Unlike NBA 2K14, EA Tiburon’s NBA Live 14 is looking to jump straight onto next generation platforms. However, according to Gary Patterson, senior creative director, there won’t be any difference between the two in terms of gameplay.
As Patterson stated, “All the game features will be the same for PS4 and Xbox One. It’s up to the gamer to decide which platform they’ll play NBA LIVE 14 on.”
There will be some implementation on additional features such as the PS4’s DualShock 4 touchpad and the Xbox One’s Cloud support. “We will support some basic functionality on the PS4 touchpad around team management. More details will be provided later. Regarding Xbox One’s cloud services, we do not currently support them. However, we will support the platform standard cloud syncing of your data.”
We also asked about the new BounceTek that NBA Live 14 implements, and how this would affect gameplay. “Basketball video gamers spend around 50% of a game dribbling a ball, yetthe mechanic of the dribble has basically gone unchanged since Gen1. This is more than a decade of old tech showing up in today’s games. The limitations of this tech are evident in visual and gameplay artifacts such as ball warping, half-dribbles and feet sliding; all of which contribute to unrealistic movement.
“Sports games are all about player movement and momentum, controlling it and exploiting it is how we balance the game, create depth but also create the amazing moments that make NBA basketball the spectacle that it is. With bounceTek, we are releasing the ball to physics for the first time ever in a basketball video game and in doing so creating the most authentic looking basketball dribble, with close to 1000 new animations, but more than that we are creating a system that mimics the nuanced movement,and thus depth, of real basketball, a system that we call ‘authentically responsive’.”
NBA Live 14 releases on November 19th in Europe and North America for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.