC was awarded. The issue was eventually resolved…by permanently displaying “None” next to Daily Bonus in the MyCAREER menu! Were the developers unable to fix the issue, or was it never meant to appear in NBA 2K21 and left in the UI by accident? We may never know, but the bottom line is that it became a mocking remnant of goodwill that was no longer being extended to MyCAREER gamers. Considering how quickly VC exploits are patched, the delay in addressing the issue and the solution that 2K landed on felt incredibly disrespectful.

3. Classic Teams in NBA Live 08

Speaking of situations where we may never get the full story, there’s one in particular that I’d love to get some answers about: the scrapped classic teams in NBA Live 08. After the PC version of NBA Live 08 was released, we naturally began to dig through the game’s files for hidden content. That led to an initially exciting discovery: there’s player data for ten classic teams, including the 1996 Bulls! Our excitement was short-lived when we discovered that there was no corresponding team data. Furthermore, a majority of the players didn’t have a face, and their data and attributes had clearly just been copied and pasted from the most recent NBA Live game that they’d appeared in.

As such, these half-done (at best) players are remnants of content that was scrapped fairly early on. Obviously an inability to secure the necessary likeness rights put an end to the idea, but it’d still be interesting to learn the details of what was planned and how it ultimately fell through. That might also confirm the speculation that the FIBA squads were a replacement for the classic teams. It’s always seemed likely given that the FIBA players appear after the unused classic players in the database, and the fact that the FIBA deal reportedly came about late in NBA Live 08’s development cycle. Hopefully, one day we’ll get some answers about these remnants of cut retro content!

4. Coaches for Custom Teams in NBA Live 2004

Although the NBA Live series had a strong run from NBA Live 2004 through NBA Live 06 on PC, long-time fans were still bothered by the absence of what were once staple features. That included custom teams, more specifically the Create-a-Team feature from the PC versions of NBA Live 98 through NBA Live 2000. In addition to providing a way of quickly assembling fun squads for exhibition showdowns, it was a useful (and much safer) method of adding new teams to a roster. Sadly, custom teams never returned to NBA Live – Quick Pick Play and Fantasy Teams notwithstanding – but remnants in NBA Live 2004 PC suggest that they almost made the cut that year.

If you open up the file containing all of the coach’s faces and head models, you’ll find six unused files named “customA” through “customF”. With those filenames, it’s safe to assume that those six generic faces would’ve been selectable when creating a coach alongside of a custom team. The fact that they’re still in the files suggests that custom teams may have been a late scratch, perhaps due to technical issues. Of course, they were still useful for modding purposes, from adding new teams to using them as a placeholder in roster updates after a coach was fired. Given how modder-friendly the developers were at the time, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were intentionally left in.

5. MyCAREER Accolades

Much like the Daily Bonus, MyCAREER Accolades became a dismal reminder of how levelling up a MyPLAYER was once a more rewarding journey. Basically, the MyCAREER Accolades were a series of statistical challenges that awarded a small amount of VC upon completion. They consisted of multiple levels that challenged you to keep hitting those statistical goals for further payouts, and there were Accolades for both NBA games and the connected online modes. Again, it wasn’t a huge amount of VC per Accolade, but if you played often and performed well, those bonuses would add up and help you to reach that next upgrade faster. It was certainly appreciated!

And then, much like the Daily Bonus, the payouts stopped but the listings remained. Unsurprisingly, this happened in NBA 2K18; the same game that introduced The Neighborhood, and other elements that would serve to ruin MyCAREER in future releases. It flew under the radar, probably due to a combination of the goodwill that 2K had banked, and the fact that if you didn’t go digging through the menus, you wouldn’t see that there was no longer a VC reward listed next to the Accolades. If you did know that however, then every Accolade pop-up was a bitter reminder that they were remnants of a fairer approach, and a warning of the greed that was yet to come.

What are some of the most memorable remnants of missing and removed features that you can recall seeing in basketball games, both in-game and hidden in the files? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.