Erick Boenisch is a senior producer for 2K Sports and he’s the chief of the NBA 2K development team that has brought fans the prolix MyGM and MyLeague modes in the NBA 2K series.
The modes were already ridiculously deep in NBA 2K16, but per a developer blog provided to us on Monday, we learned the features were being taken to another level.
Last year, the team introduced team relocation and rebranding. Uploading logos for your uniforms and arena floors was a blast. There was really no limitation to the kinds of designs you could create.
In NBA 2K17, fans will not only have the ability to relocate and rebrand, you’ll also have an opportunity to expand the league to as many as 36 teams—with the same level of customization for every squad.
In NBA 2K16, you could only relocate and rebrand three teams. This year, you can fully customize them all.
The screenshots provided show off an attractive and clean menu system, but who cares about menus when a mode has been almost completely fleshed out. When you create a new MyGM or MyLeague, you’ll have a few choices. You can start a normal 30-team league with the teams and divisions as they are in real life—but that’s no fun.
You can also start a league with expansion enabled. You’ll be able to expand the league from 30 to 36 teams (all with fully customized designs) from the beginning. Last but not least, you can start a league of up to 36 teams. The option to realign divisions, use expansion teams, classic squads, edited/rebranded teams, Euroleague clubs and more is a part of the league construction process.
If you want to create teams, but you don’t have the time or creativity to come up with designs and names, there are 10 pre-built fictional organizations in the game with complete audio support (meaning the announcers will say the team name and comment on the organization’s specifics.)
There were a ton of users in the NBA 2K community who created custom logos, uniforms and courts for NBA 2K16. In this year’s game, they’ll be able to upload their entire team kit (unis, logos, arenas, etc) for the rest of the community to download.
When somebody asked Boenisch about the three-team limitation in MyGM and MyLeague. He talked about the difficulty in balancing the schedule to handle more than three relocated teams.
Apparently that issue has been resolved. In NBA 2K17, the scheduling system won’t just handle full relocation, it’s also built to support expansion drafts. This means players will have to be left unprotected to fill the new team’s rosters.
Also, the schedule creation tool can generate a ledger of games for leagues ranging from 30 to 36 teams. The draft lottery formula will adjust depending on the amount of teams in the league, as will the odds of winning the top pick.
If you don’t pick expansion from the beginning of your MyGM or MyLeague experience, it can still happen dynamically as you play through multiple seasons. The league will vote to approve expansion franchises and you could be forced to make roster decisions accordingly.It won’t happen very often, but the functionality is built in.
Quite honestly, there’s very little—if anything to question or criticize with these new concepts. I am still waiting to hear if anything has changed as it pertains to injury logic, but that may be more of a gameplay question—though it obviously affects MyGM and MyLeague more than any other mode.
Even with that small gray area, this news is still cause for celebration for fans of MyGM and MyLeague. The features were already king among the franchise mode concept in sports video games.
These advertisement about options and features now is the best if they have reasonable logic.