NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at Signature Skills in NBA 2K.
A key improvement as basketball video games have evolved is the way in which different player abilities are represented. Indeed, the difference between an old basketball video game that shows its age and a title that holds up extremely well is that in the former, every player tends to play the same. Whether it’s their speed, shooting ability, or another part of their game, they might as well be generic. Of course, in games like Double Dribble, they were! It worked there, but NBA games that utilised real players needed to accurately represent their skills and athleticism.
This led to the implementation of player ratings, many of which became standard across basketball video games. As games became more sophisticated, ratings alone weren’t enough. Player-specific moves and animations, as well as tendencies, helped games take the next step. There needed to be a mechanic that went beyond ratings, though; something that represented an uncanny knack or specialised skill. These days, NBA 2K achieves this through the use of Badges. Before Badges however, we had Signature Skills. In some ways, they were better than their successors. If nothing else, they paved the way for them. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Signature Skills made their debut in NBA 2K13. They were advertised as a way of expanding the attribute and tendency system, by granting players additional skills and boosts. Again, it’s a similar role to the one that Badges now play. Offensive Signature Skills enhanced a player’s ability to make shots in certain situations, by boosting their ratings and decreasing the impact of penalties such as imperfect timing, defensive presence, and fatigue. Defensive Signature Skills could negate offensive boosts, and increase the likelihood of making stops. With Signature Skills equipped, players were more adept at breaking ankles, making tough shots, and locking down opponents.
Unlike earlier attempts at player differentiation, such as Freestyle Superstars in NBA Live, Signature Skills were equipped by superstars and role players alike. This way, the diverse skillsets and innate abilities of the league’s best players were represented, but so were the specialities of role players and key reserves. They were generally assigned on top of suitably effective ratings, but unlike Freestyle Superstars, there were no minimum qualifying ratings for real players. In MyCAREER, you did need to level up your attributes to unlock specific Skills, and upgrade them for bigger boosts. As with loading up on Badges, this could make a MyPLAYER extremely powerful.
There were also a couple of MyPLAYER-specific Signature Skills that couldn’t be equipped by regular players. These included the Gatorade-branded Prime Pack, with the special ability of not tiring during the first quarter, and On-Court Coach, which forced AI teammates to always respond to calls for the ball. Such abilities were tailor-made for MyPLAYERs, since it was very easy to quickly tire out a player that you were locked to controlling, and in earlier iterations of MyCAREER, AI teammates had more autonomy as far as refusing to pass on cue. Unlike other Skills, they were there to enhance the gameplay experience, rather than represent realistic abilities.
NBA 2K14 also added a unique Signature Skill for its cover player, LeBron James. The “LeBron Coast to Coast” Skill granted boosts to the Speed, Quickness, and Ballhandling attributes, while reducing the penalty of making contact with a defender, when taking the ball coast to coast after a change in possession. The Skill could also be equipped by a MyPLAYER, and in the PlayStation 4/Xbox One version of NBA 2K14, it was acquired after a cutscene in which LeBron gives you some pointers. It was somewhat gimmicky, but not unrealistic. It also wasn’t overpowering, which brings us to one of the main benefits of Signature Skills compared to Badges.
In NBA 2K13 and the Current Gen/PC version of NBA 2K14, there was a maximum of five Signature Skill slots for real players and MyPLAYERs alike. In the PS4/X1 version of NBA 2K14, this was increased to seven slots. You could obviously acquire more than five or seven Skills in MyCAREER, but the additional ones had to remain in your inventory to be swapped in and out. In that sense, they were similar to the Traits in NBA Live 19’s The One, and the ability to customise Badge loadouts in NBA 2K22. Real players likewise had to be equipped with the five or seven Skills that best represented their style and abilities, even if they could feasibly have others.
Compare this to more recent games, where players can have dozens of Badges and level them up to Hall of Fame with the appropriate min-maxing. The boosts offered by Signature Skills were also fairer and more balanced in their impact, thus being less of a crutch. It could be argued that five or seven slots were too few for NBA players, but they were adequate given the smaller selection of Signature Skills compared to the array of Badges that we now have. Furthermore, while Badges have become powerful (and yes, OP) gameplay augmentations the more that they’ve been expanded and over-specialised, Signature Skills kept it simple and realistic, while still being effective.
That’s not to say that they don’t have similar issues; after all, they are the forerunners to Badges, and thus share some of their best and worst characteristics alike. The prime example is the Acrobat Signature Skill, an ability that has also been a Badge. Quite infamously, the official roster updates for NBA 2K13 removed the Acrobat Skill from every player that originally had it, as it facilitated an exploit. The intended benefit of Acrobat was removing the penalty for changing your shot in midair, while granting a boost to shot success after performing a hop step, Euro step, or spin move. This did work as intended, but the Skill had an even more powerful effect on the perimeter.
Gamers discovered that by performing a Euro step before shooting a three-pointer, the shot would go in every single time. When I was messing around and maxing out my player in NBA 2K13 through hacking, I equipped Acrobat and exploited the glitch for all it was worth. I scored an effortless 123 points with the help of 23 three-pointers, demonstrating how powerful the exploit was. It also highlights the problem with the solution the developers settled on. While removing the Skill from every real player that had it prevented the exploit’s immediate use when playing with NBA rosters, it could still be equipped again, and was also still available for MyPLAYERs to attain.
Aside from this glitch however, Signature Skills were generally not OP or infallible. Equip the Alley-Ooper Skill, and you’ll still see lobs go awry one way or another. Dimer will help pad your assist numbers, but AI teammates will still brick wide open shots. Ankle Breaker won’t make defenders stumble every time, and a player with Pick Pocket will still commit reach-in fouls when they’re too aggressive. If anything, there have been times when playing NBA 2K14 MyCAREER that I’ve felt some Skills weren’t effective enough! Of course, that may be because I’m used to playing MyCAREER in more recent games, where certain Badges made things too easy.
Of course, the earlier approach to Badges was similar to Signature Skills in terms of balance with their effects, and being sensible in their number. As such, when Badges were introduced in NBA 2K15, they felt like a natural successor to Signature Skills. In particular, I was a fan of how NBA 2K17 allowed us to earn just about any Bronze level Badge by performing the requisite tasks, while only being able to upgrade our archetype’s key Badges to Gold with VC (and then to Hall of Fame via gameplay). Looking back, it was a good middle ground between the sensible but restrictive nature of Signature Skills, and the MyPLAYER Builder’s flexibility at the cost of simplicity.
Assessing the impact of concepts such as Signature Skills leads to mixed thoughts. On one hand, they were an innovative idea that furthered player differentiation; a means of expanding abilities beyond the base ratings. In doing so, they paved the way for further improvements in future games. On the other hand, they also established the foundation for mechanics that have had an adverse effect on gameplay, particularly in the online arena. Any issues we have with Badges and their negative impact on the gameplay in recent titles can be traced back to Signature Skills. Had they not been popular or successful, we may not have seen the concept evolve into Badges.
At the same time, it’s unfair to judge an innovation by any missteps that were made when building upon that idea. Any gripes we have with Badges in recent games don’t change the positive impact that Signature Skills had on NBA 2K13 and NBA 2K14. Because of the low payouts of Skill Points in NBA 2K13, I didn’t get to equip many Signature Skills in my memorable MyCAREER game. They’ve had much more of an impact on my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER, where I’ve really come to appreciate them. They also work well in regular gameplay with NBA rosters. The Acrobat glitch aside, they’re subtle boosts that make players’ strengths more effective and apparent.
As far as how they should’ve been handled moving forward, had Signature Skills been retained in their original form, expanding the number of slots to an even ten would’ve been a good move. The limited slots in NBA 2K13 and NBA 2K14 are restrictive, and switching Skill loadouts is more “video game” than “sim”. Nevertheless, they were a worthy addition to the game’s mechanics, and established a concept that was initially well-handled and received positively. There may be little chance of ever returning to that pure sim focus with augmentations that aren’t contrived or overpowered, but that doesn’t mean that Signature Skills weren’t a great idea, and a welcome innovation.
