Stephen Curry has an ability to do things on a basketball court that no others can. It poses a problem for defenses, obviously, but it also makes for a dilemma for video game developers.
One of the developers behind the NBA 2K series openly admitted to Forbes that the development team simply do not know how to accurately mimic Curry virtually.
“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” said Mike Wang, the NBA 2K gameplay director. “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 that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.”
The developers don’t want to reward things like taking three pointers off the dribble and throwing up unrealistic long-range shots. Unfortunately, those are two things that Curry does successfully, and the developers aren’t sure how to maintain gameplay balance while still letting Steph be Steph.
“Taking 3s off the dribble are also definitely discouraged in NBA 2K,” Wang said. “Especially after over-dribbling beforehand.”
Don’t worry, though – the developers are trying very hard to make Curry play like Curry.
“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,” Wang said.
If Mark Jackson was wrong about Curry hurting the game, well, he may be right about Curry hurting the video games. And 2K are still doing a better job than EA, who struggled to replicate, well, anyone.
