Sean O’Brien, NBA Live 14‘s executive producer, has published an “open letter,” stating that the upcoming EA Sports basketball title will be exclusive to next-generation consoles, giving gamers yet another reason to upgrade to the Xbox One or PS4.
“There has been a lot of talk the last few years about how great NBA LIVE was going to be,” O’Brien wrote on the EA Sports website. “The vision is a simple one: To create a great basketball game exclusively for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.”
O’Brien also stated that EA Sports is fully committed to rebuilding the NBA Live franchise, given that there hasn’t been an NBA Live title in four years. In that time, the NBA 2K series has grown to immense popularity, shattering franchise records by selling 4.5 million copies of NBA 2K13.
“The great news for me is that EA Sports is 100% committed to rebuilding NBA Live,” O’Brien wrote. “There is an enormous financial commitment to the development of the product on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, including the size of the team and resources required to give us every opportunity to make a great basketball game that can compete with such a solid franchise like NBA 2K.”
NBA Live has a lot of work to do if it plans to give NBA 2K a run for its money. But with what we saw at E3, with the game’s bounceTek technology — which is a drastic improvement in ball handling and dribbling — the EA Sports franchise might just be a worthy competitor.
“We needed to capture the essence of half-court basketball, providing 1-on-1 isolation both in the perimeter and the post, the 2-on-2 chess match that is the pick and roll, while still offering the gamer the opportunity to push the basketball in transition and have the control required to get the ball into the lane to either take the ball to the rim or find an open teammate if the defense collapses,” O’Brien wrote.
To do this, O’Brien said he needed the best locomotion and player movement engineers in the country, so he recruited Gary Paterson, who previously designed FIFA‘s physics engine.
“Gary felt that we needed to innovate with dribbling and that no game had truly captured the control required when the gamer was dribbling the basketball,” O’Brien wrote.
“I then had Gary work directly with Scott O’Gallagher, a former professional basketball player turned gameplay designer, and together they have designed an incredible ball handling system with NBA superstars and great ball handlers having their own set of dribble moves, animations and real world speed and skills that you’d expect.”
The most interesting part of O’Brien’s “open letter” is the reveal of EA’s partnership with Synergy Sports Technologies, the tech company which provides real-time statistical information that the NBA uses for scouting teams and players.
“I want to remove subjectivity from how we rate players and have that data provided by Synergy Sports to completely drive how the game plays,” he wrote. “I’m really excited about being able to update our game within an hour of something happening in the NBA. We’re going to be making an enormous investment into this connected experience. “
NBA Live 14 is due later this year on the Xbox One and PS4.