NBA 2K11 My Player Mode Detailed

Here is the NBA 2K Blog on the My player. Read on after the break.
Career Path
The first thing you’ll notice upon starting the mode is that My Player no longer begins in the Summer Circuit. This year, you will be taking your created player to the NBA Draft Combine at Attack Athletics in Chicago, Illinois. This fully licensed and rendered gym will be your player’s home for the first three games of his career. Your goal at the Draft Combine is to impress the scouts and coaches in attendance at the event. If you perform well enough, you’ll find yourself attending the NBA Draft at Madison Square Garden in our authentically rendered draft environment. If you are lucky enough to get drafted, your My Player will walk up the steps and be greeted by David Stern at the podium. Enjoy the photo op while you can, the going gets rough from here on out.

Once the draft is over, you will be invited to participate in the Summer Circuit. You will play four games to prove to your team that you belong on an NBA roster. If at any point you slip during the Summer Circuit, your team will either cut you outright, or ask you to join their NBA D-League affiliated team. Your road to the NBA won’t be over, but it will certainly be a lot more difficult if the latter happens. If you do manage to last the 4 games of the Summer Circuit as well as impress your team’s management, then you’ll be invited to the 12-man roster for the upcoming NBA season. This is just the beginning of your story...

My Career
I call it a story, because this year, your career will be defined by whatever persona you want to take on in the all-new My Career feature. My Career is the new hub where you can go to find all things central to your career as an NBA player. You’ll find a detailed breakdown of your minutes and where they are coming from/going, a Timeline detailing important career milestones, a place to view all of the Endorsements you have received, and of course, a place where you can go talk to management and tell them that you’ve had enough and that you want a trade (the choice is ultimately theirs though, unless you force their hand…).

The high level concept with My Career is that every action you take in your career has a reaction. The reaction may be positive or negative. This leads to the most innovative component of My Player and easily my favorite feature in the game this year. Following games, you will participate in Press Conferences where members of the media will grill you on pressing events happening around you and the team. Did the game come down to a last second shot, but you didn’t take the shot? The media are going to want to know how you feel about not taking that last shot. The team’s on a 5 game losing streak? They’ll be asking you what you think about your teammates. Have you recently requested a trade? They’ll ask you why. How you answer these questions shapes how people around the league perceive you. 

You have three character traits that define you and change based on your actions:

- Teammate Chemistry: If you have your teammates’ back, they will have yours. If you start throwing them under the bus, you’ll quickly find them starting to freeze you out on the court. Get open all you want, they’ll just look the other way for their next pass.

On the other hand, if you can prove to management that you are a great teammate, they will come to you looking for suggestions on who they should trade during the season and who they should try and sign during the offseason.

- League-wide Popularity: Being a dominant player isn’t the only way to make a name for yourself. You can also do this in the Press Conference room. Showing endless confidence, and even a little arrogance, is definitely one way to catch the attention of fans around the league. The tricky part is trying to build this while keeping your teammates and the local fans on your side. The prize? As you guys have seen from the Ronnie2K teases on the NBA 2K FB page, Endorsements aplenty if you can raise your popularity high enough. If you manage to reach the pinnacle of popularity, you’ll find yourself designing and naming your very own signature Jordan Brand shoe that other players around the league will be seen wearing as your star rises.

- Local Fan Support: The key to building your League-Wide Popularity starts with the grassroots support of the local fans for your team. Earn the adoration of the local fans and they’ll reward you with undying support, thundering applause, and MVP chants. If you are disrespectful of them in the Press Conferences, you’ll find they will be the first people to let you know you aren’t wanted anymore. If things go bad enough, you’ll find the crowd chanting ‘Trade Him’ whenever you touch the ball. No one wants to be THAT guy, right?

Teammate Grade 2.0
Another big focus for us with My Player this year was increasing the quality of the existing features in the mode. So many games make the mistake of adding bigger and better things, all the while forgetting about the foundation. It was important for us to stabilize and build upon the foundation that defines the My Player experience. The single biggest piece of A.I. in the mode is the Teammate Grade logic, and I’m pleased to say that it has received an extensive overhaul in its logic.

We were very ambitious in our design for Teammate Grade in 2K10’s My Player. While I think we achieved great success with it, basketball is a game filled with nuances, and there were plenty of situations where I’m sure you didn’t agree with the outcome. A common one that we received feedback on was the ‘Allow man to score’ following a defensive switch. Your teammate would be guarding ‘your man’ and when he scored, you took the hit for it. These are the types of issues that we spent months isolating and eliminating. The under-the-hood work we did here isn’t flashy; it isn’t going to make you jump out of your seat with excitement, but it will absolutely make your time spent playing My Player a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience. 

Here are a few examples of some of the new additions:

- Pass Leading to Assist/Foul: Commonly known as the ‘hockey assist’, this is often the instrumental pass that sets up a basket. We want to make sure you get your credit this year for being the playmaker.

- Bad Pass Out of Shot: For those guys whose reaction is to shoot first and then decide mid-animationthey want to pass out, and you pass to a player who is already fully covered, you’re going to take a negative hit to your Teammate Grade. Smart passing is not recommended, it’s required in 2K11.

- Allowed Inside Pass: If you allow your man to establish a favorable position in the interior through a lapse in defense, you’re going to get dinged for it.

The Little Things
The ‘Little Things’ is my favorite section of any Developer Insight that I write. This is the area where we talk about some of the lower profile additions to the mode. On their own, they don’t necessarily carry a lot of weight, but together, they define the attention to detail that we strived so hard to achieve. I’ve compiled a quick list of just some of the changes you’ll find in My Player this year:

Key Games: The NBA season is often described as a long 82-game grind. Not every game has the significance of a playoff game or a matchup against a rival. New to NBA 2K11, Key Games are games played during the season that are of more significance than other games. This may be because you are matched up against a star player at your position, or it may be because the game is against a hated rival. Due to the significance of these matchups, users will earn a 2x multiplier to their Skill Points during these games. Key Games don’t come easy, but if you can perform in the clutch, you will be rewarded handsomely with an abundance of Skill Points.

Attribute Caps: In an effort to make each Playstyle mean more, we are enforcing attribute caps on players this year. An example of what this means is a Defensive PG might have a max stealing attribute of 99 while a Shoot First PG might have a max stealing attribute of 80. This is going to pay off when you you’re playing My Player Pick-Up games. In 2K10, without attribute caps, this would mean that you might be playing against a 7’2 center that had a ballhandling rating of 99. That’s not realistic and not an experience we want you to encounter.

Adjustable Qtr Length and Sim Qtr Length: The ability to change in-game quarter lengths is something that was not supported in My Player until the release of the patches last year. This year, I’m proud to reveal that not only are adjustable quarter lengths supported, but simulated quarter lengths as well. This means you can adjust the length and pace of simulated games to ensure that the pace you play at results in scores that are similar to the other teams around the league.

Sim To End of games: Another nice little feature is the ability to simulate to the end of the game s(available once you reach the NBA). If your team is getting blown out, or you are blowing out your opponent, you will now have the option to simulate the remainder of the game. Our simulation engine will ‘play’ your character for you as you continue to rack up stats for your player.

Skill Point buyback: This one is quite simple. In 2K11, you are now allowed to buy back Skill Points should you later change your mind on an attribute you had previously upgraded. The catch? You only get 75% of the original purchase price back. This means that if you spent 100 Skill Points upgrading your Offensive Awareness, you will only receive 75 Skill Points in return should you choose to sell it back at a later date. This affords you greater flexibility in developing your My Player without being able to do so in a fashion that negatively impacts My Player Pick-Up games.

Scaled in-game goals: With the addition of the ability for users to customize the quarter length of their My Player games, it only seemed to make sense that we make the game objectives commiserate to the length of the quarter. If you choose to play 5 minute quarters, you may get an objective to record 5 assists in a game. This same objective in a 10 minute quarter might require that you record 8 assists. The idea here is to provide a realistic challenge regardless of the quarter length you choose to play.