Our PS3 Patch Impressions

We played some NBA 2K12 after the PS3 patch released yesterday and we're thinking.....

Solid first try. Still needs a bit of work, though.


This is good because this was considered a mini-patch and it was confirmed yesterday that this is not the major gameplay patch that is supposed to release soon. This patch was supposed to address the match-making issue, and it seems they threw a few more things in there as "extras" as well.

1. Match-Making: This part of the patch looks good. We tested the game very late in the evening (after 2am EST) and were able to connect to all three games in about 30 seconds or less.

2. Steals: This was addressed, but talking to most people who play 2K12 (our writer panel was unanimous) there are still too many on-ball steals. In addition, steal attempts force our players to react and too many times force us into reactionary animations that lead to turnovers. There is one one to change the behavior regarding excessive steal and block attempts (C.Billups had 4 blocks in our final game last night) CALL MORE FOULS.

3. Three-Point %: This one is still going to need some tweaking. We're hopeful, but we suspect the culprit may be the lower difficulty setting as much as anything else (we play on simulation and don't have much experience with other settings) this may need addressing. Madden, easily a more casual game than 2K12, has a difficulty setting (All-Pro) just below the max difficulty of All-Madden. here's an image of our last online game.

4. Free Throws: Two of the three games last night were my first. Although I was able to compete with my opponents (all three games were single-digit margins) the FT system scares me. In one game I went 2-10 and in the other I went 5-16. That's below 30%. I have no problems shooting FTs offline and therein lies the issue. Gameplay must be seamless. While playing online, some aspects change that SHOULD, others should NOT. Users can't feel like they're playing a different game online and one they're totally unfamiliar with. Why would the FT release points change? We realize that FTs can't be too easy or hard or it hurts the experience. Our suggestion is simple: Make it identical to what we're used to offline, try to account for lag and be done with it.

EDIT: We spent the weekend testing the directional passing accuracy and we have to say the results are still
too mixed. We tested it by running the 1 Fist Delay play with our SF and drove the right side of the floor and passed to the open SG on the wing or drove and dumped the ball off to our PF. Many times a pass intended for the open wing player would find itself in our PFs hands. This has been one of our chief complaints since 2K11 (2K10 didn't seem to have these issues--or perhaps it was that we didn't pay for bad passes as much) While we sincerely hope this is something the 2K team continues to work on, it may be something to focus on being a non-issue next year.

Well, those are the major issues we noticed. We had zero problems with lag, network or timeout errors and the experience feels nice minus those hiccups (although it did seem like offensive rebounds were a little high). Hopefully the major patch will render these issues moot so that fans of this great series can enjoy themselves playing online.