NBA 2K14 review update one: PlayStation 4 and Xbox One

While the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of NBA 2K14 didn’t feel like a necessary upgrade for the series, developer Visual Concepts has revamped the game for next-generation consoles.

NBA 2K14 is the best-looking next-gen launch title — you may actually mistake it for a televised basketball game. In the transition to the new consoles, NBA 2K14 loses a few things, most notably the LeBron James-focused Path to Greatness mode. But it gains a retooled single-player career mode, MyGM (formerly The Association) and MyCareer.
MyCareer is revitalized as a story-based mode, with cutscenes in which your created player encounters a fictional rival named Jackson Ellis. As sports tales go, it’s clichéd, but engaging nonetheless — every time Ellis talked some trash before a matchup between us, it motivated me to turn in a great performance. My coach provided goals during those games that challenged me to shut Ellis down, building up that rivalry through gameplay. Veteran teammates engaged in lighthearted hazing with my rookie character, but they also came over after poor performances to reassure me and invite me to join them on the practice court.

MyGM puts you on the business side of running a team as well as personnel management. You’re held accountable for your actions by the club’s owner, its players, its fans and the media. When you tell your owner how well you think you can meet his goals, you have to live up to your words or risk losing his trust. Conversations often presented me with decisions I actually had to deliberate over, where my options fell somewhere between a rock and a hard place — a great virtual representation of the challenges of being a real GM.

But MyGM suffers by being inextricably linked to 2K Sports’ in-game Virtual Currency (VC). As in MyCareer, you spend VC on upgrades for your GM’s abilities, such as business savvy and contract negotiation skills. But the main way to earn VC in MyGM is to play your team’s regular-season matchups; you don’t get any VC for simulating games. So players who are more interested in the management-simulation aspect of this kind of mode than in playing the games themselves won’t be able to make much progress — unless they buy VC with real money.

NBA 2K14 also struggles online. Lag wasn’t pervasive in the games I played, but it was persistent enough to throw off my pinpoint timing on shots. The game includes a new online mode, The Park, in which you and up to 99 other MyPlayer characters can walk around a virtual playground and play pickup games. This mode was completely broken for me until Visual Concepts patched the game earlier this week. I played a fiercely competitive 2-on-2 game and felt myself getting hooked, but it has the same technical shortcomings as other online modes.

Visual Concepts didn’t pull it off completely, but NBA 2K14 looks and feels “next-gen”; it’s one of the only launch titles to truly herald the arrival of a new console generation and give us a glimpse of what the future holds.

NBA 2K14 plays well enough on the court, but the rest of the game fails to match it. It’s not a turn for the worse for the highly regarded series. But it’s the first NBA 2K title in years that I can’t unequivocally recommend — especially with next-generation versions of the game only six weeks away.

NBA 2K14 was reviewed using a retail PS3 copy provided by 2K Sports. You can read more about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

During the time I spent playing NBA 2K14 on PS4 for review, it was playable online with a bit of lag, although The Park was broken until a post-release patch. I had no other issues with connectivity in the main modes: MyCareer, MyGM and MyTeam. But since December 26, the game has been plagued with connectivity issues, visual bugs and crashes that have persisted on both PS4 and Xbox One, despite assurances from 2K Sports on multiple occasions that developer Visual Concepts had resolved certain problems.

Chief among the issues is downtime for the 2K Sports servers. MyTeam is an always-online mode because players’ collections of digital cards are stored in the cloud, so server downtime leaves MyTeam completely inaccessible. I’ve been unable to enter the MyTeam mode on a number of occasions over the past few weeks; after another attempted fix this week, I successfully loaded the mode but was stymied by server issues when I tried to do anything.

MyCareer and MyGM are not technically always-online modes. But they are always-online by default because they use VC, the in-game currency; NBA 2K14 verifies save games with 2K’s servers to make sure players aren’t using exploits to get additional VC. The modes are still playable when the servers are down, but players can’t continue with their existing save files; they must start from scratch with a new offline save game. I haven’t had issues with MyCareer or MyGM myself, but I’ve seen dozens of reports of problems from other players.

Other issues are being reported in the 2K Forums and in tweets to the 2K Support account. Users on PS4 and Xbox One are suffering crashes to the console dashboard, as well as an inability to play private TeamUp multiplayer games with more than two people. (2K said a fix for the latter problem, at least, is coming in a future patch.) Odd visual glitches are also present in the MyCareer loading screen.

NBA 2K14’s reliance on VC means that online connectivity is deeply integrated into the game, which makes it a problem that the servers are unreliable. The game isn’t completely unplayable, but MyCareer, MyGM and MyTeam are its main single-player modes — that’s where players spend the bulk of their time. And considering all the problems players are experiencing, it’s tough to recommend playing the game at the risk of losing all progress.

While the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of NBA 2K14 didn’t feel like a necessary upgrade for the series, developer Visual Concepts has revamped the game for next-generation consoles.

NBA 2K14 is the best-looking next-gen launch title — you may actually mistake it for a televised basketball game. In the transition to the new consoles, NBA 2K14 loses a few things, most notably the LeBron James-focused Path to Greatness mode. But it gains a retooled single-player career mode, MyGM (formerly The Association) and MyCareer.
MyCareer is revitalized as a story-based mode, with cutscenes in which your created player encounters a fictional rival named Jackson Ellis. As sports tales go, it’s clichéd, but engaging nonetheless — every time Ellis talked some trash before a matchup between us, it motivated me to turn in a great performance. My coach provided goals during those games that challenged me to shut Ellis down, building up that rivalry through gameplay. Veteran teammates engaged in lighthearted hazing with my rookie character, but they also came over after poor performances to reassure me and invite me to join them on the practice court.

MyGM puts you on the business side of running a team as well as personnel management. You’re held accountable for your actions by the club’s owner, its players, its fans and the media. When you tell your owner how well you think you can meet his goals, you have to live up to your words or risk losing his trust. Conversations often presented me with decisions I actually had to deliberate over, where my options fell somewhere between a rock and a hard place — a great virtual representation of the challenges of being a real GM.

But MyGM suffers by being inextricably linked to 2K Sports’ in-game Virtual Currency (VC). As in MyCareer, you spend VC on upgrades for your GM’s abilities, such as business savvy and contract negotiation skills. But the main way to earn VC in MyGM is to play your team’s regular-season matchups; you don’t get any VC for simulating games. So players who are more interested in the management-simulation aspect of this kind of mode than in playing the games themselves won’t be able to make much progress — unless they buy VC with real money.

NBA 2K14 also struggles online. Lag wasn’t pervasive in the games I played, but it was persistent enough to throw off my pinpoint timing on shots. The game includes a new online mode, The Park, in which you and up to 99 other MyPlayer characters can walk around a virtual playground and play pickup games. This mode was completely broken for me until Visual Concepts patched the game earlier this week. I played a fiercely competitive 2-on-2 game and felt myself getting hooked, but it has the same technical shortcomings as other online modes.

Visual Concepts didn’t pull it off completely, but NBA 2K14 looks and feels “next-gen”; it’s one of the only launch titles to truly herald the arrival of a new console generation and give us a glimpse of what the future holds.