There’s no doubting the fact that NBA 2K10 was a financial success last year, and for the most part was also a critical success. But what a lot of gamers found out about 2K10 right when they started playing the game was that it was full of technical problems. Was this expected? To some, yes. 2K Sports hasn’t had the greatest track record when it comes to polish and online play, but even the NBA 2K vets were shocked at how buggy the game was. So when the new cover was announced it got me thinking, was this just a way to make the game stand-out on the store shelves, or was this 2K’s way of saying “Hey, we’re sorry for last year, we have Jordan now and he’s cool right? This year is going to be totally different I promise. Isn’t Jordan awesome?” and then still give us a buggy game?

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited to see what NBA 2K 11 has in store for us basketball fans, but I felt the same way last year. I was completely hyped for 2K10, and I followed it every step of the way. I even played the NBA Draft Combine and got even more excited about it. There were some issues in that game but I thought that was all going to be fixed when the retail version was released. Can you really blame me for being excited? I love the Be a Pro modes featured in the EA Sports titles and it seemed like a great fit for the best basketball game on the market to have it. But ultimately that mode felt rushed and, in my opinion, 2K spent way too much time trying to throw in all these new features instead of making sure the game runs smoothly.

Adding to the poor framerate issues and inability to connect online was a My Player mode  (the supposed highlight to NBA 2K10) that felt unrefined. To make things worse, it took 2K an entire month to release a patch that only fixed some of these problems. NBA 2K10 was feature-rich and should have been a great game, but with all the issues it just couldn’t live up to its potential.

So what does 2K Sports do to try to make up for this? For starters, in an interview with Gamespot.com Erick Boenisch of 2K tells them that the online issues from last year’s title was due to overwhelming support and trying to do too much for the fans.

“NBA 2K10 was very, very successful for us….If anything, the online issues we saw with NBA 2K10 arose from our trying to do too much–trying to deliver too much to our fans… Our infrastructure was in need of updating, and it took the success of NBA 2K10 before that became clear.”

Really!? Because being the leading basketball title in the market for years and years was not enough of an indication that the 10th anniversary title would be a huge success? After reading this I completely felt like 2K was slapping me in the face and telling me I liked it. In fact I don’t know how any 2K fan could read that and feel like they weren’t ripped off. I’ll give it to him that he admitted that they tried to do too much, but not making sure one of the biggest sports titles has working online play is inexcusable. Adding to this, this year in a statement made to IGN, Jason Argent of 2K said “NBA 2K11 would be the single biggest step forward the series has ever seen year over year.” So forgive me if I feel like this is déjà vu and that the Michal Jordan signing and cover is trying to mask the stink of last year’s title.

Many gamers posted their frustration and anger with 2K and vowed to not purchase the next title. I won’t be getting 2K11 on day one, but that doesn’t mean I won’t get it at all; after all, 2K Sports knows how to make a basketball game. But the whole Jordan thing has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. How can I not feel like they are trying to make us forget about last year’s title and how can I not feel like this year’s title could suffer from the same issues? Why else would they go as far as to put Jordan on the cover instead of all these current NBA stars to choose from that kids all around the world look up to?

It’s like what the Knicks were trying to do last year, they put a crappy product on the court, got rid of most of their players and made room to sign a high-priced athlete in hopes fans would forget about the prior year. With competition heating up between EA and 2K, I guess they had to do something to get fans excited again for NBA 2K11. Putting Jordan on the cover seems like their back up plan in case the game turns out to have the same technical issues as last year. Call me a pessimist, but 2K already has a poor track record for online play and they’ve already shown us what happens when they try to give gamers “too much”. So, to me, the Jordan cover is just another way 2K is trying to dance around the issues they dealt with in 2K10.

Tags: 2K, 2K Sports, NBA 2K10, NBA 2K11

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 6:24 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.