Interview: Visual Concepts’ Rob Jones talks NBA 2K13 on Wii U

While it might have missed launch here in Australia, NBA2K13 for the Wii U will soon be with us any day now. A couple of weeks ago we got to the chance to speak to Rob Jones, gameplay director on the NBA2K series at Visual Concepts. Rob is no stranger the 2K series, he’s been working on the games since 2001 with only a brief break in the middle for other basketball games at 2K before returning in 2006 where he has been ever since.

The team at Visual Concepts aren’t strangers to Nintendo consoles either, every year there has been a NBA2K game on the Wii as well all of the other consoles. However, with the move to HD on Nintendo’s latest console, Jones says that not only can they bring the same experience but in same cases it might even surpass the other consoles. “The experience that you’re going to get on Wii U is on par, actually in some ways it surpasses the other two because there are specific things that [GamePad] brings that the other two can’t do. We’re happy to be able to give you the graphical experience, and the actual gameplay control experience that you had on the other two consoles that have been so acclaimed.” Jones does admit though that the team didn’t have infinite time to tailor and discover the full power of the Wii U this year, but have done enough to make sure that the ‘Wii U crowd’ could see the potential in the controller, the system and the experience the game differently to anywhere else.

So what does the Wii U version bring differently to the court? Firstly, it is bringing all of the advanced features out of the menus and to your fingertips on the GamePad screen. “Accessing any of the advanced features is always been extremely tough for the user” explains Jones. “That touch screen right there in the middle really allows us to bring out some of those settings, or like let’s say a quick play. I want to call for a really quick post up, or a quick 3 point shot. Those things were available to those advanced users, and the casual person could never even find it”.

You can of course hide all of the settings and just play the game on the GamePad as well. But now say your team’s not doing too well “[at] any point in time you can bring that quick settings page back up. And it lets you do things like tell your team to focusing on rebounding more, or spread the court out, or you want to call for quick substitution, you kind of just tap on the name of the guy you want to sub, and the menu kind of reacts to that.” The team was really keen to make players on the Wii U version stay involved in the game at all times.

The other unique feature on the Wii U version of the game is the Gatorade Biometric Scanner. It allows you to lift up the Wii U GamePad to the screen and ‘see’ through the GamePad the energy remaining in your players. “By doing that you can quickly determine who you need to sub, because they’re getting tired. That’s just pretty much lifting the controller, having a quick glance, and putting it back down, and you’re back to regular game play.” says Jones. The GamePad also makes the My Career and My Team modes even better with the “fantasy basketball slash collectors game” being able to played through on the controller. You’re also able to play My Team online or offline. The entire game itself is also online enabled as well.

Outside of the Wii U specifics, we asked Rob how after all this time, does the team keep the game fresh? “I think that we had a lot of goals this year And I think that for the most part if not in general we pretty much hit everything.     From the gameplay side we wanted to keep making the game feel more fluid and more responsive to user, one of the biggest things we introduced was the control stick that allows user to control their dribbles, like one-to-one with the stick, without losing the equity that we put into the shots controls that we had since NBA2K6.” Jones continues, “We also worked really hard on just continuing to improve our collision system that really shows off all the human reactions from being collided with when you’re going to the basket, or jumping into the air. Jones is also proud of the improvements made to the artificial intelligence of the computer controlled players to react more like humans and now “they can adapt better to what you’re doing to them, computers are usually pretty easy to kind of sort out after a while”.

You’ll also notice on the NBA2K13 that this year’s game has been exclusively produced by musician Jay-Z, outside an obvious musical influence to the game, Jones explains that Jay-Z wanted more than just a token title and influenced the game in subtle ways.

“He helped a lot of with crafting a menu that responded to the beat, to the music and to the feel of the game. He had a lot to say about that. Also, not only is he a gamer, but he is a musician too. But they’re literally sitting in the cave, while they’re working and in their down time they’re either gambling, playing video games, gambling on video games, but it’s just one of those things where it’s like they spend so much time in our world that he actually has valuable feedback as a consumer, not only from his own experience, but also from the experience of people that works with him, that are fanatics of the game.”

Not that Jones doesn’t think the team wasn’t doing a good job at those elements before Jay-Z came along but he validated a lot of their choices by asking the same things they were going to implement anyway. Jay-Z also used his star power to secure some of his celebrity basketball friends for the game who wouldn’t return the team’s calls.

Speaking of high profile players, Jones tells us that legendary players are back again, but they’re not the focus this year. “They’re not front and centre the way we’ve had in the past, but they’re available. Your favourite teams are available and online playable out of the box.” However, Jones doesn’t want the game to have to rely on older stars year after year, he believes that there are enough new stars to create a new dynasty of great NBA players. “They had a window where there was a need to bring back the glory days.” but now “it’s time to embrace these guys, Chris Paul, and Blake Griffin, and Kevin Durant, and LeBron”. These new players will be the icons in 20 years that the classic players/older people know now.

We asked Rob as well if there was any plans to take the NBA2K games ‘international’ much like FIFA is with including international leagues. “It’s something that we continue to talk to them about, because we think that there is a strength there, and there’s such an international influence in basketball nowadays that make sense to start recognising that and actually kind of showing that off, and I don’t think, this is a personal opinion, I don’t think it necessarily would detract some of NBA, but that said, you know, it’s their call to us what [the NBA] want to include and not include in the game.”

Rob and the team are trying to make NBA2K13 more than just a game, but something that becomes a tradition, in fact he believes it might already be there. “NBA2K as a game has become part of the gamer’s fabric, and it’s kind of transcended ‘I’m going up to buy a basketball game’. It’s kind of one of those things where, I like to say, I’m not a fan of games like Halo or Call of Duty, I mean there are games that don’t really speak to me, but they are such part of the gaming culture, that when they come out I purchase them anyway.”

“It’s become one of those things where your friends have it, so you have to have it too, and integrating music with Jay-Z, and integrating kind of his style, his motif, and his kind of understanding what people like, was a big step for us, because it really meant accepting that we’re mainstream, as opposed to just a game”.