“Scoring in the paint and 3-point shooting have historically been the toughest areas to properly balance,” NBA 2K gameplay director Mike Wang told Forbes.com.
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First a little lesson on video game evolution: As gamers improved over the years, they were able to use the digital versions of the league’s elite 3-point shooters and abuse the video games by hitting, say, 15 3’s in a 20-minute “NBA game.” There’s even a name for that kind of shooting, which is frustrating to serious gamers: “3-point cheese.”
But as video games — the NBA 2K series, in particular — grew more realistic and advanced, developers found ways to stem 3-point shooting abuse by developing formulas and metrics that track things such as difficulty of shooting off the dribble and volume-shooting fatigue.
“Taking 3s off the dribble are … definitely discouraged in NBA 2K,” Wang said. “Especially after over-dribbling beforehand.”
Unfortunately, Curry’s real-life 3-point production, not to mention style and range, this season and last has shot down the mitigating metrics and developers’ defensive formulas. Video game Steph can’t keep up — and neither can the games.
“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” Wang told Forbes.com. “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.”
Translation: Video-game Steph is more human than real-life Steph, who has jumped his avatar.
But the 2K guys — like opposing NBA coaches and defenders — aren’t giving up, Wang said: “We’re going to have to invest even more time in future iterations to really let Steph be Steph in future versions of NBA 2K.”
