Game Informer: Candid Conversation with NBA Live EP Sean O'Brien
Game Informer's Matt Bertz visited with NBA Live Executive Producer Sean O'Brien to talk about the upcoming 15 release, the state of the franchise, and what to expect this year and in the future.
Some excerpts:
So is Live Seasons in the top three for modes that people spend time playing?
Yes Ultimate Team, Live Season, and then our traditional Rising Star and Dynasty modes. You really see a difference if you look back five or eight years ago it was all about Dynasty mode. The evolution has happened because the NBA as a league in particular and its players do a great job with what they do socially. It's a highlight driven sport. We see highlights all the time, we hear players talking about their games, and the league is promoting all that stuff as well. I think the NBA specifically is a league that does a great job of surfacing all the cool stuff that's happening in the league, whether it's a specific performance or a team's winning streak, and the players are talking about it so it's always top of mind for us as sports fans. For us to actually do that and ensure that we have that relevancy is super important. I think moving forward it's going to be something that we see more and more of. I'm reading something online, I'm watching something on television, and then if my video game doesn't support the same thing and isn't up to date, then there is a disconnect there. Right away it becomes something that's less important to me or less impactful in my life. For us to do that, we're getting away from that dynasty mode where there's that fantastical approach to it where I can just do whatever I want. It just gets away from realism a little bit, and I think there is definitely a segment of our audience that enjoys that and wants that control, but I think the evolution is happening through that connected experience and live services.
Does this mean by extension that Dynasty mode is becoming less prominent in your development cycle?
I would say yes right now. What we're trying to do is incorporate some of the cool moments and the control you have either as a coach, player, or general manager within other game modes. There are certain things about the control you have to draft a player, trade a player, to try and sign a contract that we're trying to bring into some of our other modes. I think it's taking what was great about Dynasty mode and still having it there because there are people who want it. Its just having a solid system with better for us better simulation results, having the right players traded or signed as free agents, the right teams wining having that simulation engine that is buttoned up and really solid, but then taking some of the cool concepts that has always made the dynasty mode great and bringing them into other modes.
Last year you had too many other elements to tackle so you didn't put the EASBL into the game. Is that coming this year?
That's not coming this year. We don't have any online team play in this year's game but it's something that we're exploring moving forward. I think it's a big part of when we talk about our game being a live service, having that ability to compete online and compete with your friends. We want to make sure that this year we shore up our online head-to-head, we shore up gameplay, and we shore up visuals. So it's really the core of our game that we're focusing on. From there, our challenge for Live 16 is to ensure that we have a new take on what online team play looks like. Take what it used to look like in Live, what it looks like in NHL, and what it looks like in FIFA, and put a spin on it that is a little fresher and obviously suited to the game of basketball.
The off-the-ball A.I. was one of the glaring faults from last year.
Yes. We're developing something right now called the quick action. If you played NCAA Basketball 10, it had it in it. Here's the challenge with basketball games. I play the game a certain way, and you play the game a certain way. You expect certain off-ball motion or moving to happen a certain way, and I expect it to happen a certain way. Based on how I play, if I like to attack the basket and try to get to the rim on every single possession, I'm expecting a certain type of motion and I don't want a guy to run automatically into my path, but he doesn't know where I'm going because the game can't predict that stuff. So if I'm on the foul line extended on the left side and there is a guy on the baseline. If I'm expecting that guy to stay still because I'm going to the basket, but then he starts cutting at the same time I do, then there is four people right there and you get this crowded-kids-soccer-sort-of-looking game, and then no option to penetrate and kick. So what we're going to do now is let you know when there is opportunity for motion based on who you are and where you are. If I'm LeBron on the perimeter, maybe the opportunity is just to clear out and let LeBron go one-on-one. If you're LeBron, L1 will come up and give you an icon. If you press it, the contextually appropriate motion will take place. It's a really cool feature that allows me to control the motion based on how I want to play the game. If I don't expect a lot of motion to happen I don't have to trigger it. If I want a contextually appropriate motion to happen, I press that button and the guys clear out and I know what's happening and can initiate my action.
Who are the new faces you brought in to help with Live 15?
We hired three engineers, and the guy who runs gameplay, Connor Dougan, who most recently was on UFC for a minute and SSX. He was a line producer for SSX and worked with me on basketball for a long time. Prior to that, Ryan Santos was a guy who worked on NBA Street and NBA Live up to 10, then he left to work at Blast Radius for a while and then the Jordan account. A real basketball head. He's a designer so he does a lot of different things across our game.
The nice thing I found out this year was after we filed 14
it was a really hard year. This year has been hard too, but some of the s--- that just was broken. Stuff like basic things. I always go back to this example our profile save/load system just was f------ broken. Just was completely ignored and a disaster going to 13. The thing about sports games, you don't have to worry about certain things. There's certain things like the gameplay is head-to-head online, you can go into a game, you can load up teams and arenas it just works and you try to make it better and focus on the things that our end player would see. We had to do all this stuff under the hood just to get to the point where our nose was above water and it was really hard on the team. And then to get hammered in reviews and all that hard work and guys were like, What the f---, why am I doing this?
There was that response for the rest of the week after we shipped. Guys were really defeated and hurt by it, but the cool thing for me was to see that next week everyone started rallying and it was just this moment of, F--- this, we can do this and let's make the game better. That was really a moment for me where I knew we were missing some key people, but for the most part we had the DNA on the team and the culture that we could do this, because it's not easy. It's not for the 9 to 5er. If we want to catch up as quickly as we do and be as aggressive as we need to be, you need to be committed, so it was cool to see the team didn't turtle, they actually stood up and we were able to make the game so much better in the months after we shipped 14 in November and then continuing to lead into this on a shortened development cycle. That's the other thing too, we're working on 10 1/2 months from launch, and then we need to launch again. So that extra six weeks, you can do a lot of s--- in six weeks in production. That's the other challenge we're faced with, but no one's making any excuses, and I'm really amazed at what we were able to accomplish so far this year. We're just going to keep going.
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