It has been a long time since we have covered sports titles at NBA 2K MT Digital Foundry, however with the advent of NBA 2K21 about the newest wave of consoles, we're seeing something genuinely fascinating here, using a proper generational jump in fidelity across the board. To show that, we took a peek at the sport primarily on PlayStation 5 and PS4 Guru, but we also spent some time with both of the Xbox Series consoles.
Delivering such a big excellent improvement is quite an achievement in my view. While it may not seem this way on the surface, sports games are from what I can tell - one of the more difficult genres to work on. Truncated development programs need annual entries in each show, meaning less time between each release but more than this, these matches need to match up to some correctly'real' experience, often delivered with a TV-like presentation. A game like NBA 2K21 should deal with actual people in real places performing complicated, interlinking actions. If you're off by even a hair, you are diving straight into the uncanny valley.
What exactly makes this so difficult? Well, nailing the arenas and player likenesses is a massive part of the equation but it's the movement which makes this difficult. Realistic animation, momentum, and collision of each player on the court is a huge challenge.
Developer Visual Concepts - whose job on this particular franchise dates all the way back into the Dreamcast era - is doing some fantastic work here. As soon as it's easy enough to see the imperfections in Buy NBA 2K MT Coins the visuals, even if you just let the game clean over you, it actually begins to look surprisingly authentic in actions.