The game is honestly trash imo, they messed up a lot of the physics so that some situations like blocking lead to players going with their head far above the rim for a block. The game speed is also not adjusted right, so that for example passing and acceleration are far too slow compared to the steal speed and hands of defenders (leading to too many turnovers and steals), the same with acceleration of players, where they are far too slow during a full court sprint which makes real transition impossible. There are offline sliders that adjust the speed somewhat to make up for that, but it leads to animation glitches as the player movement isn't working right with that speed and leads to skating etc. Also, defense is the worst it's been in ages and the vast majority of the scoring is in the paint, where you can't defend right due to the bad cpu. And I'm saying that as someone who was top 200 worldwide occasionally in NBA 2k7-12 and beat top 5 guys, plus finished NBA 2k21 with like a 22-2 record online but just became disgusted at how I had to play to win. You can watch eSports or online streams to see how bad the gameplay is, just a paint and 3s fest vs bad cpu switching defense. And as others have said, the game is also bogged down by microtransactions(even in offline modes) and 2k has become one of the greediest developers around.
Highly exaggerated, but I’m sure many people will run with your opinion because it suits their opinions and view of 2k anyway. I’m far from a ass kisser since I think 2k tends to ignore glaring issues since the early days like passing, fast breaks and canned animations. They’ve made great strides since the early days and even in the last decade. But continue to be negative. If this mode doesn’t excite you as a gamer, fine, but as basketball heads I’d figure people would be blown away by this.
I haven't played 2K in a few years. I've been wanting to give it another shot just to see how its evolved, but can't say I'm super optimistic. As noted, 2K has gotten super greedy with the way they design the game. It honestly felt (and probably still feels) like a F2P game, but they still charge money for it. To be fair, I guess you can usually get it super cheap or via Game Pass/PS+/etc., but that kinda confirms that this is the business model they want. There's probably still a good core gameplay design in there somewhere, and I'm sure they make improvements every year (maybe taking a few steps back at times). It is a big budget NBA game (the only one available), so of course you can have a lot of fun with it. But they definitely spend the majority of their resources with the F2P mechanics. They make a TON of money with these games, but they can't even fix bugs that have been around for ages or update the PC version to match console versions from years ago (someone tell 2K that the consoles basically are PCs now). Of course, I think most of the sports games these days are pretty trashy and follow similar business models. Some do it better than others, but I guess it is kinda natural to do something similar in this genre. With the yearly release schedule, quality & polish is definitely not a goal.
The online experience has honestly gotten worse compared to 10-15yrs ago if you check how the competitive gaming looked and how you had to play defense actively or were able to score in a variety of ways vs the top ppl in the world, which is now impossible. What "mode"? I'm talking about the entire game, not a specific mode. I am a basketball head, it makes it even more frustrating when you see the fundamental aspects of basketball botched and the games being an abomination with wrong physics and monotonous paint scoring or abuse of defense, it doesn't look at all like real sports or makes for a good competitive game. Or even offline if you play MyGM, the simulation of stats and games is horrible and the trading ai is terrible, making for very uneven teams after a while.
