Hi again, everyone.  I’m here at SFO airport after showing the latest build of NBA Live 10 to some various media outlets.  By the time you read this, there probably will already be some previews on the web regarding the stuff we talked about.  We threw a lot at them so I’m sure you guys will be getting some good meat on the game. And as I’m sitting here in the terminal with Sean O’ Brien and Garreth Reeder killing some time waiting for a delayed flight to Vancouver, I figured I’d spend a minute whipping up a quick gameplay blog for you.

Since it seems a lot of people are hoping to hear more information on defense in Live 10, I guess we’ll make that today’s theme.

Last week I already briefly discussed the first line of defense — stopping the ball handler from penetrating his way to the hoop.  Let’s go into a little more detail there.  As you know, it’s been quite a challenge in basketball games to create a strong onball defensive locomotion model that allows user controlled defenders to effectively stay in front of the ball.  Usually the ball handler is given too many tools and is just too fast, making onball defense frustrating, and almost a chore to play.  We really got sick of seeing people actively trying to switch away from the ball when playing defense, feeling that the AI could do a better job at guarding the ball than they could.  Instead, we wanted to encourage users to stay active and not run away from the play, so to speak.  Jeff Antwi worked closely with our engineers and animators to repair and balance the movement of the ball handler vs. the onball defender.  We ended up incorporating some really interesting ideas such as pad filtering, which is a technique that evaluates the user’s left analog stick movement and selectively ignores certain erroneous inputs to better relay the user’s intention rather than what he actually did on the sticks.  A number of other ideas were implemented — none of which I want to blog about today… you know, trade secret stuff.  But at the end of it all, we really feel that guarding the ball is much easier this year and more users will opt to manually guard the ball rather than cop out and guard a non-factor on the weak side of the court.  Of course, we still have the Defensive Assist button.  And if you choose to, you can use it as an aid.  However, on the higher difficulty levels, we intentionally make it a little easier for the ball handler to blow by user’s with a crossover if they hold down Defensive Assist for too long.  Just a way of encouraging users to use the button as it was designed, a way to find your check when you’re disoriented (especially useful in online team play) but not a do-it-all, automatic defense button.  Oh, and one more note about Defensive Assist.  While using that feature, you can now use the left analog stick to “move within the bubble” and shade to either side, get tight, or gap.  But again, on higher difficulty levels, don’t rely on the assist or you’ll get smoked.  The last thing I want to mention regarding onball defense movement.  You really have to pay attention to the matchup this year.  If you have a guy with good lateral quickness, you can afford to really get up into the ball handler and take away both his shot and his drive.  However, if you’re checking a water bug guard like Aaron Brooks, you better learn to gap him properly and take away certain angles or he’ll leave you in the dust.

So what happens if you have a mental lapse or you get crossed up and your first line of defense gets beat?  That’s when your second line of defense comes to the rescue.  I’ve always felt that the NBA Live series featured strong help defense logic.  But Live 10’s help defense is really something special.  Our AI engineer who works on defense (who shall remain nameless to keep away the headhunters) worked closely with Novell Thomas (one of our resident basketball strategy experts, who should probably be playing ball somewhere for lots of money by the way) to beef up our AI in that area.  Now when the onball defender gets beat, you’ll see some textbook help coming to protect the basket and some beautiful rotations off the ball.  These guys worked tirelessly, constantly tweaking and tuning the system to ensure that the right guys rotate over to help, that they come at the right time, and that everything happens in a realistic manner.  Not an easy feat by any means, but take my word for it… dribble penetration takes quite a bit of skill in Live this year when you’re playing the higher difficulty levels.

TANGENT - That’s the 2nd time I mentioned the caveat, “on the higher difficulty levels.”  Let me just take a minute to explain the design behind our difficulty levels this year.  In the past, tuning difficulty didn’t involve much more than messing with the AI’s shooting percentages to artificially make it easier or harder for the user to win.  That’s lame.  So at the start of Live 10’s dev cycle, we encouraged all of the guys to incorporate difficulty level tunables in a meaningful way for every gameplay bucket that we touched… which basically ended up being all of them.  So this year, you’ll see and feel some very noticeable differences between the various levels, that really make playing each one a different experience.  Here’s how we tried to balance the game:

Rookie = For kids and total newcomers to basketball games.  My 6 year old son can compete in this one.

Pro = For the casual basketball fan.  The AI is a little tougher but defense is toned down quite a bit to allow for easier shooting and dribble penetration (read: more dunks)

All-Star = For the “serious” hoops gamer.  AI is pretty tough, especially when playing with a non-elite team.  Most experienced gamers will find a nice challenge here.

Superstar = For the hardest of hardcore.  AI is dialed up even more.  Expect to concentrate hard on every possession and have almost flawless execution to win.

So make sure you have the difficulty set to match your expectations to maximize your enjoyment of Live this year.

END TANGENT

So where was I again?  Oh… help defense.  Well, I’d like to be able to draw up some nice diagrams or show some videos of our defensive rotations but unfortunately, I’m stuck in this airport and I don’t think you guys would want to see something drawn up in Paint.  Also, I’m not quite ready to divulge the way our logic works… you know, trade secret stuff.  Sorry.

Well, we’re getting ready to board so I think I’ll shut this blog down now.  Sorry no cool media to accompany this thing.  But next week I promise to show some more of the game as I walk you guys through some of the more interesting game mechanics that we worked on this year.

Later,

Mike