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Wayback Wednesday: The Broken Rotation Screen in NBA Live

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 the broken rotation screen that appeared in various NBA Live releases.

During my extended NBA Live 10 retro kick, I wondered why I didn’t spend more time with it when it was new. I’ve wondered the same about some of its immediate predecessors, a couple of which were fairly solid in their own right. Issues with lobs and broken plays soon reminded me why. The fact of the matter is that NBA Live 10 does have some quirky moments that were annoying when it was the newest game I owned, but are more tolerable now that the game is nostalgic. My involvement in NBA Live modding also kept me focused on the PC releases.

However, reflecting on it further, I’ve also realised that the quality of Dynasty mode played a large role here. In many ways, I feel that Dynasty peaked with the prior gen version of NBA Live 06, which also included the PC port. It’s not that there weren’t any improvements in the following games, but there were also inaccuracies with the sim engine, and other such annoyances. Oh, and the broken rotation screen, which affected basic functionality, and stood in the way of one of the main joys of roster management: creating different lineups. Let’s take a look back…way back…

In older basketball games, managing your rotation didn’t extend much beyond moving players around on a lineups screen. NBA Live labelled it “Reorder Roster”, and it was where you moved players in and out of the starting lineup, changed the bench order, and if there were more than twelve players, designated which ones would be inactive. It’s a staple function, and something that we still see today. As far as managing the rotation, the order of the players determined who was subbed in first and played the most minutes off the bench, though it was imprecise and substitution patterns were spotty. Starters always played big minutes for the CPU, or when using auto subs.

Playing Time In NBA Live 07 Dynasty

This changed when games introduced deeper control over rotations. In addition to setting the starting lineups, inactive list, and bench order, it was now possible to assign a set number of minutes for each player. This had an impact on simulated performance, as well as in-game substitution logic. Obviously, the exact number of minutes a player received would vary depending on the flow of the game. They might play fewer minutes if there weren’t as many stoppages to facilitate substitutions, or they may see more court time if a teammate fouled out or was injured. Introducing control over rotations improved lineup management, and allowed for more realism.

NBA Live 07 was the first game in the series to include deeper rotation control, which should’ve greatly improved the Dynasty experience. Unfortunately, the rotation screen was broken, and ended up causing more problems than it solved. The main issue is that within Dynasty mode, the broken rotation screen completely replaced the usual Reorder Roster menu. There was no longer a way to manually set bench order using the new rotation screen, and while assigning court time was intended to automatically reorder the bench accordingly, the adjusted order wasn’t always logical or desirable. To that end, managing your team’s lineup in Dynasty was now incredibly clunky.

It’s a common problem when a new feature replaces an old one rather than expanding upon it, without truly replacing its functions. In recent games, you’ll notice that the rotation screen includes the ability to adjust lineups and playing time independently of one another. We can move players in and out of the starting lineup and inactive roster, change the bench order, and then set minutes as desired. Adjusting the minutes doesn’t alter the bench order (unless you set it to zero, at which point they’re placed at the bottom of the lineup), and isn’t necessary to ensure that a player is the sixth man, or the tenth man, or anywhere else you want them to be. We now have complete control.

Depth Chart in NBA Live 07 Dynasty

We didn’t have that in NBA Live 07, or the other releases with the broken rotation screen. It also didn’t help that instead of a specific number of minutes, we were setting a percentage of playing time. By NBA Live 10, that was simplified into a bar that represented playtime priority. It’s not that this was a difficult concept to grasp, but it was very imprecise. Furthermore, you could only assign players to one position in the depth chart, while hoping that the substitution logic would make proper use of their secondary positions. This meant that while the rotation screen sort of worked, we still had far less control than was desirable, and the results reflected those limitations.

Ideally, a combination of the depth chart, playtime priority, and a player’s secondary position, would allow for sensible and realistic rotations. Unfortunately, the games’ substitution logic struggled to account for lineups outside of the starting five, and combinations that involved players subbing in at their secondary position, or sliding over to accommodate a teammate coming off the bench. In theory, higher playtime priority would force the game to seek out opportunities to sub in players without replacing a teammate who also played heavy minutes at the same position. In practice, it resulted in strange lineups and inaccurate minutes for teams boasting deeper rosters.

Granted, we could certainly try to work around issues with the broken rotation screen, but the CPU-controlled teams couldn’t. This wouldn’t be an issue if the CPU didn’t set its own rotations when starting a new Dynasty game, but it did. The CPU’s rotation building logic tried to place the top five rated players in the starting five, while giving the best players at each position the most court time. All too often the CPU used the secondary positions to bench logical starters in favour of players with a higher overall, but then distributed minutes evenly because a benched player was nevertheless still one of the highest-rated players at their position. This led to unrealistic rotations.

Rotation Screen in NBA Live 10 Dynasty

These strange starting lineups and rotations were often immersion-breaking, which brings me back to why I didn’t feel compelled to play Dynasty in NBA Live 10. It’s one thing to see a CPU team make its own fictional trades and signings; that’s part of the franchise experience, and aptly captures the odd and unexpected nature of player movement. It’s another thing altogether when the 2010 Cavs are starting Zydrunas Ilgauskas at centre and Shaquille O’Neal at power forward due to the aforementioned rotation building logic. Simulated results and gameplay performance suffered due to the imprecision of playtime distribution, which detracted from Dynasty’s appeal.

Although the eighth generation NBA Live games did a poor job with Dynasty and Franchise mode overall, I was pleased to see that they adopted the rotation screen utilised by NBA 2K, leaving behind the broken interface. I wasn’t the only one that found the approach clunky and a detriment to Dynasty mode, so it was frustrating when the issue wasn’t remedied in NBA Live 08, 09, or 10, after being introduced in 07. Indeed, it epitomised how Dynasty and other modes would make the occasional leap forward, only to fall out of vogue and focus rather than constantly improve and build upon the previous year. Squandered potential has been the bane of NBA Live.

It also demonstrates the importance of getting the basics right, otherwise the entire experience can be spoiled. There were certainly other issues with Dynasty around that time, from simulated stats to the absence of a drill to develop shooting ratings in NBA Live 10’s Academy, but the inability to properly manage your rotation due to broken mechanics and logic was off-putting before you even encountered those problems. Again, even if you tried to make the best of the situation, the lineups the CPU was putting on the floor were unrealistic and immersion-breaking, more so than any weird fictional trade or signing. We can’t expect perfection, but it was too much sloppiness.

Rotation Screen in NBA Live 08 Dynasty

I don’t like to throw that word around too easily, because much like “lazy”, it can be a harsh buzzword that downplays the efforts of hardworking people and the difficulty of developing games; especially given the short development cycle of an annual release. However, one of the reasons that NBA 2K overtook NBA Live is that their attention to detail was better. They kept improving upon modes and concepts, whereas progress in NBA Live stalled. The broken rotation screen also exemplifies how NBA Live was trying to streamline modes instead of make them deeper, which continued to be a problem on the eighth generation right up until the notably shallow NBA Live 19.

On the bright side, EA did finally address the issue with the broken rotation screen in NBA Live 14‘s Dynasty. When roster editing was patched into NBA Live 18, we were fortunately given full control over minutes and lineups there as well. It’s just a shame that I couldn’t enjoy NBA Live 10 to its fullest because of the underlying issues with subs logic, and a clunky interface. I’m sure I wasn’t the only Dynasty gamer that felt that way. Once again, it’s a prime example of how the bells and whistles of shiny new gimmicks mean nothing if the basics aren’t done right. It also emphasises the need to continually evolve when new features aren’t the improvement they’re intended to be.

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