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The Neighborhood is NBA 2K18 is to unify different player types

Whether you like to play on the court or in the park.

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NBA 2K18's senior producer Rob Jones was recently in attendance at a London event for the game, and given that the Neighborhood social space has just been revealed, Gamereactor asked Jones about the motivation behind putting this social space in the game.

"There's quite a few reasons, right," he started. "First of all, if you look at our growth over the years, the game already was starting to get this foundation of really being social - people playing in the park, people playing in Pro-Am - but there was a clear break in the way people wanted to experience it, from the standpoint of, you know, 90% of the people wanted to play MyCareer storyline, but really they only wanted to play, at least we felt by looking at how they were actually experiencing it, that they only wanted to play it long enough until they got to the magical 99, and then they wanted to get into the social aspect of playing with their friends, playing in the park, competing, and things like that."

"But those weren't tied, like, you actually had to leave MyCareer in order to do that. So we started trying to figure out 'okay, is there a way to unify it? Can we create a situation where, for guys who really only care to play in the park, can they get the same experience of working their way to 99 by playing through park games as opposed to only playing through the storyline? And what if I wanted to do both?' So this whole idea of can we make it something tangible? And it didn't make sense, there was no sense in it being done all through menus, it's a lot easier to just say 'hey I can walk to the park' or 'I can just walk to my agent's office', and so that started driving everything in terms of that."

"And then [we started] to think, what other things would be interesting in that space? Then suddenly you start getting the mini-games, and the 2K zone, and the shops, and things like that. So if you think about it, there are areas that are endemic to MyCareer, meaning like your team practice facility, and your own court, and the agent's office, even the barber's shop, because there's scenes that play off there, right? So all of those were built as part of your narrative and your storyline and things like that, and then other places were built in like 'oh, you know, when I want to put NBA clothing on I'm doing it in a menu'. Well, let's build a store. Once we built a store it's like we could have scenes in there too, or we can make it part of a particular decision that you make, or things like that. So it just starts growing and growing, and then you're like 'wait, the sky's the limit here'. Unfortunately, as high as that limit is, the work was more significant as well."

Do you like the idea of the Neighborhood space?

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"If you're looking to pick up a basketball simulator to play with your friends, online or offline, then this is the game for you."



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