Note: I originally started writing this article with the idea that it would be a one and done. I did not anticipate that a) I would have material for two articles and b) the game would exceed my expectations on how unscrupulous it is. This article concentrates more on the microtransactions aspect and the second will be more about how inherently weird MyCAREER is, and what pitfalls await them in NBA2K24 from what little we know about it.
If you look at NBA2K23 reviews, most reviewers will either: Lambast the microtransactions/commercialization of the entire game or ignore them entirely. I wanted to talk about it because since I became a game designer, I can’t really talk about gacha games anymore as I’d be talking about my direct competitors. So let’s not do that.
So, MyCAR…
HEY DO YOU HAVE A 2KSPORTS ACCOUNT!? YOU CAN’T PLAY ONLINE UNLESS YOU DO.
Dude I just booted up the game calm down! I don’t even know if I like this yet! And there you run into the first hurdle into actually getting into NBA2K23 – you need an account. I have a 2K account due to the massive amounts of Civ6 I’ve played over the years, but apparently that’s not good enough for 2KSports. So, one account creation later, difficulty level select (I went with Rookie as I haven’t played a basketball game since NBA Jam Tournament Edition) and maybe we can…
EULA AND PRIVACY POLICY. ALSO DO YOU WANT US TO SPAM YOU WITH NBA2K OFFERS? NO? HOW ABOUT ACTUAL NBA SPAM? ALSO NO?
I haven’t even gotten to the Main Menu yet. That’s how bad this is. Ok, once all of this is done maybe, JUST MAYBE I can find out what’s going…
DO YOU WANT TO BUY OUR LEGENDARY PACK FILLED WITH VIRTUAL CURRENCY, A BUNCH OF SPONSORED GEAR TO TRICK OUT YOUR BOY, AND COSTS SIXTY-SIX COMMA NINETY-NINE CANADIAN DOLLARS? (Note: This will be completely useless in September of 2023, when 2K24 comes out)
Wow, didn’t even have time to see the main menu and already they’re soliciting cash from me. I’ve seen gacha games that are less predatory as they at least have you do the tutorial! If you select Rookie, you don’t even have a tutorial or anything. There is a tutorial, but no option on first boot to go there immediately? That’s weird. I understand making it optional, especially for a yearly title but not having the option to immediately go there for new players? Not great. Still, points for convenience I guess?
Finally, I can go to MyCAREER. No interruptions, just I get to make my dude. Originally, I wanted to make a version of myself, but a) that would be boring and b) I’m 5’9″ IRL (let’s not get into the weight) so that would lock me to Point Guard, making it so either I build a playmaker or a 3-point specialist. Instead, I built 5 characters for all 5 positions on the court, with different specializations and teams and let our Discord figure out who I’d play.
Fatal mistake, as I asked fellow terminally online nerds about sportsball. Only one person answered, and they’re from LA. Guess where we’re getting drafted, folks. That’s right, our boy is a Clipper. You thought I’d pick the Lakers? Fuck no. I hate insufferable teams and fanbases. Which is why I hate my own local team (for the record, that’d be the Montreal Canadiens).
For the record, here are our five candidates and what name I gave them:
- Bill Fabre – Playmaking Shot Creator, Point Guard with the Orlando Magic
- Lucious Xargay – Defensive Anchor, Center with the New Orleans Pelicans (Both names were in the game’s own autocomplete)
- Lester Unlikely – Slashing Combo Guard, Shooting Guard with the Portland Trailblazers
- Lucifer Beal – Glass-Cleaning Slasher, Power Forward with the New York Knicks (Both names were in the game’s own autocomplete)
- Scoochie Stockhouse – Point Forward, Small Forward with the Los Angeles Clippers (Both names were in the game’s own autocomplete)
In the process of making our five potential candidates, I ran into a big problem – Lack of differing identities for each character you create. Personally, I want my characters to look different, be different. The only things that are different per build are height, weight and wingspan as they have actual gameplay effects (changing your maximum potential attributes – IE: You can’t be a good blocker at 5’9″ because you simply do not have the height and wingspan to actually block a 6’8″ dude). Face and name? Those are shared across all builds on the account. When I came back after modifying my appearance for my second character, I found out that my first character’s appearance now matched my second one’s. That’s not a bug. In any other game, I’d have called this a funny bug. Here, since everything is handled at account level, it is a feature.
And it is a bad feature.
I eventually re-started once I realized that as a Small Forward on the Clippers, the game would force Kawhi Leonard (a 95 Overall player) on the bench behind my 62-63 Overall ass. Therefore, we must make a new character. With input from the Discord once again, reminding me of the infamous MLB The Show video, we have our guy.
Meet Dogus “Big Dog” Dick. Otherwise known in cutscenes as MP.
We Got Drafted
The story, no matter your position or special talents, starts with your character getting drafted by the team of your selection while the whole Barclays Center audience boos the hell out of you. It then immediately skips to a month later where they talk about the Summer League Championships where you are slated to face off against your rival, Shep Owens. Now, if that’s the first time you heard you had a rival, that’s normal. The game has no time for good story pacing, interesting moments to experience or actually setting up a compelling narrative. They gotta get you into the MyCITY penthouse which is the center of all of the MyCAREER and player-specific online play.
Naturally, the best way to explain everything is through a thinly veiled parody of sports talk shows with no personality whatsoever called “Top Takes Daily”. I get that they couldn’t sign the Inside the NBA folks (note: they do have Shaq, but he’s on the half-time show), but at least try to mimic some of their charm. People love that show! So they show you the dueling opinions of the fandom: Some think that everyone should be fired for drafting you (and if we had gone with the Power Forward I would agree with them – the last thing the Knicks need is a Power Forward due to signing/trading for 4 of them in the 2020 off season), whereas others are really happy. Y’know, sports fans. You also find out that for some reason, Shep Owens has a reality show and stole Antonio Brown’s ego. The conflict here is simple: Shep Owens is a gifted athlete but has zero basketball IQ, you’re a student of the game who’s a hard worker but isn’t necessarily athletically gifted (never mind that Big Dog Dick is 6’9″ and has a 7’6″ wingspan). You’ll have to do a lot of never minding in this story mode.
First though, we need to explore the, sorry, I mean MyCITY.
MyCITY is an online hub where you can play several games of basketball with other folks who are clearly better at the game, and have grinded it since launch, than you. This is not a knock on the game itself outside of not being able to matchmake with similar OVRs for fairer matchups. Throughout the city there are a bunch of courts serving different purposes (the Mt. Dew court being for silly basketball competitive minigames, while the Dreamer and Hammond Park courts are reserved for top-tier play and have to be unlocked throughout MyCAREER, for example) as well as several obvious brand placements stores for you to trick out your basketball paperdolls at the cost of the currency you need to boost your stats.
At first, it is not worth it to do so, it may never be worth it to do so. I play a few multiplayer games and get trounced, but I got to Season (7) Level 2, unlocking a suite of Lego 2KDRIVE shirts. One says Big Butte on it. You know what I’m wearing. Big Dog needs a Big Butte.
One thing I’m noticing at this point is that… MyCAREER isn’t predatory – at least not at first. You CAN purchase Virtual Currency to power-up your character, but you still have to grind to extend your max OVR to 99, as you start out at 85. Once you reach that you cannot actually boost your character unless your MyPoints bar levels up… and that can only be done through actually playing the game.
The Summer League
The first match you actually play is in the Summer League championships where, coincidence, your team and Shep Owens’ team made the finals. For some reason, you’re not on-site when that happens, but don’t worry about that. The narrative designers sure didn’t.
Let me make this clear before I move forward: I may come off as harsh and snarky as far as the end result of their work, but honestly they have designed something that’s actually really cool. There’s just these little narrative/system problems that, if this were a game more focused on the MyCAREER section, could be fixed. The integration of on-court objectives and off-court objectives works particularly well, and I don’t think I’ve seen a sports game handle sponsorships and the like to such an extent (though it could be improved, of course). Granted, I haven’t played a sports game since Mutant Football League, and that doesn’t have a create-a-player option. Although if they decided to do so for the second one, I’m in there.
Your teammate ranking in that match determines the amount of minutes you’ll be getting in the season proper. My first attempt at this, I got end of the bench. When Dogus Dick came to play, he was a solid rotational player since I knew a little bit more what I was supposed to be doing. Still, that’s kind of difficult to deal with since you get bonus virtual currency for performing well in a game – the more minutes you have, the more chances you have of performing well. Since you need these VCs to raise your attributes, you can see where there’s a problem. You’re often mismatched against players that are much, MUCH better than you in all areas. I recall the match against the Pelicans where “Big Dog” Dick was matched against Zion Williamson, a generational talent. To say I got humiliated would be putting it mildly. Another issue is that by default, the in-game timer is set to 5 minutes. Naturally, if you don’t put that to 12 minutes, it’ll be very hard to actually perform to the expectations of a full NBA game when you have less than half the overall time.
At least the coach explains why your performance in the Summer League is important: They wanted to put pressure on you to see how you would perform in high-pressure situations. I’ll make the argument that if they started you at 70 instead of 60, maybe you’d be able to handle stuff better. Visual Concepts disagrees with me.
The Microtransactions
Starting from this point is where 2K starts pressuring the microtransactions in some very predatory, FOMO way and some other baffling methods. One such method is the Create a Gatorade bottle. As you progress in MyCAREER, you’ll eventually get a quest to talk to a Gatorade Rep so you can make your own custom Gatorade bottle! Neat, you think, as it will be a little trinket you can have on you that shows customization. Nay, that would have made actual sense. Instead, you get asked to put some initials, choose the colors, and then you get a coupon for what I think is 10 to 20% off ordering that Gatorade bottle for your own use. In any other game, you’d actually get to use the Gatorade bottle you designed in-game with the option to defictionalize it (but only until March 1st, 2023). In NBA2K, you don’t even get to do that.
That’s not even talking about the Gatorade boosts/Skill boosts in case you gaffled your weekly Gatorade Gym workouts. I have never typed the word Gatorade more than now and I’m not even done. When you do the Gatorade Gym workouts, if you do not score 3 stars (out of 4) on every workout, you do not unlock the turbo boost for the week… but you can pay for it with VC if you want. Also, just to incite you to spend the currency you need to actually trick out your boy, you can do a Gatorade Reaction Test (I do not remember, nor care about, the actual name of it) and the better you do on that, the more of a discount you get buying Gatorade boosts. It’s exhausting.
However, the real money driver in NBA2K is the design and community. I don’t mean that in the overstated “Don’t buy the microtransactions if you don’t want them around” way. Most of the community won’t buy the microtransactions for MyCAREER. They’ll do it for MyTEAM though – If you want to know more about MyTEAM, if you’re aware of EA’s Ultimate Team format in EA Sports FC/Madden/NHL or MLB The Show’s card thing, it’s the same deal everywhere. Buy a pack of cards, hope you get what you want out of it.
Instead, it’s how the community plays the game that drives people to buy VC.
When you first start up NBA2K, there is already an unwritten set of rules that you would have no idea about. This is a series that has been alive for longer than some of the people actually playing it, after all (shoutouts to my cousin’s son) and that goes for online play. Eventually, this evolved into what we have now: Do not play online until your character is well on their way to being around 90 OVR. By that time, you likely will have some higher level badges, have attained several game changing perks (the ability to change your Takeover abilities between games, several badge loadouts rather to have to change them before every game manually) including the Gym Rat perk, which is considered a must (and requires 5 real weeks of perfect Gatorade Gym workouts before you can even get it). That’s not even considering how you can totally build your player wrong from the start and not know so until much later, where someone will be pulling a Call of Duty lobby slur showcase in your controller speaker (on PS5).
The problem here is that Visual Concepts does not take into account these unwritten rules of the community when they give you quests that make you earn VC, additional perks, more badge XP, etc. So a new player is told they did something wrong without even knowing there was something wrong to do. The game told them “Go here, pull 20 points on that court and earn rewards” so they attempted to do just that. In fact, you don’t unlock PvE matches until much further in the story, where you need to win fans on the street courts enough that the organizer of The Classic, a 4v4 street ball tournament (and where you will face Shep Owens as a final boss of sorts), will personally invite you to build a team and play in it. Before you unlock that part of the quest (which will require unlocking each court through the Music, Fashion and Business subquests anyway), you cannot actually play PvE outside of the NBA. It’s a pain is what it is, doubly so when you know they could design an elegant solution even considering the rapid turnaround of these games.
I mentioned earlier that it is very possible to lock yourself into a bad build: Here’s the most frustrating part of the game. There are NO respecs. None whatsoever. The closest thing you have is the Rebirth system, which implies a NG+ type deal, but that’s not what it does. Instead, it allows you to create a player that’s much stronger at the outset, but still requires going through the same storyline which makes even less sense this time around, as instead of being a player drafted due to their on-and-off court leadership and intangibles, you would be a bonafide generational talent coming out of college.
Naturally, those last few points you need to get? They cost VC. A LOT of VC, and it costs 450,000 to 480,000 VC to level from 60 to 99 OVR depending on how your stats are allocated. This costs around… 100 american dollars of microtransactions. So while it’ll cost less… that’s per character. If you want to change your position/build? You must pay this again (or slightly less with the Rebirth feature, which requires an OVR of 95 to get anyway).
During the course of the game, you’ll often get dailies from shoe companies – You have to complete them with said company’s shoes, which naturally requires buying them for VC. There is a trick however. The moment you complete the shoe deal with the company, you get that company’s whole suite of non-limited shoes. Of course, you’ll need to be fairly far among the Business side of the main story to even unlock endorsements, and have your personal brand be fairly high in a few categories to get access to one of the shoe deals (which depending on how you play, will most likely be Under Armor or New Balance). Still, at least there’s a way to unlock this.
The worst is the transportation items. You are given a skateboard to move around the City because it is story important for the Business district (you have to help use your growing popularity and NBA stardom to help a bunch of up-and-coming kids that make custom decks – yes I know this has nothing to do with basketball). However, the skateboard is… slow. You can buy rollerskates, a pocket bike or even a go-kart to move around faster but that costs a lot of VC. Like, around 65k, and that’s the currency you need to buff your guy up to the levels you need to be to continue playing.
Everything in the game is tailored to get you to cave and buy VC to avoid grinding, or access stuff faster. That’s where the microtransactions are problematic even in MyCareer. The worst part is, the game itself is fun! With a more focused experience, they could make this hub/mode an interesting and fun experience that could even serve as a gateway for casual fans of basketball to get more involved in their fandom of the sport. As is? It’s a massive cashgrab.
Next up, we break down MyCAREER.
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