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Thread: NBA Live 10: Producer Interview

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    Default NBA Live 10: Producer Interview

    I was not a fan of 2K's or EA's games this year. Last b-ball game I enjoyed was NBA Live 07 on the XBox. When you get someone from the leaders you are expecting to indeed make a better product. I want to look forward to this game because I miss playing a basketball game. NHL09 is what I am enjoying this year.

    When producers of a sports video game want to talk to you about their product eight months before it ships, they are either extremely confident about their title or completely desperate for attention.


    In talking to the producers of NBA Live 10, I find it to be a little bit of both. For years, all you heard is how this is the season Live turns things around, this is the year Live overtakes 2K, this is the year EA Sports takes that foundation that's been built on the next-gen technology and really shows the world what a basketball game should look and feel like.

    And yet, while the game has shown improvement, it is still nowhere near the level 2K Sports offers in their NBA franchise.

    Why should Live 10 be any different?

    Well, for starters, EA Sports went out and hired the gameplay designer from the NBA 2K team, Mike Wang, a guy known throughout the sports gaming world as one of the brains behind popular concepts like 2K's Signature Style.



    But that's not all as the team is putting all of their focus on gameplay as they hope to return the franchise back to the glory days when NBA Live was a game right below Madden on the sports gamer's wishlist every year.



    Will it work? ESPN sat down with Wang along with Live's lead producer Sean O'Brien and game designer Ryan Santos to find out as we get the dirt on the direction the franchise is headed this coming season:


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    ESPN: New team, new direction I assume. Where are you guys taking the Live franchise?

    Sean O'Brien: It's important for us to recognize the technology investment that has been made with NBA Live the last couple of years. Basically, it's about building a foundation, and the nice thing for all of us is that we're in a good situation here where there is a good, strong technology foundation for us to work off of. It's important to recognize all of the work that has been done the last couple of years. That being said, the cool thing for us is that we are here to finish the journey, but finish it in a little different direction as we offer a different perspective, a different flavor.

    What do people think of the NBA Live franchise right now? I think if we asked you that question four years ago, I think your answer would be completely different than if I asked you what you think of NBA Live right now. One of the things that we want to do is to go back to those days where NBA Live was a top tier franchise across sports. It was really Madden and NBA Live at EA Sports that led sports video games, and that is one of our goals, to bring Live back to that status.



    In terms of a higher level direction, we want to turn NBA Live more into a service rather than a packaged good. That sounds lame and boring, but what it means is that traditionally we've shipped a package good at the launch of a season and then maybe provided a piece of downloadable content or a title update and called it quits. Next time we'd talk to the consumer is 12 months later when we shipped it again. But I think this past year with Dynamic DNA and some of the stuff we have planned moving forward, we want to talk to our consumer when it's relevant throughout the season.



    The idea of providing those real-world updates, whether it's injuries, whether it's how a player is playing with his new team after being traded, whether it's the tendencies of a player shifting over the course of a year or even the course of a week, and evolving that even more so as we move forward. At the same point, that is all well and good, but we really need to nail gameplay. That is why I'm really happy Mike Wang came to EA last year, to bring a fresh perspective to how we do things and to bring some of those wins he had at 2K in helping create a very strong basketball title.



    We want to evolve Live back to what it was before -- being culturally relevant, being one of the best-playing sports video games on the market, and like I said, being a service rather than a packaged good consumers see every 12 months.



    ESPN: By bringing Live back to its glory days, does that mean you're trying to make it more of an action/arcade title rather than a pure sim?



    Sean O'Brien: I wouldn't say so, no. I can understand why you're saying that, but that's not what I meant. I think if you look at NBA Live a few years ago, I think you had a fondness for it. There isn't that sense of fondness now, what we get are frustrations based on the quality of product and also a strong competitor. I think our goal in sports is to be seen as a leader in terms of the quality we're providing. But when it comes to gameplay, we're not headed in a more arcade direction. We're sticking with the simulation or the exaggerated simulation that we want to do with a sports video game.



    ESPN: But we've heard this same 'building a foundation" line for at least three years now with this game. Why should we believe anything will be different in Live 10?



    Sean O'Brien: It's easy for me to say, hard for you to believe. I think ultimately we can say it right now but until we show you software from NBA Live 10, that will be the determining factor on whether or not you believe me. I think that what we can say is that 07 was a complete technology re-write in terms of gameplay, then we saw big jumps in 08 and big jumps in 09, but it's still not where we wanted to be. But I think the beauty of this is we've got a new guy who is leading our gameplay effort, and having Mike Wang gives us a new and fresh perspective on what our game is all about.



    Mike Wang: I think we agree a lot on all of the controller throwing moments we've had before in Live. Some things just weren't right. The basic fundamentals of basketball were wrong, but there is some really solid basketball foundation stuff there. Some of it has cracks in it, some of it is kind of broken, so what we wanted to do with this year's game is staying away from the new innovation, staying away from the new funky thing you could do with the controller. What we wanted to focus on was getting basketball right. And that's what I'm really excited about because when you play an early version of the game, it already feels a lot different. It feels like real basketball. Like Sean said, it's hard to tell you something over the phone, but I haven't been this excited about a product in a long time.

    Sean O'Brien: And that's the thing you'll notice when we start showing the game this summer or at E3. There won't be a new Freestyle control or any sort of marketable gameplay mechanic feature. It's more about just building solid gameplay. And that may sound not very exciting, but if you understand where we are, that's an extremely serious message that we're filling in those cracks in the gameplay Mike mentioned, then adding another level of depth that we'll get into later in the summer. It's not a gimmicky feature, it's more of a core part of an NBA basketball game that is missing right now
    .
    Rest of interview:
    http://sports.espn.go.com/videogames...ory?id=3900151

    I love to hear what I have in bold. I hate having to push like 8 buttons to do a dunk and so many combos to make a move, I am excited for a game to get back to a core. Does not seem less exciting to me.
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    Twitter: JBuck610
    Host morning drive sports talk program in Albuquerque.

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