On the heels of conference calls for NBA 2k8 and NHL 2k8, 2k Sports recently held a call to discuss what’s new in this year’s version of College Hoops. Sitting in on the call were producer, Zach Timmerman, assistant producer, Jerson Sapida, and some guy named Greg Oden who apparently played for Ohio State once… or so I hear. The rules were simple, send in some questions and tune in for the answers.
One of the first pieces of information to come out was the promise that almost no part of the game has been ignored, noting that they had, “added features to every part of the game and touched up every part of the game.” This is the kind of thing we’ve all heard before, but as the call got underway it quickly became easy to believe that a lot of work has gone into making what is already the best college basketball game on the market even better. There were also some promises that they’ve made the game experience better for the “casual” player, who they don’t want left behind as these games add layer upon layer of complexity. This is the sort of thing that sends a shutter down the spine of any “hardcore” hoops fan, but the deeper into the call we went, the less it sounded like anything had been oversimplified.
It was clear from the outset that the new feature that 2k Sports thinks fans are most looking forward to is 2k Share, which allows you to share the games files with friends online. This is something that Sapida really dug into, noting that it allows you to share everything in your game from rosters (yeah!) and AI sliders to legacies and playbooks. He also noted that 2k Sports will be watching closely how gamers use the 2k Share feature, paying close attention to what’s popular and what people don’t like so that the feature can be modified and expanded going forward.
That said, the feature that is likely to have the biggest impact on on-court gameplay is the new 6th Man, which seeks to have the crowd in a big arena giving a boost to the home team’s ability, making things tougher for the team on the road. The really good news with this feature is that it’s not hard-coded. By default, bigger hoops schools like Michigan State and Kentucky are going to see a bigger advantage than Dayton. But if you take over a smaller school in legacy and are able to build-up that school into a national power, you’ll see the 6th Man feature play a bigger role in your home games, although the school’s arena capacity also plays a role.
True, this feature might give some players of 2k7 pause, considering how overdone the Team Unity feature in College Hoops 2k7 felt on its default settings. Timmerman, however, was quick to acknowledge the general feeling that it needed to be balanced— something that has been addressed for 2k8. While I’ve always been skeptical of features like momentum, Team Unity and 6th Man, features that attempt to model and dictate the flow of play, precisely because they can unbalance the game, Timmerman was adamant that the team put a huge amount of effort into analyzing stats and developing formulas that keep the features from becoming overbearing. Skepticism aside, if features like Team Unity and 6th Man can be made to work well together, it could lead to some truly amazing gameplay in 2k8.
Off the court, many gamers expressed dissatisfaction with 2k7’s sim engine, which generated a lot of unlikely upsets. Sure, Duke losing by 30 to UNC Charlotte is the kind of unlikely result you can let pass once in a while, but seeing them lose like that four or five times a season to teams of that caliber? Obviously, there’s been an issue there and Timmerman didn’t duck it, saying, “Definitely. We weren’t happy with how our sim engine worked in a few ways last year and we took some drastic steps to address it.” That said, Timmerman also made clear that you will still see upsets happen, hopefully just not as often.
When asked what separated College Hoops 2k8 from NBA 2k8 Timmerman talked in depth about how different pro and college basketball are and how hard they’ve worked to be authentic to the college game, including less isolation (one-on-one) play and tailoring the set play calls to match those called more often in college than in the pros. And, of course, if you don’t like the plays offered in the game, you can use the new play designer to come up with some of your own. He also made it clear that because the NBA game comes out first, it gives them time to see what people like in that game make tweaks to their own, something made possible because the two games share the same graphical engine.
