Basketball is the quintessential Filipino sport. The sport is played in every barangay across the country and you can easily join games whenever you want. You might not be the next Stephen Curry, Russell Westbrook, or Anthony Davis (this year’s cover athlete), but NBA 2K20 offers some good old gaming basketball fun combined with a paradigm shift that may have been creeping into sports games in general over the past few years, but has finally arrived in this installment of the 2K franchise.
Many of the previous features from other 2K games return in NBA 2K20. You can pick it up and play with your friends or take on the task of managing an NBA team or player (MyCareer mode). Unfortunately, the MyTEAM mode is largely unchanged and uninspiring. If you play daily, you’ll get some prizes, but aside from playing other teams for virtual currency (VC), that’s about it. The MyGM and MyLEAGUE modes have changed significantly. Playing previous titles, I used to sim entire seasons to see if my roster changes and other experiments would pan out, but now you have to complete daily tasks, slowing down the pace of MyGM significantly. Making each decision is now crucial to your team’s success, and sometimes you’ll have to put some off for later.
However, the biggest change (and possibly the most intriguing) is MyCareer mode. I ended up playing MyCareer mode more than anything else in the game. For this MyCareer mode, you play as Che, who is a star player for his college basketball team, but has to go through an unusual path to the NBA. You can balance out Finishing, Shooting, Playmaking, and Defense/Rebounding. Do you want to make Che an unstoppable three-point specialist like the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry, or an inside presence like the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis? Or do you want a jack-of-all-trades like the Houston Rockets’ Russell Westbrook? The choice is largely yours—but I went with the guy who fills up the stat sheet to make myself a valuable acquisition for any NBA franchise. One of the more annoying aspects of the game is that they try to get you to spend real-life money to make any sort of upgrade, but having done games journalism for most (if not all) of the “microtransaction” era, it was something that I was already used to seeing in games.
Other than building the type of player you want to be, you’ll be fully immersed into a realistic MyCareer experience this time around. Previous MyCareer modes had completely unrelatable characters who seemed like they came out of comic books or movies than people you’d encounter in real life. NBA 2K20 changes that. You’ll be fully immersed in the NBA experience. You’ll be answering questions from the press, heckling from the fans, and other influences as well. Can you endure the pressure, or will you make your own decisions? You’ll have team morale and a fan base, but you can also choose to boost your own ego to get corporate sponsorship deals. You can be low-key and boring, or bathe in the limelight like other NBA superstars of yesterday (Charles Barkley) or today (Draymond Green).
One of the biggest changes in this installment of the 2K franchise is to use your platform in MyCareer mode to speak out publicly on certain issues. Do you want to use it to speak up about wider issues in basketball, or just “shut up and dribble” and stay silent? It is not unusual for athletes to speak out about issues. While they are paid millions and millions of dollars to play sports, they also choose to leverage that platform to advocate for those who don’t have millions and millions of dollars. As I mentioned earlier, this change was clearly a paradigm shift in the realm of sports games in general. You can choose to become more than just the highlight reels and statistics, and bring a moral ethos into a game that you usually just pick up and play with friends, or play coach or GM.
While NBA 2K20 remains largely unchanged from last year in the big picture, adding the “woke” elements in MyCareer mode made me definitely reflect on how I approach sports games. Before, I just sought to build great teams and let them prosper (if the game’s algorithms let me) or rebuild a team from scratch. That is what first got me into sports games—the idea of team-building and nurturing that team to success, playing armchair GM for hours on end. But with NBA 2K20, what I really saw was the ability to see sports games from another perspective. Could sports games really be injecting the human side of the athlete experience in the future? We’ll have to find out. Overall, if you really want to enjoy NBA 2K20, stick to MyCareer mode.
Developers: Visual Concepts
Publisher: 2K
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Also published in GADGETS MAGAZINE October 2019 Issue
Words by Jose Alvarez