The NBA 2K brand made serious strides as the best basketball video game over the last decade. I can say from experience that the last three in particular, going back to NBA 2K13, felt noticeably different in terms of gameplay and control. That’s obviously the ultimate goal to provide a product that’s as similar to the real thing as possible.
Stephen Curry is complete insanity on the basketball court this season, especially from three. In an interview with Forbes this week, gameplay director Mike Wang spoke on the difficulties of simulating the kind of player that Curry is:
To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K. He’s a ‘rule breaker’ when it comes to jump shooting … he becomes a problem in the video game world where we’ve been trying to train our gamers [to know] that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.
The issue is the fact that Steph Curry has no rules or boundaries when it comes to shooting, and most importantly shooting off the dribble. It’s not popular or efficient to take shots off the dribble in 2K. Wang says that they still don’t want to promote jacking up shots and hero ball, but because of Curry in real life, they’ve made some slight tweaks to his “jacking” ability in the game.
In NBA 2K16, Curry was rated a 93 behind only LeBron James at 94. For NBA 2K17, we shouldn’t just expect Curry to be the highest-rated player, but possibly even the most unfair player we’ve seen in this 2K era.