Open letter to the gaming community from EA NBA Live Producer Sean O'Brien

[MrBill]

Whether you liked NBA Live 14 or not, you have to respect a developer that is committed to addressing fan concerns and who owns up to areas where they admit they could have done better.

Letter from NBA LIVE 14 Executive Producer Sean O’Brien
By Sean O’Brien Nov 22, 2013

I’m not going to lie; it’s been a rough week. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the NBA LIVE comeback story we were hoping for this year.

We hear loud and clear that some of you are disappointed in various aspects of NBA LIVE 14, and I’m sorry if the game doesn’t live up to your expectations. Looking at your feedback, we have laid out a plan to make NBA LIVE 14 a better game as quickly as we can.

First, you’ve told us that the game is too hard to learn, and that the only way to figure it out is through frustrating trial-and-error. As a result, we are working on improving the way the game teaches the controls and on-boards new users. We realize that every single one of you is a new user and know we need to make the game easier to understand and simpler to pick up and play.

We’re also conducting an ongoing series of Twitch Live Streams to teach the skills that will help make your game experience a better one. We have our producers and designers online seven days a week to answer your questions and to offer other helpful game advice. Additionally, we’ve posted Controller Guide, Perfecting Your Style and Levels of the Dribble blogs on the NBA LIVE website which we hope will help you with basic offense, defense, play calling and more.

We’re not going to stop there. You’ve also let us know that you’re disappointed by the graphics and animations, and I can tell you that we are committed to making drastic and immediate improvements. In order to get gameplay up and running this year we had to prioritize. We felt authentic gameplay, control and the connected experience would provide the best foundation for the future. As a result, game visuals and animation polish suffered. Improvements on these fronts are also in development now for NBA LIVE 14. You will notice in the coming weeks and months that the game’s visuals and animation will improve significantly.

A goal from the start was to stay relevant to the ongoing NBA season and evolve your gaming experience. We’ve been hearing that you love LIVE Season, and many of you are having a lot of fun with BIG Moments. We’re really glad to hear you’re enjoying the mode, and rest assured we will continue updating LIVE Season with new BIG Moments and NBA Rewind games every single day of the season. We’ve also gotten a lot of great feedback on LIVE Ultimate Team, and we’ve still got some big announcements and major additions coming down the road, so stick around for that.

Let me wrap up with this; for those of you who have supported us throughout this development cycle and continue to have our backs now, thank you. We’ve got a lot of work to do; I’ve got a lot of work to do. It started 12 months ago, and continues until we build this franchise bigger and better than it ever was. This is just the first chapter in the NBA LIVE comeback story.

 

[DJ Rhude]

Admittedly the game did not play as well it looked in action and when they were showing it off at events.....a lot of problems under the hood still plague this game...Going forward I don't think the game is a total lost cause though, but I understand it's the trendy thing to bash Live these days without giving it a second thought, they have their work cut out for them to change perceptions

 

[PP]

They shouldn't price their game at $60 the same as NBA2k14 which takes a shit on them. Why anyone would buy this over 2k14 is beyond me. Its an incomplete game that looks like crap.:cj2k:. Its cool they are going to try to fix stuff.. but thats because the game wasn't finished before released.

 

[Glenbino]

I don't know if EA will ever play with the price points, but it couldn't hurt IMO. They aren't going to engender a ton of goodwill by putting out a clearly inferior product and relying on the brand loyalty to carry them. I used to be a total Live stalwart up until the series seemingly went away for good, them leaving the market drove me into the arms of 2k.

It's going to take something really remarkable to shift my allegiances now.

 

[dave]

Frankly, I think they should have released it as a free beta game and ask both the Xbox One and PS3 communities to collaborate with them until they came up with a real $59 game. If it's that easy to patch this gen's games, work with the gamers and get the game to the point where we want to pay for it.

 

[Playmakers]

Played this game with a few buddies and to be honest some of the same problems that plagued Live 07, 08, 09 and 10 are still relevant in what is suppose to be a Next Gen product. Robotic Player movement, below average animations, CPU players with no life to them all despite the hype of Synergy allegedly being used. They decided to take away editing options yet what they don't realize is synergy doesn't fix dumb AI on court behavior....at least with the ability to edit players you had a fighters chance to make a bad game decent on the floor. Now editing the game wasn't the cure for all problems but there were options in the game you could edit that would make it playable to certain extent. What I've seen out of this game is that the best gameplay is only USER vs USER matchups. But even then everything moves so slow and the players don't move like NBA Atheletes on the floor........I couldn't explode to the basket with Monta Ellis who is arguably one the fastest players in the NBA with the ball in his hands yet in Live it feels like Ellis is stuck in quicksand....In years past a run and gun team like Phoenix played just like every other half court team and to my surprise I fired a game vs Golden St for one half and then Indiana and guess what there was absolutely no difference in style of play. I can't believe even after 2-3 years off EA still can't program teams/Players to simulate their real life counter parts on the floor. Dirk doesn't even do his patented step back jumper which is a damn shame EA....Luckily I didn't purchase this game because it doesn't warrant a $40 price tag let alone $60. What a waist of time IMO to have that amount of down time between Live 10 and now and then release a game that feels 60% complete with animations and players models that haven't improved over Live 09 or Live 10 to be honest.

 

[FirstTimer]

EA gonna EA

 

[JimLeavy59]