NBA2K23 Wants Your Money And Time (Part 2)

MyCAREER, hoo boy. That’s an experience and a half. If I hadn’t played so many games, I would sincerely believe I stepped into a fever dream. Unlike what many in the community will tell you, you do play basketball in NBA2K23’s career mode. It’s just that most of your objectives have absolutely nothing to do with basketball.

We’ve already covered the start in the first article – You play (and maybe win) the Summer League finals, and then suit up for your first game soon after. As you play actual NBA games, you will unlock more and more of the story as you realize that Shep Owens being a) a local player and b) is somehow extremely likeable (to the city’s denizens) despite being a giant douche to everyone he meets, has more influence in the city despite him not being there anymore. Thing is… you weren’t your GM’s first choice – he was overridden by the team’s president who made the call to draft you instead of Shep.

That part is compelling, and there’s a KotoR Light/Dark side aspect where you can either be the General (team-oriented, leadership skills buff your teammates more than you) or the Trailblazer (flashy solo player, leadership skills buff you more than your teammates). However, you are not limited to either. Since you can have two leadership skills later on in the game, you can pick one of each or a third route if you can tolerate the MyCAREER enough to finish the College Flashback storyline. The more you activate Leadership skills, the more skill points you earn in that Leadership branch to unlock more skills and better versions of them.

Where the game loses the plot is when you start the Win the City initiative. This is where your PR team conjures up a plan to gain fans in the city so that you make them forget about Shep Owens in different districts: The Business, Fashion and Music districts. Note how none of these have anything to do with basketball.

I believe you can see the problem here. However, there is something that has to do with basketball. There is a street ball tournament called The Classic where you can directly face Shep Owens’ team (because of course, he’s the reigning champion) if you can convince the person who holds the tournament to let you captain a team. However, the PR team will not let you enter the Classic if you haven’t won over each district (and naturally, each district will contribute a “street” baller for you to add to your team.) In order to do that, you’ll need to unlock the PVE courts in each section and win 5 games there to unlock that baller for the Classic. You only get to pick one, the others have to be on the team.

The Music District

Reader, I ask you a single question. Do you like J. Cole?

Because you’re gonna get a LOT of J. Cole. The entire goal of conquering the Music District is to schmooze up to J. Cole enough to get a feature on an upcoming track with him. For that, you’ll have to bust out your rap chops on several occasions, and play street ball with J. Cole. Naturally, the street baller you add to your team following this is… J. Cole. If you’re thinking “J. Cole isn’t a baller what the hell are they doing?” I agree with you. However, you’re playing on his court (the Dreamer court), you’re trying to schmooze up to his label (Dreamville Records), and the people you’ll interact with for the most part of this questline are his entourage.

So if you don’t care for J. Cole? Too bad.

The real weird part is the rap sections. You have to select one line out of four and only one (or two) are correct. You can restart as much as you like, but it’s practically impossible to really verify which line is the intended one as they’re all trash. You can look up the rap sections on youtube but I can tell you one bar by heart because of how strange it is:

“I’mma Shaq the backboard, I’mma cave the roof in.
Hope it doesn’t rain, ’cause I caved the roof in.”
– 21st century poet, fashion icon, business mogul, and ball handler, MP (MyPlayer)

WE GETTING OUT THE PENTHOUSE WITH THIS ONE :fire: :fire: :fire: :fire:

Still, absolutely nothing will prepare you for what you need to do after you successefully rap your way into the hearts of the music district. You’ve shown you have music taste (as defined by the contractual obligations of 2KSports towards one J. Cole), you’ve shown that you can rap (as defined by bars written by marketing execs forced to make basketball references) but now…

You get to make beats. And that’s the music daily. Part of the online experience is that as you advance in the MyCAREER story, you get more dailies to gain more currency to beef up your dude further (or buy more gear). Each section has a quiz daily and a performance daily. In the case of the Music section, you get music trivia questions at the start of the questline and recording a beat on the DJ Machine. Thing is, if you save the beat, you have a chance of hearing it in the playlist so if you make trash you might accidentally troll yourself later down the line.

You’re given 10 samples with 8 different fills, vocals, and other things to spruce up the beat, with 4 tracks (Bass, drums, lead track, rhythm track) but you can’t mix samples at all, tempo is fixed across all tracks so you can’t make interesting downtempo drums uptempo lead or other things like that, and sometimes the better beats you can do is just rhymically mashing a fill because the drum parts aren’t interesting. Yes I messed around with that much.

The music district is the only district that doesn’t place you in direct conflict with Shep Owens – You’ll get periodic videos where he clowns your rhymes but performs somehow worse, but that’s about it. There are far more direct confrontations in the other two districts.

The Fashion District

Part of being a NBA player is apparently having drip before the game so you have to establish yourself as a fashion mogul. You actually play a lot more basketball for this one, but they make sure that if you’re a big man, you’re gonna have a hard time. Dogus Dick is a 6’9″ Power Forward. I’m gonna have a problem. Still, you get to play a street match against another NBA player for their sunglasses and their shoes so you can start not looking like a herb, get into contact with a fashion designer that got burned by Shep Owens (she made him a shirt in exchange for exposure and he ghosted her) and then eventually meet these two.

These two sneakerheads are the Fashion Trivia daily quizmasters, and one of them will challenge you to a free throw contest which, again, if your free throw stat has a low ceiling, you’re doomed. The game does not inform you of this beforehand, but the Free Throw stat costs so little OVR that keeping it at around a 70 is perfectly fine. Chances are it will be much lower when you first encounter them. There’s no real failure condition here – you can try as much as you want, but it is still quite annoying to spend currency in a stat you do not really care about right now, no matter how little it may cost.

Still, at least you play basketball for these challenges, as you’ll have to play a game of Horse against an indian food man who also designs his own pants (which are considered really good looking), and eventually play a match against Tyler Herro for his sunglasses to complete the outfit. At least Tyler Herro is an actual NBA player so adding him to the hoop squad for the Classic is a good get.

The big ending is getting featured on a fashion reality show filmed at the City Design Institute (I cannot get over this name, it is TERRIBLE) as a judge, where your designer, you and Shep Owens are picked as the judges. Naturally, whoever you pick wins because your designer will vote with you, and thus you… defeat Shep Owens? Who even cares? At least you get free duds out of it.

The Business District

This is the longest part of the whole story, and arguably the most infuriating. You try to schmooze yourself with local coffee mogul Uncle Bobby (real name Robert Miles) but you have to deal with his underling throughout. Once again, for most of this, you won’t be playing basketball, but out of all three this is the one that is the most relevant to your career as progress in this allows you to obtain endorsement deals, which unlocks a lot of currency at a time where stats start getting costly to upgrade.

I’m getting ahead of myself – The idea is to start using your platform as a rising NBA star to help people achieve their dreams so Uncle Bobby takes notice of you and your charitable acts. Of course, that means helping out a man with a vegan hot-dog stand. If you were wondering where you get the weenie hat I had adorned in the previous article, there you go. It can be, in fact, one of the first pieces of gear you obtain. While some on-court gear can give you bonuses, outside of Corporate/Free Spirit branding bonuses when you do fashion walks, street gear doesn’t really affect you much. At least there’s that.

Still, you start endearing yourself to Uncle Bobby only to learn that he’s planning to launch a national campaign for Perco-Latte using… of course, Shep Owens. You blow a gasket and that’s how you unlock endorsement deals. Fulfill branding conditions (usually a mix of 3 up to 5-6) and then you can just sign a deal with a company, like that. Yes, this is all advertisement. No, you can’t take two shoe deals at once. I tried, it’s not possible.

Oh yeah, during this whole shebang, Uncle Bobby asks you to play in a charity game of basketball alongside either Tracy McGrady or Kevin Garnett. Because I’m a dumbass, I went with Kevin Garnett as I wanted to have more Trailblazer points (picking Tracy McGrady gets you General, and I already had a HoF tier badge for that that I was nailing the requirements for every game – some of them are PISS EASY to get, it turns out!) Here’s why it’s a mistake – whoever you pick will be at your side for the Classic… and whoever you did NOT will be in Shep’s team.

T-Mac would have complemented the team well, Garnett and I have the same role on the team. Whoops.

Still, once you’re done with that, you finally get to…

The Classic

The Classic works differently from the conquering the districts. First, you need to actually conquer the districts even if you have successfully completed the 5 games on each PvE court necessary to recruit the player for your team. Otherwise you’ll “get laughed off the court”, never mind that at that point you likely have either completed Palace Intrigue (the NBA portion of MyCareer) or are well enough into it that your performances should be speaking for themselves, but eh, nobody accused this game mode of making any sense, least of all me.

Once you’ve reached the Street endgame, you get an invitation from Kenny King, the organizer of The Classic and pretty much the guy that runs street ball in the City. It’s firmly established that you cannot play at Hammond Park without him allowing you to do so. Of all the characters in the game, he’s probably one of the most sympathetic – A knee injury (likely a torn ACL) forced him out of College ball, and even after it was healed he couldn’t play anywhere near his talent level prior so he was forced to stop playing. However, in order to keep close to the sport he loves and gave his life up to now to, he started organizing street ball in the City, in order to give opportunities to players who, for some reason, couldn’t make it to college ball or even high school ball.

Before you get to meet him, you have to do a NBA trivia quiz with two dudes playing chess near Hammond, because of course you do. At least it’s basketball related. Which is very surprising in this video game about basketball.

The Classic itself is simple: Champion team is floated to the finals, whoever beats the other two teams faces off against the champion team. So… the big ending of the Win the City initiative is just… well, win 3 4v4 matches. Shep Owens is a 84 OVR with most of his talents in his physical attributes. There’s nothing special, you just get a green jersey and a title belt (as well as some currency to spend on more abilities!) It’s so bland, it’s supposed to be this cathartic moment where you show your rival that yes, you are actually that good and better than him. However, the moment at the park isn’t really left to breathe – it’s just… there.

Palace Intrigue

This is the main mission involving your NBA career, and it’s a lot better structured than the street ball aspect. Your character is essentially a pawn between the VP of Marketing and Promotion for your team and the team’s GM. Basically, everyone on the team wanted to pick you for the draft except the GM, Othella Akpem. That includes the team president, who outright overrode his own GM to pick you. In theory, this could be considered the main story with the street ball stuff being sidequests, but the way both are intertwined, it’s difficult to say that it is. The final cutscene where you gloat about owning the city requires both stories to be finished.

Where this lost me completely is how much Othella wants Shep Owens. It becomes obvious that he doesn’t want you there and is trying everything in his power to get you to leave or demand a trade. He asks for (what he thinks) are unreasonable on-court goals (they aren’t), he leaks stuff to a specific journalist about how “the team doesn’t want you” and forces you to react to it. It has more of a high school vibe than anything sports related.

(Note, I did The General version of this story. I haven’t checked if Trailblazer has different requirements, but the rest of the game didn’t lead me to believe it would be that much more involved.)

Granted, considering what goes on in the NBA, you might say that’s the most realistic part of the story. Still, it doesn’t make for a compelling narrative, doubly so when you get to the endgame, where Othella starts floating a trade with you involved. At first, it’s just a rumor, but he eventually says he’d consider trading you and 3 draft picks for Shep Owens straight up. Again, at that point in the story it would be incredibly damning for him to even propose that but this is all to have a “showdown” with Shep in terms of the Player Evaluation metric, where you have to beat his analytics for three games out of five.

Again, if you’ve remotely played (and you will have due to how much you must play to even get here) the game enough, this is easy as the highest the game will ask is an A-. If you limit the turnovers and don’t intentionally screw over the team, you should be getting that on the regular.

So, you get your metrics, everyone is like “Bruh” towards Othella and he quits in frustration. Congratulations, you are now Lebron James and control everything on the team.

Following the story, you get a chance to relive your college highlights to get a sort of 30 under 30 influencer cover that I didn’t pay too much attention to because I, quite frankly, had enough of it at that point. This would have at least had you play more basketball, but it would also introduce more narrative dissonance as you would be equal to your current level of talent in college, where you were marked as a 60 OVR, at least 20 to 30 points back to where you are now, with no badges, no badge loadouts, etc.

Long in the Tooth

Much like this article, MyCareer wears out its welcome fast. Everything is centered towards showing as much advertisement and product placement as possible, without any consideration as to what would make a decent enough story to warrant such a mode. If they didn’t make the mode reliant on the stakes of said story, then perhaps the advertising and product placement would be fine as, after all, sponsorships are common in the world of sports. However, the fact that the game goes out of its way to make you do skateboarding, fashion shows, rapping, instead of concentrating on the core game of basketball (which is really good! there’s some control/tutorializing issues but outside of those the game is stellar when you actually get to play it).

Still, in NBA2K24, 2K has mentioned that the non-basketball stuff would become more optional and while I haven’t played the game (I might pick it up sooner than when it goes free on Playstation Plus this time around, for another potential feature that’d be more like a Let’s Play), seeing some of the glitch exhibitions leads me to believe that they have made significant changes to the video game enough that it would be worth doing another deep dive like this. And if they haven’t, I guess I can amp up the snark next time.