Last year’s NBA 2K15 started with a great deal of fanfare. The intro video to that game treated it as the culmination of the developers’ work over 14 years, insinuating that it was finally the perfect game of virtual basketball. Of course, as soon as you actually got into a game, that insinuation was quickly proved false as NBA 2K15 was, on court and off, a low point in an otherwise stellar history of games. Because I’ve written so much about what NBA 2K15 got wrong, it almost feels redundant to get into the litany of ways that game failed on the court. To summarize: bad spacing, poor AI on offense and defense, lack of authentic CPU offense, and sketchy animations all worked in concert to torpedo 2K’s efforts.

 

If you're a fan of sports games, you're probably also a fan of paying $60 for what many times amounts to a roster update and a few superficial changes. Okay so maybe you aren't a "fan" of this, but you're generally okay enough with it to still hand over three $20's + tax for minor improvements to a familiar formula. You may say you're not doing it anymore, you may make "This is the last time" proclamations, but once the season approaches and you know the newest version is available for purchase, there you are in Gamestop ready to fork over the cash. In the case of NBA 2K16, I have some good news: Your trio of Andrew Jackson's will be used for much more than just adding new rookies and subtracting the Bobcats.

 

Keep reading to learn what you can expect on the NBA 2K16 release date, what buyers need to know and other important information about this game. Even though older consoles get NBA 2K16, the team focused on delivering unique experiences to the newer consoles last year and we expect a similar gap in features this year. The NBA 2K16 release date is October 7th on all consoles and on PC. There is no chance that stores will sell out of NBA 2K16 on the release date, so don’t worry if you want to stop on your way home from work to buy the game for yourself or a kid. But perhaps the biggest up we encountered was the inability to use your keyboard keys in order to write text. Whenever the game asks you to write a text, you’ll have to do it via the console way. This means that you’ll have to select each and every letter and press ‘X’ (or whatever button you have assigned for your primary action) in order to write something. And this pretty much shows the game’s console roots.

 

MyCareer in NBA 2K16 is much deeper this year, but it still has room for improvement. The new upgrade system, which has you upgrade sets of skills rather than tweaking individual skill ratings, is blind to the type of player you want to become. This is especially irksome early in the progression, when you see points get allocated to post defense and blocks when you’re a point guard who would be better served with skills used during defending the perimeter. I also wish you had more control over your character’s reactions. Even when you choose the humble option, the voice actor delivers his lines with an off-putting tone. The season-long performance tracking is also broken; despite leading all rookies in points per game and assists by a wide margin, my player was apparently not considered for the rookie of the year award or all-rookie teams. The most noticeable shortcoming of all is the long load times in between games, cutscenes, and crossing over to MyPark.

 

Now in its second year on current-generation hardware, part of me expected the latest NBA 2K to make substantial visual leaps from its predecessor. Though obviously 2K16 wouldn’t best last year’s edition in terms of bulking up on polygons (the jump from old to new hardware is far too great to try and emulate year-over-year), perhaps the fuzzy-looking beards and impressively-mapped faces in screenshots had me believing that 2K16 would bump shoulders with the photorealism we’re all hoping to finally have someday. That day hasn’t quite arrived, but NBA 2K16’s substantial tweaks and improvements to both offensive and defensive play make it well worth any fan’s while -- and that’s before trying out its new gameplay modes.