When it comes to the game itself, as a designer, would you sacrifice aesthetics of the game over game play or vice versa?

Any day, any day! I think for me, I’m always going to be a gamer at heart. I’m a visuals guy. But, I understand at the end of the day if the game doesn’t play well, it doesn’t matter how good it looks. So for us, we do make those decision sometimes. We only get a year to make this game. And we only have x-amount of people to make it and resources. When we divie up resources, this year the big focus was game play. But, at the same time we wanted to make sure the visuals were poppin’. It’s definitely a balance. As a gamer and a designer, I always feel that game play is number one. My job is to create visuals to support the game play experience. So, when you play the game…‘Melo looks like Melo, LeBron looks like LeBron, Dwight Howard looks like Dwight; they’re wearing the right jerseys, they got the right tats, they got the right kicks. It’s that much more immersive, and you feel like it’s a real NBA game. I think really all those things go hand-in-hand, and when we design…it’s like that for every area. For audio, for game play, for visuals, for online… We look at all those elements and how we can make it more of a cohesive package so that the experience is that much better.

We spoke on it a little bit, but specifically what improvements/differences can we expect in 10 from NBA Live 09?

 Mike Lang, our lead game play designer, would probably be a better person to speak to about the details. But, overall, even if you get a chance to play with the demo, we’ve changed the control system. The movement of the players, the off-ball movement is so much better this year. All the dribbling controls are just amazing. The amount of control you have over your player is just ridiculous. Check out some of the blogs we posted, along with videos. It’s truly amazing some of the stuff you can pull off to create space, to get your jumper open, to blow past a defender, to make an amazing dish when you drive through the lane…to even saving the ball. Some of the off-ball cuts are amazing too. Just like running through screens to get open. Just like you see when Rip Hamilton plays, or Ray Allen. Having off-ball control of your player, so if you want to take control of your player and free ‘em up yourself; you can take control and run him through screens. There’s really just some amazing game play improvements this year. We also looked at some of the things that were broken, things we wanted to fix. Like rebounding and passing…animation! So, we played close attention to what the community was saying about NBA Live ’09, and really tried to improve on the things that were really frustrating about the game at times. That was one of the big goals. Sometimes when you play a video game, there are some things that get you so frustrated you want to just throw a controller. We wanted to basically not have that happen anymore. We wanted to take those controller-throwing moments and fix it for the user. So that it was a fluid, flowing game. When you pick up Live 10 – it takes a little while to get used to the controls ‘cause we did change a lot of things – but, once you understand it and see the amount of depth you have with this game, it plays like real basketball. You have so much control to really make it feel like a real game. I think game play-wise, people are just gonna be blown away this year. There’s definitely room for improvement. I think we as a development company, we see that there’s only one year to create this version. So, we’re looking ahead at NBA Live ’11, ’12 – in these years what are we gonna do? What is year one, year two and year three? This is really just the start! When people play the game, they’ll see a huge jump from ’09 to ’10. What you’ll realize quickly is that we’re back on track to becoming the premier basketball title on the market. From a game play standpoint, I think it’s a huge, huge leap forward. Presentation is another big one! If you look at the way we’re trying to create more of a broadcast feel, there’s a lot of huge improvements there with the audio, with the arena specific crowd chants, arena-specific sound effects. We have these dynamic storylines which are basically stories that are driven by all the real-life stats entering the season. So as you play, you have different match-ups, they’ll talk about these different storylines – our announcers. We re-did a lot of the camera work too.  Overall, this game saw a lot of improvements in many areas.  I hope our fans really enjoy playing the game when it comes out October 6th.

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