Ever since the transition into the current generation of consoles, the NBA Live series has been the younger, less successful, brother in the basketball game family. Every year before the season starts they have to go back home and sit there while everyone keeps telling NBA 2K how great and successful they are. This year EA Sports is hoping to show up their “older brother” by making their game more authentic than ever and by hiring Mike Wang, formally of 2K Sports, to be their lead gameplay designer. With someone from 2K Sports spearheading the design you can expect a lot of gameplay improvements. So far EA has not released too much information in terms of what is new to NBA Live 10 but they have released some gameplay footage as well as a recent blog post discussing about the authenticity of the new title.

One of the largest aspects of the sport is the basketball culture that surrounds the game. EA Sports is hoping to capture all of this culture from player antics to tattoos to signature sneakers. In a post by NBA Live’s Visual Games Designer Ryan Santos, he shares with us what they’re doing to bring a new level of authenticity to the court. To make NBA Live 10 more “culturally relevant” Ryan talks about having to revamp the visuals, game modes and especially the soundtrack. He says he wants to “take inspiration from the things that relate back to basketball and incorporate it into my design.” To start, the visuals needed a boost in authenticity. The first thing they wanted to do is to obviously make sure they get all the player’s looking as close to their real life counterparts as they can. One of the biggest aspects to making them look genuine are their tattoos. What Ryan wants to do is make sure all of the tattoos on every player are up to date and look exactly like they do in real life. The next step in breathing authenticity back into the series is with the jerseys. In NBA Live 10, you will see even more throwback and holiday/cultural jerseys. The last step is getting the players’ signature shoes in the game. The shoes a player wears are just as important as the player themselves. This year NBA Live is putting an emphasis on the player’s shoes, so when you see Melo or Lebron on the court they will be wearing their signature Nike Kicks. To someone who isn’t a big basketball fan this might seem like such a small issue but to die hard fans this is what brings authenticity to the game.

Even the practice gym has gotten an overhaul to be more representative of how a real state of the art NBA gym might look like. Dubbed the “hanger”, this is practice screen will appear when you load up the game. In the hanger, you will see players hanging around in their “cool gear” and signature shoes. On-screen prompts will appear to introduce you to the new controls. There will be a ton of video screens surrounding the gym to give you ESPN content along with some on demand videos from the EA servers. The bottom screen will still display dynamic messaging to give you NBA Live 10 news and Dynamic DNA updates. While all of this is happening, the new soundtrack will be jamming in the background. Ryan Santos wants the soundtrack to represent the culture of the game so this year the team in Canada is working hard with EA Worldwide Music Group in Los Angeles to bring a more authentic sound. They released some singles from the upcoming game which can be found at the EA Music Trax website.

So far this is all they are willing to dish out to us on the new title but it does seem that EA Sports is trying to go in a new direction with the franchise. From the images released and from the gameplay footage it does seem like NBA Live 10 is already looking much better than 09. Check out the full blog post along with all the new images at http://insideblog.easports.com. Keep checking back for more updates on the new title and some insight on the new controls and gameplay.

[Source: EA Sports Inside Blog]

       

Tags: EA, EA Sports, NBA Live 10

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under News, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360. 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.